{"id":5344,"date":"2019-03-19T06:00:04","date_gmt":"2019-03-19T11:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/?p=5344"},"modified":"2019-03-14T17:04:43","modified_gmt":"2019-03-14T22:04:43","slug":"el-rey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/?p=5344","title":{"rendered":"El Rey"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Thirty-five years ago, establishing a new beer was not a frequent occurrence and so doing resulted in a bit of a stir. That beer was Corona. In a few short short years, the brand had made the move to the clear longneck bottle and the results were immediate.\u00a0 Sales in South Texas took off. The Corona wholesalers, in fact, ran short of supply as they could not acquire adequate inventory from Mexico.<\/p>\n

About that time, a young sales manager from Barton Brands, Bill Hackett, decided to fly to South Texas to find out just what the commotion was all about.\u00a0 Bill saw a tremendous opportunity in Corona and Barton soon picked up import rights for the Modelo\u2019s beers.\u00a0 A couple of years later, the importing rights were shared with Gambrinus until Constellation (Barton) reacquired all of the U.S.<\/p>\n

When Mike Mazzoni left Barton in the late 1980s, Bill took the reigns as president.\u00a0 After decades of leadership under Bill, it was recently announced that he has retired from Constellation, thus closing the book on one of the most highly thought of supplier executives in the beer industry.<\/p>\n

Bill’s legacy is one of respect\u2026. respect within all three industry tiers of the beer industry.\u00a0 Bill’s contemporary suppliers admired his leadership and success. While he was leading Corona, the brand\u2019s growth was unprecedented.\u00a0 Retailers loved the marketing support Bill provided behind the Modelo brands and the higher-ring the brands produced.\u00a0 It was, however, with the middle tier that Bill was most respected.<\/p>\n

Bill believed in the wholesaler and the wholesaler believed in Bill.\u00a0 Bill felt that wholesalers were the key to Corona’s success and he built the Modelo brands on this philosophy.\u00a0 Bill instilled that culture of the wholesalers\u2019 importance into the employees of Barton\/Constellation and the result was a win-win for all.<\/p>\n

Earlier this decade a California wholesaler, who had sold their\u00a0Modelo distribution rights to the AB network, filed a lawsuit against Constellation Brands.\u00a0 The wholesaler asked for compensation for being denied the opportunity to purchase existing\u00a0Modelo rights from another wholesaler. The reason the wholesaler had been denied was due to poor performance with their Modelo brands.\u00a0 Instead of beginning termination proceedings, Constellation sent in a sales team to help the wholesaler turn around their performance.\u00a0 Within a year, that wholesaler, with Constellation\u2019s help, won the best wholesaler award for the given time period.\u00a0 This example of Bill’s leadership speaks volumes as to his view of wholesaler relationships.<\/p>\n

Baron Beers\u2019 annual wholesaler meeting, traditionally held late winter\/early spring in Palm Springs, was the talk of the industry.\u00a0 Wholesalers never missed that convention.<\/p>\n

Bill’s legacy is well documented and he will be considered, by all three industry tiers, to be one of the very best beer executives of all time.\u00a0 Bill will be missed.<\/p>\n

When I see the annual Christmas ad for Corona on the island with the lights on the palm tree, I will always remember Bill.<\/p>\n

El Rey – The King…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thirty-five years ago, establishing a new beer was not a frequent occurrence and so doing resulted in a bit of a stir. That beer was Corona. In a few short short years, the brand had made the move to the clear longneck bottle and the results were immediate.\u00a0 Sales in South Texas took off. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_s2mail":"yes","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2xRTi-1oc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5344"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5344"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5353,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5344\/revisions\/5353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}