Arran Brewery targets £5m turnover
Owner Gerald Michaluk, who bought the company out of administration in 2008, told FoodManufacture.co.uk: “We have reached just above break even on a turnover of £700,000. My plan is to get to £5m turnover and a 20% profit by year five.”
Michaluk is currently finalising funding for a £1.6m capacity expansion. He plans to open a new bottling plant in Scotland within the next three months, to run alongside its main bottling operation which takes place at the Marston’s brewery in Burton on Trent, as well as establish an international microbrewery network.
Microbrewery hub
The new Scottish plant will bottle Arran’s experimental beers, and will be available on a contract basis to other microbrewers in the area. “There are about 51 microbreweries in Scotland and another 20 or so in the north of England who could potentially send their beers to us.”
The firm will also boost capacity at its Isle of Arran brewery to 5m bottles a year, Michaluk said; the site currently produces 500,000 bottles per year, mainly for the Scottish market. Arran plans to expand UK-wide and also start making international exports later in 2011.
This expansion will boost employee numbers from 11 to 33 over the next three years.
International ambitions
Arran Brewery also plans to set up duplicate microbreweries overseas in countries such as Spain, America and France. A group of Spanish delegates have just finished a brewery training course with the firm, and will now return home for technical training. They will be ready to set up breweries in Spain by September: “We will own the companies but they will run their own show”, Michaluk said.
"Real brewing is taking off everywhere, we want to expand into countries where the craft brewing scene is not as established,” he added.
A second group of trainees from California and Texas will also begin training in Arran shortly, ready to set up breweries in America.
Arran Brewery recently gained UK wide distribution with Co-op and also has Scottish listings with Asda, Tesco and Sainsbury’s. It was expecting to gain more UK-wide listings, Michaluk said, although he added that supermarkets would only ever account for 50% of sales as the company would also develop its on-trade business.
A colourful Scottish entrepreneur, with interests stretching from a luxury helicopter operation to a body armour business, Michaluk said he would decide whether to stay with the business or sell up after it hit its profit targets.
