nightclublog

Strauss and Verrecchia Join OP Board

The Oxford Publishing Advisory Board welcomes new members Jason Strauss and Richard Verrecchia.

Strauss (pictured) is managing partner of Tao Asian Bistro & Nightclub and Marquee Nightclub in New York City. Strauss and his partner formed Strategic Group in 2001 and currently collaborate with a multitude of high profile companies to directly integrate brands into various platforms that influence popular culture. With prestigious clients such as Coca-Cola, Mercedes Benz and Tommy Hilfiger, Strategic Group has evolved rapidly into a multi-faceted and continually evolving company.

Verrecchia is director of beverage for OSI Restaurant Partners, which includes Outback Steakhouse, Carrabbas Italian Grill, Bonefish Grill, Fleming’s Steakhouse & Wine bar, Roy’s Restaurants, Cheeseburger in Paradise, Lee Roy Selmon’s and Blue Coral. He supports each brand’s president and director by working with them to develop their concepts, beverage visions and goals.

Keynote Speakers Added for Atlantic City and Las Vegas Shows

Oxford Publishing Inc. has announced that Jonathan Newman will deliver a keynote address at its East Coast event, the Nightclub & Bar Convention and Trade Show in Atlantic City, N.J., October 13-15.
Newman served as chairman of the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board (PLCB), the largest buyer of wine and spirits in the United States and the largest purchaser of California wines in the world. The PLCB operates more than 600 stores and manages more than 4,500 employees statewide and generated almost 1.7 billion in retail sales in fiscal year 2006-07.

Clay Dover (pictured) will be one of the keynote speakers at International Hospitality Week in Las Vegas, March 1-4, 2009. Dover is president and CEO of Metromedia Restaurant Group (MRG), one of the world’s leading multi-concept table-service restaurant groups, with more than 700 locations in 16 countries operating under the brands of Bennigan’s Grill and Tavern, Steak and Ale, Ponderosa Steakhouse, Bonanza Steakhouse, Bennigan’s Sport and The Tavern concepts.

Gerry Ruvo, president and CEO of SKYY Spirits LLC, also will deliver a keynote address at the Las Vegas event. SKYY Spirits LLC, a subsidiary of Milan's Gruppo Campari, boasted more than $315 million in revenue last year, with SKYY Vodka alone accounting for 12 percent of sales, or approximately $158 million. Ruvo and SKYY Spirits manage brands including SKYY Vodka, the SKYY 90 luxury brand, SKYY Flavors, Campari, Cabo Wabo tequila and others.

For more information about the shows, visit www.nightclub.com.

Future Brands Appointments

Future Brands LLC, the U.S. sales and distribution operation for Beam Global Spirits & Wine Inc. and the Absolut Spirits Co. Inc., has announced the appointment of Pryce Greenow to VP, sales, west region. Greenow reports directly to Bill Newlands, senior vice president of U.S. commercial development for Beam Global.

The company also has appointed Tony Truzzolino to VP, sales, east region. Truzzolino, a 25-year veteran of the beverage alcohol industry who has served in a variety of senior-level roles in the sales, distributor management and marketing areas, joins Future Brands from Beam Global Spirits & Wine, where he was VP, commercial development.

For more information, visit Beam Global  and www.drinksmart.com.

Beam Hosts Great Whisk(e)y Debate at World Whisky Conference

Beam Global Spirits & Wine Inc., a unit of Fortune Brands Inc. recently hosted the first Great Whisk(e)y Debate ever held in Scotland. The debate was hosted for the World Whiskies attendees to exuberantly discuss the history, heritage, qualities and tasting notes of bourbon whiskey and Scotch whisky.

Bourbon was vigorously defended by Fred Noe, the great grandson of the legendary distiller Jim Beam and seventh generation distiller from the famous Bourbon family, while Scotch whisky was championed by Richard Paterson, third generation master blender of the Dalmore Scotch Whisky distillery and one of the world’s leading authorities on Scotch whisky. Moderated by Jim Kokoris, former president of the Kentucky Bourbon Circle and long time friend of all whiskeys, the Great Whisk(e)y Debate sparked strong opinions among the hundreds of spectators.

Beam Global CEO Tom Flocco personally weighed in on this topic yesterday during his keynote speech at the 2008 World Whiskies Conference, offering to set the record straight about bourbon.

“Kentucky produces 95 percent of the world’s bourbon; almost two thirds of it comes from us,” he said. He reminded the audience “that loving one is not cheating on the other. In this industry, you really can serve two masters.”

Future Brands Appoints Greenow

Future Brands LLC, the U.S. sales and distribution operation for Beam Global Spirits & Wine Inc., and the Absolut Spirits Company Inc., has announced the appointment of Pryce Greenow to vice president, sales-west region. Greenow reports directly to Bill Newlands, senior vice president of U.S. commercial development for Beam Global.

“Pryce comes to us from Beam Wine Estates, where he was responsible for sales strategy development and the execution of off- and on-premise national accounts, export markets, duty free, airline and military channels. Among his accomplishments, Pryce led the channel management team that accounted for 30 percent of total company wine sales and delivered market-beating results,” Newlands said. “Pryce’s results-oriented style coupled with a track record of delivering exceptional commercial benefits makes him the perfect candidate for this role. He is well-positioned to lead the Future Brands’ west region and its distributors to achieve their profit and market share goals in 2008 and beyond.”

“I look forward to working with the second largest spirits supplier in the U.S., where every major brand has seen improvement in dollar sale percentages in the last year. I also look forward to building on the strong relationships we have with our customers,” Greenow said. “Future Brands has had a strong start to 2008, and I am committed to meeting the company’s 2008 goals.”

Prior to Beam Wine Estates, Greenow worked at Allied Domecq Wines USA, where he led trade marketing and creative services. He was responsible for tailoring national marketing programs to enhance POS effectiveness and exploit local market, channel and account specific opportunities. He then went on to serve as a manager for Allied Domecq Wines USA’s business planning and analysis group. Preceding his work for Allied Domecq, Greenow was a consulting leader for San Francisco-based Marakon Associates. He spent seven years in the British Army where he achieved the rank of captain.

For more information, visit www.beamglobal.com and www.drinksmart.com.

Heineken Opens Regional Headquarters in Chicago Area

Heineken USA has announced the opening of its new central regional business unit office in Downers Grove in the Chicago area. The new office, which builds on the company’s recent success in the central region of the country, will support a 30-person team responsible for managing the Heineken USA portfolio in critical sales market areas such as Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis and Indianapolis.

Led by Scott Blazek, vice president for the central regional business unit, Heineken USA’s new physical presence in the Chicago area enhances the company’s ability to maximize its resources and meet the needs of its consumers to distributors and retailers who appreciate the Dutch and Mexican portfolio of brands.

“The central region is a key growth market for Heineken USA and we’re excited about continuing our commitment to Chicago as one of the company’s ‘corporate hometowns,’” said Chris Steffanci, senior vice president of sales, Heineken USA. “With our continued prominent presence in Chicago, Scott and his team have the ability to collaborate with our business partners on a real-time basis in a market that has helped make Heineken USA the nation’s premier import beer portfolio.”

For more information, visit Heineken USA.

Loyal Pennings Innovates With the Wickler

Loyal Pennings, the nightlife entrepreneur famous for his successful clubs like LAX, Las Palmas, Concorde, Deluxe and Garden of Eden, has translated his prodigious experience into a new invention called the Wickler. The Wickler - a Wireless head-count Clicker - is poised to bring the hospitality and security industries into the 21st Century.

Though it started out as a modern case of necessity being the mother of invention, the story of the Wickler is bound to spread far beyond the world of nightclubs once the Hospitality and Security industries see the nearly limitless applications possible with this state of the art device. The Wickler digitizes, centralizes and stores the traffic information from all of the entrances and exits of an establishment through a wireless network.  It also gathers demographic data and merges it with the Point of Sale data being gathered through the ordering system, and finally delivers it all to a main Wickler held by the club manager or owner.

In brief, the device will not only be able to tell a club manager/owner how many people are in the establishment at a given moment, but it can track the length of time spent there, the ratio of drinks ordered, the rate at which they are ordered, and even how sales are affected by the DJs set! The Wickler also surpasses traditional Point of Sale data by merging it with the headcount to give the club manager/owner a clear sense of how club capacity can affect the sales traffic. More is not always better, as an overcrowded club can actually hinder the guests' ability to get to the bar and result in a sales bottleneck. These usages and applications only scratch the surface of the potential of the Wickler, an invention that is sure to have a massive impact on other types of venues like casinos, sports arenas, museums and amusement parks, just to name a few.

Loyal Pennings began to formulate the idea for the Wickler when he opened Garden of Eden, his first club in Hollywood, in 1997. Garden of Eden was where he met his future partner, DJ AM, but was also the place he encountered the extraordinarily vigilant Hollywood Fire Department in the personage of the infamous Fire Marshal, Robert Gladden. Pennings found himself spending an inordinate amount of his time on many nights running from door to door checking the head count clickers held by security, and mentally subtracting the exit numbers from the entrance numbers in order to give the Marshal an ongoing, accurate, and current count of guests in the club. Failure to provide an accurate count could result in the club being shut down, but the time and effort needed to provide that count in a large club was quickly becoming a job unto itself.

In 2005, after years of developing the Wickler concept between club openings, Loyal Pennings partnered up with Eric Parmarter, entrepreneur and technologist, who immediately grasped the potential of the device. Together they created a prototype of the Wickler with a stunning set of features. They licensed a micro battery to avoid unnecessary bulk, created a custom casing smaller than a Blackberry, installed an enhanced data chip inside and put a digital display on all units. The also included an amber and black light luminator to check IDs. In addition to the external design and functionality they also tweaked the software to include multiple menu items. A user can hit a combination of buttons to process the incoming data in numerous ways. By far the most effective feature of the Wickler is that the information base is a web application, meaning that no installation is required for this incredible device. All the data and software is housed online, accessible through a web client for detailed reports. This centralization also means that the password-protected data can be accessed by the club owner or manager online or through a PDA from any location. The Wickler is the ultimate traffic-tracking device...as valuable to security at a political rally as it is to a nightclub.

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but originality, ingenuity and foresight are the father and the godparents! Pennings and Parmarter have thought it through thoroughly, but even they have only just begun to envision all the possible applications for their invention; the first wireless hand-held hospitality and security management tool.

Distributors Celebrate 75th Anniversary of Modern Beer Distribution System

April 7, 2008 marked 75 years of a legal, safe and regulated beer industry in America. 2008 marks the 75th anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition and on Monday, April 7, 1933, before Prohibition was officially repealed in December, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a law, which legalized beer with an alcohol-by-volume percentage of 3.2, thus making beer the first alcohol beverage legally re-enter the marketplace legally.

“Americans now have access to nearly 13,000 labels of beer —all within the safest alcohol distribution system in the world because of the state-based regulatory system that was established 75 years ago,” said Craig Purser, president of the National Beer Wholesalers Association (NBWA).

The repeal of Prohibition led to the development of an effective state-based regulatory system that continues to protect consumers from tainted or counterfeit alcohol — a problem that was prevalent during the Prohibition era and is still prevalent today in many countries around the world.

The economic impact of Prohibition’s repeal is staggering.

America’s beer industry — made up of brewers, beer importers, beer distributors, brewer suppliers and retailers — directly and indirectly contributes nearly $190 billion annually to the U.S. economy. The beer industry supports more than 1.7 million jobs, provides almost $55 billion in wages, and pays more than $36 billion in federal, state, and local taxes, NBWA says.

For more information about NBWA, visit www.nbwa.org.

Taliera Completes Acquisition of Red Eye Brands

Taliera Holdings has announced that it has acquired Red Eye Brands of Bryan, Texas. Red Eye is Taliera’s first brand acquisition and provides entry into the global beverage, specialty, natural and organic food markets. Taliera is an acquisition holding company formed for the purpose of acquiring operating businesses and brands in the global beverage industry. “This acquisition for Taliera is our first step in creating value for our shareholders, our customers, and our team,” said J. Smoke Wallin, CEO (pictured).

“We intend to grow our company by acquiring strong, well-recognized brands from larger consumer products companies as well as smaller regional companies like Red Eye. Many non-core brands lack the focus of senior level management or strong brand support. Our strategy is to take full advantage of these opportunities by providing each acquired brand with the marketing support and senior level attention necessary to enhance the brand's market position, leverage our industry relationships to expand its distribution and successfully launch line extensions and new products.”

For more information, visit. www.taliera.com.   

Spirits Industry’s Historical Trade Magazines Preserved

As the 75th anniversary of Prohibition’s repeal nears, Brown-Forman honors the beverage alcohol world by preserving pieces of industry history. Through a contribution to the Louisville Free Public Library, Brown-Forman has preserved the only known collection of volumes of the Wine & Spirit Bulletin.

The 18 bound volumes of Wine & Spirit Bulletin, which are among the spirits industry’s first trade magazines, date from 1882 to 1915. They chronicle the industry during its “golden era” prior to Prohibition. The historic publications include early stories on Brown-Forman’s founding brand, Old Forester, as well as Jack Daniel’s, Early Times and The Old Oscar Pepper Distillery (the present-day Woodford Reserve Distillery).

Brown-Forman and the Louisville Free Public Library’s main branch will each maintain one full set of the reproduced volumes, and the original set will be donated to the Kentucky Historical Society. An additional set of the books will also be donated to the Library of Congress.

Brown-Forman’s position in the beverage industry has remained prominent since the company’s beginnings in 1870, and it played a key role in the development of Louisville’s Whiskey Row on present-day Main Street. Of the 89 whiskey companies located on Whiskey Row before Prohibition, Brown-Forman is the only distiller whose presence still remains.

“Brown-Forman is proud of its role in the pre-Prohibition development of the beverage alcohol industry, and we continue to shape the business moving into the future,” said Chris Morris, Brown-Forman master distiller and noted spirits historian. “We are honored to save a piece of history through preservation of these documents.”