Brewed in the North by Matthew J. Bellamy

Author:Matthew J. Bellamy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2019-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

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While CBL was the first Canadian brewer to go national, the innovative corporation soon had competition on the national scene. At Labatt, there was a sense that it needed to copy CBL’S strategy or perish. As early as 1945, executives at Labatt began to reflect on what was needed to succeed in the post-war world. “We must remain in business,” Mackenzie stated, “and to remain in business we must make sales and profits in new places as well as old.”36 The strategists at Labatt further concluded that in order to survive, the brewery would have to expand its capacity to meet the surging post-war demand for its products. All of this meant that Labatt would have to jettison what Mackenzie once termed Labatt’s live-and-let-live philosophy and acquire a number of existing breweries across the nation. “We have always grown with Ontario,” Hugh Labatt stated, following Mackenzie’s lead, “and now we are planning to grow with Canada as a whole.”37 Building on the momentum of recent years, the brewery focused on becoming national in scope, selling its beer from coast-to-coast.

First, Labatt moved into Quebec. In 1950, Quebecers consumed over 50 million gallons of beer. The province had the most liberal liquor laws and market research showed that Quebecers knew and liked Labatt’s products. But as was the case in Ontario, Labatt could not produce enough beer to meet the post-war demand. And even if more beer could be produced at the London plant, there was no way to compete from a distance with the large local firms that supplied Quebecers with almost all of their beer.

Then in the summer of 1951, an opportunity emerged to break into the tightly held Quebec beer market: Frontenac Breweries of Montreal was put up for sale. It was just the opportunity those at Labatt had been waiting for. “Its purchase will allow us easy entry into the Quebec market,” Mackenzie told the board of directors, “and will also give added relief to London since the present Quebec volume now produced here will be transferred to the Quebec plant.”38

Hugh Mackenzie immediately assigned John Cronyn the task of appraising the value of the Montreal brewery. The son of Verschoyle Cronyn, a First World War flying ace who had joined Labatt’s board of directors shortly after the war was over, John Cronyn had graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in chemical engineering. Upon graduation, he began to search for work. Just at that time, Cronyn’s great-uncles, John and Hugh Labatt, were anxiously looking for young members of the family to join them at the brewery. Hiring Cronyn seemed so sensible to them that they hired him without consulting management. This infuriated Hugh Mackenzie. Usually calm in command, Mackenzie wrote an angry letter to the board of directors demanding a statement on the company’s hiring policy. It wasn’t that Cronyn was unfit for employment. Indeed, in many ways he was just the type of individual that Mackenzie was looking to hire. (Since the end of

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