What'cha Drinkin'? with Mark Bentley
Editor's note: Automated speech-to-text transcription, edited lightly for clarity.
Stewart Tippler:
Hi, good afternoon and welcome to a new edition of What’cha Drinkin’? My name is Stewart Tippler. I work as the European representative for Quirk’s and today I've got the pleasure of interviewing Mark Bentley, who is the entre category controller for Molson Coors. So Mark, first and foremost, what are you drinking?
Mark Bentley:
So, I've got a beer, a Blue moon. It's a Belgian which is a white beer style. I'm a bit of a big geek, so I could talk about beers all day long. But yeah, this is a cracking beer to enjoy on a lovely hot summer's day like today.
Stewart Tippler:
Excellent. It is. It's a fantastic hot summer's day. Myself, I am drinking, so I've got quite local to where I live in Sussex. We've actually got a fantastic gin producer. I'm going to drink a gin and tonic. So let me just pour a little bit of this in here. Obviously small measures because it is only five o'clock, we've only just started. Need a little bit of garnish. So, for the gin and tonic and especially for Silent Paul, we've got some orange garnish top tip there. If you fancy doing that, do the orange peel, chuck it in the freezer. It stays fresh for ages. So Mark, tell me a bit about the beers. What's going on at Molson Coors, obviously during the pandemic, how have things been going?
Mark Bentley:
Yes, it's quite a strange time. So, since the 20th of March so over seven weeks ago now, all pubs across the country have been shut down. So quite an unprecedented time really. The pubs are a big part of our business. Overnight, got all the pub trade shut down. So now if you’re going to be selling beer, if you want to buy beer or cider, you've got to go to the supermarkets or the little convenience stores. So it's been a bit of a crazy time but we're now in a place where we are turning our attention towards how the trade reopens and all the steps that are needed really to gear back for that reopening.
Stewart Tippler:
And as you mentioned, almost on a day-by-day basis by the way, cheers.
Mark Bentley:
Cheers.
Stewart Tippler:
You were just mentioning obviously with the pandemic taking effect and things are changing almost on a daily basis, especially in the U.K. at the moment, obviously we're starting to release restrictions as it were. What's the plan? What steps have you’ve got at the moment from a Molson Coors perspective? Have you got any ideas on dates when things are likely to get back to normal? Is it, well, the new normal?
Mark Bentley:
Yeah, I think the latest government guidance is the stage three of the reopening plan for getting business up and running again is from the beginning of July. At the moment there could be some openings from the 4th of July. So that's the date that everyone's anchoring around. There's a lot of caveats in place. So, it's all dependent on the virus and they're continuing to drop away and ultimately it being safe to open. So, from an operator perspective social distancing has been probably words that, before this year, no one have had a clue what you're talking about if you mention the words social distancing.
In many respects, pubs trying to stay apart from people is the very opposite of what pubs are all about. It's about people coming together, socializing, meeting your friends, meeting your family. So, there's been a lot of work really trying to get ahead of, well, how can pubs operate in this place when there's going to be a need for restrictions. And also from a consumer perspective, I think consumer confidence is going to be the massive thing. There's some work that CGA, sort of a research consultancy over here have done, and it's shown that only just less than a quarter of people are saying that they're going to be confident to resume their visits to pubs immediately when the lockdown restrictions are lifted.
Not all doom and gloom, there's probably another 50% that would be confident, but they'd be a little bit cautious or they need reassurance that there's hygiene measures in place, that there's things there to enable social distancing. And a lot of people are going to be really, really cautious and are just not going to want to go back straight away. Lots of work for Molson as they’re a brewer and a supplier into the trade, but also the offer is themselves thinking, right, okay, how are we going to operate under the guidelines and restrictions that will be in place and how do we gear up for this new normal? But I think consumer confidence is going to be the single biggest thing, really just how do we reassure people that it's safe to go out and start to get life back to normal.
Stewart Tippler:
And so what plans do Molson calls have? So when we go into this new normal what have you been able to do in terms of understanding what the customer needs are, what changes have been in place and how are you going to be able to help deliver and give that confidence back to the consumer that pubs are safe to go back to?
Mark Bentley:
I think the reality is we are learning all the time because for all of us, this is completely unprecedented times. So I think if anyone turned around and says they've got the answer, then I think they're lying because it's really just trying make sense of what is completely unprecedented, kind of unique times in any of our lifetimes. But I think for me personally, my role is all about understanding what's happening in the market, looking at the trends and then critically understanding what consumers are looking for. So a lot of the work I've been doing is really starting to look at some of the practicalities for reopening. So giving guidance to operators around, okay, well what does range look like at the point that you reopen? So in normal times, we often talk about barrels in the brew world as a measure of volume and our pub would be 150 to 200 barrels a year.
So at the point that you reopen, actually, it's likely that trade is going to be significantly lower than that. So a lot of the work I'm doing is starting to think, well actually, if you were normally a 150, 200 barrel account, what would trade look like if you were 75, 100 barrels? And then what does that mean in terms of the number of brands that you need on the bar? What are the roles on the bar? How do you choose the right range that ultimately is going to meet the needs of the guests that you've got coming through the door but is also going to be profitable from an operator perspective?
The last thing that people want to be doing is spending lots of money buying beers and them not selling, then getting quality issues and wastage. Ultimately, they're carrying a range which isn't profitable for them. Really kind of doubling down on some of the real operational basics around how many brands do you need on the bar, what are the best brands to choose? And just really getting that in place, looking after quality, getting all of the operational disciplines in place. And I think our guidance is really about starting small and then building on from there because no one knows what level of trade you're going to be at when you open up, but it's really easy to scale up. But what you don't want to do is start too big and then find that you sat on load of stock and you've got too many products on the bar because that just presents a whole load of more challenges.
Stewart Tippler:
Ok. Well first of all, can I just say, let's have a drink and hope the day when we're able to go back into bars and pubs in the U.K. comes as soon as possible. I know that most of us are missing it tremendously. I must admit, I do frequent the odd bar and pub a couple of times a week to say the least. So I do like to support. One of the things that we do as part of these interviews, Mark, is we have a question. I'm just going to pull out here, tell us one thing about yourself that no one would necessarily know.
Mark Bentley:
Okay, well, I've got a beer related quirk, I'm also a beer sommelier, so I'm a qualified beer geek. I'll chat about beer all day long, hopefully people find it interesting, but I'll be in my element when I'm chatting about a beer. But the other is a bit more random. So we've got three dogs and we compete in agility, so we basically run our dogs around obstacle courses. A few years ago, my oldest dog, we competed on the England team, so we went to the world championships and then we've represented our country in agility.
Stewart Tippler:
And what type of breed are your dogs? Are they all the same or are they different?
Mark Bentley:
No, no, they're all different. So, the oldest one is a Jack Vessel cross toy Poodle. So, you either call him a cross breed or some say a Jacka Doodle, just a bit random. Now we've got a King Charles cross toy Poodle and then the youngest dog, which is the one I kind of run and compete with now is they're working Cocker Spaniel. So she's like all about speed and just crazy, crazy. Just run and run and run all day.
Stewart Tippler:
Okay, Mark. Excellent. Thank you very much for your time. Stay safe. Take care. And thank you very much for joining us at Quirk’s.
Mark Bentley:
Thanks. Cheers.
Stewart Tippler:
Okay, take care.