A success story about passion and hard work

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This article was published 05/05/2023 (1065 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For a guy who’s made his fortune in the wine and booze business, Anthony von Mandl has an amazingly sobering success story about passion and hard work.

The Vancouver-based billionaire is the 40th recipient of the International Distinguished Entrepreneur Award from The Associates of the Asper School of Business at the University of Manitoba. He was honoured at a gala event Thursday evening.

His family-owned company, The Mark Anthony Group, may have done about $4 billion in revenue last year, but there were many frugal years for the Vancouver-based entrepreneur, punctuated by skulduggery from the Goliaths he was competing with, before the recent success emerged.

He may very well be responsible for some of the most enjoyable consumer products on the market, yet the 73-year-old does not do many interviews and is hardly a household name… unlike his company’s products including Mike’s Hard Lemonade, White Claw Hard Seltzer and a number of award-winning wines including Mission Hill and CedarCreek.

From having early customers in his wine-importing business close their doors after making a sizable order, suppliers snatched from out from under him by international competitors, to the preposterous internal Canadian trade laws that kept his popular ready-to-drink brands out of the Quebec market, von Mandl was determined to make a go of it in the wine and spirits business despite the hurdles he encountered.

“But it was never my objective to have a business of this scale,” he said in an interview at the Asper School of Business after an inspiring question-and-answer session with students that went way overtime.

“All I wanted to do was put the Okanagan on the world wine map with a little winery — Mission Hill,” he said. “That was the objective.”

When he acquired Mission Hill Family Estate Winery in 1980, it was barely alive and the Okanagan was a decidedly unproven wine-growing region. At the time, there were only five wineries in the entire country. Now there are about 450.

That was also a time of high double-digit interest rates and to keep the winery going von Mandl figured out a way to make flavoured cider, the first of its kind on the market, to help pay the bill. That became the first of a number of innovative “firsts” he’s introduced into the market.

Now there are about 450 wineries in Canada and another 1.5 million around the world, making it one of the most competitive markets in the world.

“When I talk to people at Proctor & Gamble or Unilever they think they are in a competitive business. But how many different brands of toothpaste or detergents are there? Maybe four, five, six,” he said. “We reckon there are 1.5 million wineries in the world, each producing 10 to 20 wines. It is by far the most competitive consumer product in the world.”

Von Mandl tells the story that when the judges found out they had selected a Mission Hill wine as the “World’s Best” in a blind taste test at an international competition, the judges thought they must have made a mistake.

“They went back and tested again and we won for the second time,” he told students.

He figures one of the reasons Mike’s Hard Lemonade became so successful was because culturally it finally became safe for young men to order something other than beer.

His attention to detail and willingness to use technology to innovate products has helped effectively invent first the flavoured cider market, then the ready-to-drink category, including packaging the drinks in a can.

When White Claw Hard Seltzer was introduced about seven years ago, von Mandl said it was the biggest single new beverage launch in North America since prohibition, alcohol or non-alcohol.

The brand is doing so well — it has 55 per cent of the U.S. market — that the company constructed close to three million square feet of production in three locations in the U.S. And he did it during the pandemic. He figures his workforce is going to go from about 700 to 3,000 in the next five years.

His philosophy with his wineries is that they had to be so much better than anything else.

“We needed people to go tell their friends because we had no money to advertise,” he said. “The driving force was to have absolutely the best in craft, the best in your glass, in a bottle and later in a can. We also needed a package that would attract consumers.”

With patented production processes that use only natural ingredients he said White Claw made people say, “Oh my God, this is so drinkable, I love it. They would tell their friends and that is what they did on social media.”

He is a passionate advocate for Canada and bristles at the country’s reputation of shipping all its natural resources elsewhere for processing.

“I am doing my part in terms of having put the Okanagan the map,” he said. “With Bearface (his company’s new Canadian whisky), we are looking to once again make high-end quality Canadian whisky stand out on the world stage.”

And earlier this spring, he released White Claw Premium Vodka, which he claims includes the first innovation in vodka making in 30 years.

“In everything we do we use technology on one side and artistic on the other side and bring them together to offer customers something they had not even thought about,” he said.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca