HB Clark

Source: Exec Digital UK

Date :31/05/2007 16:12:20

ENDURING TASTES

HB Clark & Co (Successors) Ltd is A 100 year old brewing company that has survived the near-extinction of its breed without ‘going corporate’ and has evolved into the licensed trade’s largest independent wholesaler

Written by John O’Hanlon: produced by Kiron Chavda

I don’t know about you but those of us who experienced the 1960s look on them with mixed feelings. They saw the advent of pressurised beers. While some people welcomed the fact that you couldn’t spoil these with poor cellarage and you could rely on them to taste the same wherever you took them, others never saw them as a patch on cask conditioned beers. But lager became groovy and the Americans convinced us that you couldn’t taste them anyway if only you chilled them enough. Cask conditioned ale became the retreat of the obsessed, the chunky-sweatered CAMRA brigade.

CAMRA did a good job of keeping the faith though and eventually real ale became respectable again. HB Clark didn’t survive those times by refusing to change. It followed the market, but returned to brewing the real stuff as soon as the coast was clear in the 1980s and has done so ever since at its original site in Wakefield. In the meantime it had sensibly developed the wholesaling business that is so important to it today. As a brewer, producing some 1,500 barrels a year, it is still in a niche business: as a one-stop shop for the hospitality trade, though, it is a much more serious player, with an annual turnover in the region of £50 million. It is also a growing business, having increased turnover by eight percent in 2006 and expecting to grow by a further eleven percent this year.

The company was founded in 1906 by Henry Boon Clark: the term ‘successors’ in its title signifies that it has remained in family hands throughout, and its present sole owner and managing director David Russell Garthwaite is indeed a descendant of HB Clark. His son Paul is the company’s distribution manager.

It’s not just the beer that has changed. In 1989 a government commissioned report said the vertical links between brewing and pub retailing should be reviewed. Subsequently the notorious Beer Orders forced the national brewers with more than 2,000 pubs in their estate to sell or free from tie about 11,000 of the then estimated 60,000 UK pubs. The result was the transfer of more than a third of the UK’s pubs into the ownership of retail pub chains. Sales director Glenn Brown says that this reduced choice for the consumer, far from increasing it as the orders had perhaps intended. In particular, the pubcos, as he calls them severely restrict the supply chain for their outlets. If HB Clark had only its beer to depend on it would have been in trouble, as many other small brewers were. “We have had to compete, and we have done that successfully because we stock just about everything you would find under the roof of a pub, club, restaurant or hotel - from light bulbs and bleach to optics to beer, spirits, crisps, nuts, dishcloths and even the bell you ring at closing time! That has stood us in good stead. People’s time is important and with one call to HBC they can place the full order, it is delivered on one truck, at the time they want, and they receive one invoice. In theory they could run their business in a very lean way by just using our service.”

If the brewery is the historical core business, the value that has been added all around it is more important today. Apart from the brewery in Wakefield there are two manufacturing sites, FAM Soft Drinks in Leeds and Billian Bar Sundries in Sheffield, which supplies bar requisites and prepares sliced lemon. FAM produces draught minerals, installs the equipment to dispense them and maintains that equipment. In modern clubs and pubs drinks dispensers save a lot of time and really help cut the customer’s costs by reducing the amount of stock on shelves and in fridges. The company is in competition with some huge organisations like Coca-Cola and Pepsi, but these large players are increasingly charging for the equipment they install. And because they operate in a centralised way, they can’t offer the personal service that Clarks can. “Downtime on dispense equipment is a nightmare and much lost profit for high volume outlets,” says Glenn Brown. “Being local give us a real edge there.

“Any product you make rather than just distribute gives you a production margin as well as a selling margin,” proclaims Brown. “The soft drinks business has been very successful for us and has been growing by the year. Last year it grew 11 percent; this year we are targeting 20 percent growth, and I believe we will achieve that.” This success is no mystery but a mixture of good customer service and staying ahead of the game. Installation and maintenance of the equipment is completely free, and in addition HB Clark was the first to offer its customers video panels on its dispensers. These will play advertisements, club announcements, local information or whatever is on the proprietor’s CD.

This year’s growth is being fuelled by the reintroduction six months ago of EnergyCharge on draught. This is a stimulant or energy drink of the Red Bull variety, which is becoming very popular, Brown says, among young people in the clubs, where they like to mix it with vodka. “Often groups will buy jugs of energy drinks mixed with vodka and have it on their table. Having it on draught saves the bar staff from having to open lots of cans. There are over 100 stockists of energy charge since we introduced it and that is growing every week”.

Wine sits very naturally alongside cask conditioned beer, Glenn Brown believes. They are both natural products that appeal to discerning buyers. “Wine, I think, is the best example of the old saying – you get what you pay for. If you are prepared to pay £10 as opposed To £5 the difference is the quality of the drink. The shipping and bottling and labelling all cost the same. While margins can be tight, wine does offer an opportunity for everybody to make reasonable margins. People will pay for quality.”

To keep that quality well ahead of the market HB Clark appointed David Robertson as wine development manager and Peter Skuse as wine sourcing and pricing manager. “It’s a very specialised business where you have to know how wines travel, how they keep, which are best for setting down, the qualities of the grape and the vintage. It is quite an education to see these guys at a wine tasting! They have made a fantastic contribution to growing the wine side of the business,” he says. Last year HB Clark’s wine sales grew by 24 percent and Brown anticipates that this year will equal that at least.

To me, though, it is great to see a ‘proper’ brewer at the heart of a genuinely modern supply chain company. There are signs that the market is moving further in favour of naturally produced ale, says Glenn Brown encouragingly. “Nowadays younger people don’t stick to one drink in the way the older generation did. They are much happier to explore. The demographics of cask beer drinkers may not have changed that much but this new openness to change is good for our marketing. More importantly, there are signs that more women are drinking cask beer as they come to see it, like wine, as a natural product.”