Glazer’s Family of Companies’ journey from a Dallas-based soft drink bottler to one of the country’s largest and most successful beverage alcohol distributors can be traced to a simple strategy that has been the backbone of the family-run company for more than a century—investing in people, technology and relationships with its suppliers and customers.

Still headquartered in Dallas and with third- and fourth-generation members of the Glazers family involved in the company’s operations, Glazer’s now operates 46 distribution and warehouse facilities in 12 states and handles approximately 38,000 SKUs within the beer, wine and spirits categories. Under the leadership of Bennett Glazer, the company’s chairman and CEO since 1996, Glazer’s has added eight states to its area of coverage and more than tripled its revenue.

The size and scale of the company’s operations and its continued expansion could pose logistical challenges for any management team, but the Glazer’s team manages its diversified portfolio and its expanding geographical territories with a business acumen and a strategic focus on marketing solutions that has earned the distributor its reputation as an industry leader in brand building and service-minded operational excellence.

“[This recognition] is absolutely the result of the company’s foresight on leading the industry by investing in people, infrastructure and data,” says Jerry Cargill, president of Glazer’s. “Our competitive advantage in the number of branch locations we deploy makes us the local distributor in so many places. Our beer focus has enabled Glazer’s to achieve over-indexed market share in channels like convenience and on-premise that our competition cannot attain. We also have worked hard with our vendors on writing collaborative, integrated and attainable brand plans.”
At Glazer’s, it all comes down to execution.

“We really pride ourselves on execution that is greater than our market share, and that’s what we hold our people accountable for and that’s what we expect. I believe it’s one of the reasons why we’ve been on a good run lately of being considered top performers by our suppliers,” asserts Louis Zweig, Glazer’s senior vice president of corporate strategy and business intelligence.

The Glazer’s Difference
For Glazer’s, brand building isn’t just an initiative, it’s an engine that drives the company’s high performance and results-producing culture.

“What sets Glazer’s apart is that our talent comes from within, but we also work with suppliers on forward and backward integration initiatives to ensure that we have people who can speak the suppliers’ language,” notes Cargill. “We are very focused on creating attainable brand plans with our vendors. We have great systems that enable us to target the right accounts and channels for building brands, and we work well with our vendors to get aligned on how we are to execute their brand strategies.”

Glazer’s effective market execution and its ability to not only meet, but exceed suppliers’ goals also is noteworthy given Texas’ complicated alcohol laws, including local option “wet/dry” elections. For instance, certain retail programs that are commonly part of national brand marketing plans, such as mail-in rebates or scan-back rebates for retailers, are prohibited under Texas law, according to Zweig. “There’s been a trend with the suppliers centralizing more of their activities. Very often we’ll see national marketing plans, and this happens mostly on the wine side, that sound great, but the problem is you can’t run them in Texas. Two or three years ago, if Texas couldn’t participate in a program, well, we didn’t get any program,” Zweig says.

However, one of Glazer’s key strengths is its ability to localize national plans and target local consumers in a strategic way, he adds.

Three years ago, Glazer’s formed an alliance with The Levenson Group of Companies, a Dallas-based full-service marketing and public relations agency, enabling the company to tap into local marketing expertise and turn its suppliers’ investment dollars into successful programs that fit the Texas market, Cargill says.

“The Levenson Group is really able to dig down deep into the market and find the best vehicles and avenues for growing the brands. They live and breathe in the market and because of the relationships they have in the market, they’re able to do it incredibly more efficiently than our suppliers can do it sitting in New York or California or Louisville,” Zweig remarks. “Now when we get a national marketing plan, we can come back and say ‘We can’t do it the way you cookie cutter it for 50 states, but here’s our ideas on how to execute your strategy and model it for the state of Texas.’”

The company now distributes wine, spirits and beer brands from companies large and small—Miller Brewing, MolsonCoors, Diageo, E. & J. Gallo Winery, Constellation Brands, Pernod Ricard, Van Gogh Vodka, New Belgium Brewing, Abita Brewing and even non-alcohol brands such as Red Bull and Voss Water, just to name a few—and Glazer’s is dedicated to giving each brand the same level of service and market execution to grow sales in its territories.

Glazer’s also has identified an opportunity to tap into the growing Hispanic consumer segment, as the company is home to two-thirds of the top Hispanic markets in the country, says Cargill. The company partnered with Nielsen to get Hispanic-specific data for its key markets and has invested in Spectra HispanIQ research that provides in-depth insights that identify high-value Hispanic consumers as well as how to execute marketing efforts at the store level.

Realizing that retailers and on-premise accounts are the most visible point of contact for consumers when purchasing beverage alcohol, Glazer’s has taken its internal training program, called Glazer’s Beverage University (GBU), to its customers, offering the first distributor-developed, web-based “school” to retailers, their employees and on-premise account employees.

“GBU is making the training of our own people and customers much more efficient than ever, because we are now online, so our people and our customers can learn at their own pace and in a style that suits them,” explains Cargill. “We believe that an educated customer and an educated Glazer’s representative can help grow the business and upsell consumers.”

Growing a Business
Since the company’s inception as a beverage alcohol distributor back in 1933, Glazer’s has leveraged a successful strategy of aggressive expansion and acquisitions to grow its market share and territories. Louis and Bessie Glazer founded Jumbo Bottling Co. in Dallas back in 1909, producing flavored sodas and selling them off the back of horse-drawn wagons. The focus on beverage alcohol started 24 years later, when Louis Glazer’s sons, Max and Nolan Glazer, established Glazer’s Wholesale Drug Co., Inc. and was soon appointed the Schlitz Beer distributor for Dallas. Throughout the 1940s and ’50s, the company expanded its business by offering new products in existing territories and expanding into contiguous territory across the state and into Louisiana and Arkansas. Starting in the late ’90s and into this decade, the company began to make strategic acquisitions and created joint ventures to further solidify its position as a leading beverage alcohol wholesaler, including adding distributorships and brokerage firms in Missouri, Indiana, Kansas, Ohio, Iowa, Mississippi, Illinois and Oklahoma. Glazer’s also owns a 50-percent stake in Arizona-based Alliance Beverage Co., along with Sunbelt Beverage Corp.

The company’s acquisition of Maxwell Distributing Co., an East Texas distributor, in 1999 marked a strategic focus on further building its beer business.

“Since that point, many of the acquisitions that we’ve made had been to expand on this beer footprint and what this beer footprint really does for us is it puts us into channels where the typical wine and spirits distributor may not always excel. So now we’re very good in convenience and we’re terrific in all facets of on-premise and it’s driving efficiencies for our wines and spirits business like you wouldn’t believe,” remarks Zweig. Glazer’s now distributes 15 million cases of beer annually.

Just this past March, the company announced it was ceasing operations of Union Beverage Co. and forming a new operation, Judge and Dolph, LLC, with Wirtz Beverage Group to create the largest wine, spirit and malt beverage distributor in the state of Illinois.

“In today’s environment, it is important that we are fast, flexible and decisive so that we are capable of maximizing all of the available opportunities in the market. The creation of Judge and Dolph, LLC will enable us to continue our long-term strategic growth plan,” says Cargill. And by all indications, Glazer’s well-planned expansion and acquisitions strategy will only continue to help grow the business.

“The move we made in Illinois is a great example of how we want to operate our business profitably, which creates a platform for pretty aggressive expansion growth. We still believe that there’s a lot of opportunity in the market and we want to try and take advantage of that,” remarks Zweig.

With continued growth comes the challenge of combating rising fuel prices, although Glazer’s has made a commitment to not compromise either its service levels or its ability to execute against its vendors’ brands, Cargill notes.

Driving Efficiency
As part of its ongoing commitment to better serve its customers and suppliers, Glazer’s has made significant investments in technological initiatives to lower error rates, increase productivity and improve service levels. For example, Manugistics, a replenishment tool rolled out companywide, enables the company to forecast demand for products at its 38 distribution centers and centralize purchasing at the corporate headquarters.

“So, on the demand side, it’s allowed our marketing managers and demand analysts out in the field looking at sales patterns to say, ‘Okay, what did the customers buy last year and what are they going to buy this year?’ Then put that into our software tool and it suggests orders and the timing of those orders for the purchasers. The tool has been a tremendous value to our organization,” explains Mike Adams, senior vice president, information technology and supply chain.

On the fulfillment side, the replenishers have the visibility to know the demand and the timing of the demand—whether it’s 250 cases this week and 600 cases next week—to allow the company to manage its inventory much more effectively and help reduce potential out-of-stocks, Adams says.

Glazer’s also implemented Supply Chain Dashboard, a performance reporting tool and BridgePoint software, which tracks the movements, status and availability of inventory to provide greater supply chain visibility. The company also participated in a data synchronization pilot program.

“From an IT basis, Glazer’s is the industry leader in data and systems,” notes Cargill. “We are Dimensional Insights’ leading distributor partner for data mining and we work with Nielsen, deploying unlimited Nitro workstations into our business, which enables Glazer’s to use real-time information to drive better decision making and better activation of brand opportunities.”

VITAL STATS
GLAZER’s FAMILY OF COMPANIES
CHAIRMAN AND CEO: Bennett Glazer
PRESIDENT: Jerry Cargill
HEADQUARTERS: Dallas, Texas
’07 SALES: $3.4 billion
EMPLOYEES: 6,000
GOALS: To continue to be an industry leader in brand building and service-minded operational excellence while achieving greater efficiency levels to benefit our suppliers and customers.

From Beverage World July 15, 2008