As Heaven Hill Brands celebrates 85 years in business, we’ve looked back at two foundational eras in our corporate history that have shaped and influenced where we are today. 

The bridge period of the 1970s-1990s ushered in a transition from a solid foundation in Bourbon and whiskey to broad diversification in the distilled spirits space, driven by consumer tastes and preferences. As a third generation of family leadership joined the company in the 2000s, the team brought more focus to sales, marketing and financial analysis and leaned into opportunities for strategic brand acquisition and new product development. 

As an enduring, independent, and family-owned company, Heaven Hill is committed to our long-term Vision of “becoming an increasingly significant player in the U.S. and international spirits industry, growing faster than our competitors and thriving for generations to come.” 

Achieving this Vision, says Chief Operating Officer Allan Latts, will come by way of the people in our organization, thriving and guided by our Values.  He talks to us about our strategic mindset and the bold steps Heaven Hill is taking to ensure our success in the years to come.

As we look to the future at Heaven Hill, what are a couple of growing trends you’re seeing, and how do you see us capitalizing on them in the next few years? 

​​​​​​​Over the years, we have seen shifts in what consumers are drinking. Today there is intense interest in Bourbon and Tequila.  Just a few years ago, consumers were more interested in flavor exploration in the vodka and liqueur categories. While we do not expect a collapse in interest in core product categories like Bourbon and Tequila, we want to make sure our portfolio has leading brands in key categories, so we can take advantage of future changes in consumer taste. Whether through acquisition or new product development, we continue to grow our diverse portfolio of amazing brands.   

Another significant consumer trend has been consumers’ interest in drinking more premium spirits.  In this we have seen a trend towards drinking less but better products. For Heaven Hill to capitalize on this trend, we will continue to look for opportunities to further premiumize our portfolio. We will do this through continued acquisitions and new product development and, importantly, through an increased focus on the great premium and super-premium brands already in our portfolio, like Elijah Craig, Larceny and Deep Eddy Vodka. Finally, we will continue to look for pricing opportunities to make some of our existing brands more premium.

With pillars of our strategy – such as premiumization – in mind, what will our approach to acquisitions look like going forward? How will we size up these opportunities? 

​​​​​​​When we consider potential future acquisitions, we will use our four strategic themes of premiumization, scale, diversification and international as a filter to help us evaluate them. For example, as we look at diversification, we may be looking at holes from a category or a price point perspective or how a brand would fit within our current line-up.

When we are thinking about scale, we would consider the amount of scale a brand brings in the areas of purchasing, operations, and distributor and retailer relationships. Also important, increasing scale allows for continued investment in our infrastructure – our people and systems. Black Velvet is a great example of an acquisition that allowed us to deliver on our strategy of Scale, as it brought significant volume to our Bardstown bottling plant, one of Canada’s largest distilleries, and significant profit, which made our company financially stronger.

Not all acquisitions are created equal, and not all of them will deliver on all four of our strategic themes. But, they will each move us in the right direction toward achieving our vision.

We understand and appreciate that acquisitions require an intense amount of work from our team as we complete our diligence and through the integration of the brand/company into our business. Acquisitions have been critical to our company’s growth, and we thank everyone on the team for all your extra effort to ensure each is a success.

We have had some recent successes around scaling sales and distribution through acquisition. Can you give us some perspective on how those successes will affect how we scale our infrastructure going forward? 

​​​​​​​As much as anything else right now, we’re focused on ensuring the company has the infrastructure (people, process, and systems) we need to realize our full potential. We passionately believe more than anything else that it is our people that make the difference and allow us to win in the marketplace with our distributors, retailers and consumers. Efficient processes and state-of-the-art systems, including both manufacturing and information technology, are also critical to ensuring that we can meet demand, deliver high quality products, maintain our nimbleness and have the right information to make the best decisions. 

I am thrilled with the progress and success we have achieved at Heaven Hill in my almost 20 years with the company. The business has grown greatly and increased in complexity; therefore we have had to become more sophisticated in how we manage the business. When we acquired Deep Eddy, that was the first time we bought a brand with its own plant, sales force and company offices. With our acquisition of Carolans, we gained foreign subsidiaries for the first time, and with Black Velvet we added a plant in another country.  

You can look across every major department and see the investments we are making. Sometimes it’s right-sizing, and sometimes it’s about being more proactive. Having a data scientist and our significant investments in data and research to support our operational objective of data-based decision making is an example of that.  

Meanwhile we are also putting processes in place so we can stay nimble and not have to reinvent the wheel every time we do something. This is a huge area of opportunity for us, especially in our plants where we are focused on our strategic objective and value of Continuous Improvement. 

As we celebrate 85 years in business, what are some things you would like team members to know? 

We are an enduring, independent, family-owned and operated company. Family involvement and leadership in the business has been important to our DNA, but we need and rely on all our team members to be leaders. We are successful when we all work together.   

When we say enduring, we mean we will continue as an independent, family-owned company for the long term!  Being independent and family owned allows us to have this long-term vision and to invest for the long-term success of the company.