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Coca-Cola Amatil and SABMiller announce...
the new Bluetongue Brewery

Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA) is pleased to announce that Pacific Beverages, its joint venture alcoholic beverages company with SABMiller, will build a boutique premium brewery at Warnervale in the Central Coast region of New South Wales.

The brewery announcement follows Pacific Beverages’ acquisition last December of the Hunter-based premium beer brands, Bluetongue and Bondi Blonde from majority Bluetongue shareholder John Singleton, and is the next step in developing the company’s premium beer strategy.

Terry Davis, the Group Managing Directory of CCA and chairman of Pacific Beverages, said the new brewery will be called Bluetongue Brewery.

"We have found a great site for the new Bluetongue Brewery, located close to the F3 Motorway on the Central Coast. We are looking forward to building a state-of-the-art facility with our partners SABMiller, who, as one of the world’s leading brewers, will bring great brewing technology and expertise to our Australian Market.

"Our aim is not only to build a great facility which will brew premium beer brands for the Australian and overseas markets, but we also aim to deliver world’s best practice in water and energy efficiencies. The brewery will become a significant tourist attraction in its own right, attracting people who want to see how Australian premium beer is brewed.

"It will deliver jobs, a strong long-term economic stimulus to the region and to NSW. I have always said NSW is open for business, and the selection of NSW by Pacific Beverages for its brewery site is testament to this."

John Singleton, who remains on Bluetongue’s board, said Bluetongue was an integral part of the Central Coast and Hunter region.

"The decision to keep Bluetongue in the local area is proof that Terry Davis and his team understand that Bluetongue can stay true to its heritage, whilst growing into a truly national Australian beer. I am excited at the prospect of what we can all do together" Mr Singleton said.

It will deliver significant employment and economic stimulus to the Central Coast region and more broadly to the NSW economy.

• 250 construction jobs.
• On completion 100-120 full time equivalent roles in manufacturing, technical and trades
• A large number of positions in sales and distribution ongoing.

The brewery, with a capacity of 50 million litres (500,000 hectolitres) is expected to be completed in 2010.

 

"Disgruntled customers tell 12 times more people than the happy ones do"

I feel for people who are in the service industry and don’t enjoy it. I feel even more for people who run a business in the service industry and employ the people who don’t enjoy it. The power of one bad person to colour your impressions of a business is amazing, and the power of one good person to win you over is similarly so. And, it has to be said, the power of any one of us to annoy people in the service industry is of an even greater order of magnitude.

I once asked a member of that industry how the staff could put up with all the complaints, requests and excessive demands and still manage to smile day after day. He basically said that once you let the customers get to you, you are gone. It probably follows that once an employer notices someone like that, they should be gone.

At the start of a recent trip to New Zealand I encountered a succession of really pleasant people – at arrivals, check-in, boarding and during breakfast – and I was starting to feel good about this airline.

Down the aisle came tea and coffee, or so I thought. Unbeknown to me, that second metal jug contained milk and not coffee. I should have been on my guard. The attendant had that "you had better be organised when I get there" look. The same sort of look you get from some of the people at McDonalds when you hesitate for a millisecond after "may I take your order?"

Anyway she came down the aisle and said "tea?" to which I said "coffee". I got the look that meant “I said tea you moron, quite clearly, quite definately, I did not say coffee, I don’t care that Im holding two beverage jugs, I said tea". And a sarcastic reiteration of her announcement. Not one to back away from confrontation, I gave her a similarly sarcastic look and remark, which she tried to top, and our mutual dislike was enshrined. I ended up hating the airline.

Now I may well be a moron, but the point is that she did not want to be there and she was picking fights where none existed. When people do not want to be in the service industry, they start resenting the customers and, unless the customers happen to be brain-dead, they pick that up. In industry parlance it is called "creating a terrorist". The disaffected customers are called terrorists because they go off and tell everyone they know how bad that business is. The people who have a good experience are called something like “publicists”: the terrorists apparently tell about 12 times as many people about their experience as the publicists do. So the greatest danger to any business is the staff who have let a customer get to them.

Later in the week our party was travelling over a remote New Zealand track and we were stopped by a soldier in full camouflage gear carrying an extremely large machinegun. He and three other soldiers were on an evasion exercise. They had been out in the mountains with bare rations for two weeks, and had one more to go. They were being hunted by nearly 200 regular army soldiers and a squadron of helicopters.

We were going in their direction and, with no restrictions on their tactics, they asked us for a lift. It was quite a daring move in the circumstances. The idea of taking four heavily armed commandos, who had not washed in weeks, 80 kilometres across a mountain wilderness was not immediately appealing, but the leader was so impressive in the way he handled the approach that we agreed. In fact, all four of them were fantastic. Even though they had not eaten or slept for some time, and were being hunted, their manner was impeccable. We had to do some filming along the way, which left them in a couple of very exposed positions, but they did not complain or make any further requests. At no point in the episode did we get the feeling they did not want to be there. You could say that we are now publicists for the New Zealand Army or publicists for the terrorists, or whatever role they were playing.

The contrast was instructive: a smelly guy with a machinegun was able to win us over where a professional attendant in a pressed uniform could not. So if you are in the service industry and looking for great employees, give those guys with the machine guns a call.

"One persons opinion – but what an opinion"