Nader, Northern Eagle Beverage Honored

4-9-10

When Community Needs It, Flourishing Northern Eagle Beverage Comes To Rescue


By JIM KEVLIN

When the Great Flood of 2006 began to recede, George Allen took to a drive down to Walton.
Many of the roads were blocked, and he had to wend his way through hill and dale on secondary roads.
Coming into that southern Delaware County village, he was greeted by an unforgettable image:  Three cars stacked on top of each other and pushed against a garage.
“There were some hurting towns out there,” George, vice president and operations manager at Northern Eagle Beverages Inc. recalled the other day in an interview at his Railroad Street office in Oneonta.
How Allen and the company responded is part of the reason Northern Eagle Beverage will receive NBT Bank’s Distinguished Business Award Saturday, April 10.
Within a matter of hours, two 18-wheelers loaded with canned drinking water had pulled off I-88 and were unloading at the local distributorship.
At a reporter’s request, Allen pulled out a calculator:  That’s 98 pallets, 5,500 cases, or 130,000 cans of drinking water.
Soon, Northern Eagle’s truck fleet was fanning out across hard-hit Delaware County, ensuring responders and volunteers helping to clear up the mess didn’t lack for clean drinking water.
But that’s not the only reason Northern Eagle was chosen for the award, according to chamber President Rob Robinson:  Whenever there’s a community need, the company is there, from the massive water distribution to a home-run contest during the recent Cooperstown Winter Carnival that raised $250 for the local food bank.
The Anheuser-Busch distributorship was founded as LaMonica Beverage after World War II by Frank “Diz” Lamonica, who sold it in 1986 to Cooperstown’s Lou Hager, a member of the famed Busch beer-brewing family.
At the time, Hager was working for Anheuser-Busch corporate in Pittsburgh and was eager for the independence, according to Matt Curley, a Norwich native and Northern Eagle general manager who had returned to Upstate New York in the mid-’80s from a corporate career to manage Cooperstown’s Tunnicliff Inn.
Curley joined the company in 1987, followed the next year by Allen, an Oneonta native and OHS grad who had recently graduated from SUNY Oneonta.
Anheuser-Busch, sold to Belgium-based In-Bev last year, has dominated the U.S. beer market for decades, controlling about 50 percent of sales.
Northern Eagle, with 32 employees and an eight-truck fleet, reaches across three counties – Otsego, Delaware and Chenango.  Its furthest outlet is in Fleischmann’s, 125 miles away.
You would think a Budweiser wholesale operation would be like a public utility, stable, profitable, unchanging, but it’s a whole different world than it was 20 years ago, Allen and Curley said.
When George joined the company in 1988, he was sent out with an order book under his arm, transcribing orders back at the office.  Now, salespeople are wired, shooting back orders to the main office via Blackberry.
Then, 40 percent of the business was chain stores; today, that’s 70 percent.  Then, 53 percent of the business was with bars and taverns; today, with tougher DUI laws, bars account for only 20 percent.                
Most of the Anheuser-Busch products sold locally are brewed in Fulton, outside Syracuse, and computer forecasting has become so sophisticated the local wholesaler doesn’t even have to place an order – it is automatically and accurately supplied from afar.
Then, Northern Eagle was distributing 50 products.  Today, it has 350, and is constantly seeking and testing new libations.
“If you throw 10 things against the wall and one of them sticks,” said Allen, “you make a lot of money.”
The scope of Northern Eagle’s business is immediately evident if you stroll into the cavernous cooling rooms – the CEW, for controlled environmental warehouse – behind the multi-bay loading docks at the green-fronted depot.
Cases of beer are stacked many times the height of a man, pallet after pallet after pallet.  Bud and Busch are well represented, in all manifestations – for instance, Bud Light Lime has been a huge seller since it was introduced four years ago.
But that’s just the start of it.  Over against that wall are a range of imports known to few outside the aficionados:  Hacker-Pschorr, Paulaner, Toohey, LaRossa.  Over there are the Jones Soda selections, aimed at the back-to-the-earth crowd, using natural ingredients and flavors like pomegranate, crushed melon and green apple.
And there’s a brand new addition:  Johny Bootlegger with 12 percent alcohol, a sweet drink in a flask that invites you to relive Prohibition.
“Now, the big thing that’s coming out is coconut milk,” said Allen, as – on his approach – the overhead door to a CEW stacked with kegs opened before him.
Even the loading dock area has changed.  In the old days, truck drivers would come in at 5, load their own trucks, deliver all day and go home at 8-9.
Today, the company has a night shift that loads the trucks, so when truck drivers come in at 7, they’re ready to go.  This has also yielded savings in overtime.
As the tour neared the end, Allen confessed there is one constant:  It’s fun to be in the beer business.
“When you’re dealing with beer, everybody’s always glad to see you.”