Why Jack Daniel’s Halo MK1 is set to be ‘iconic’
Brown-Forman offered up a taste of its Jack Daniel’s Tennessee whiskey brand’s limited edition release Halo MK1 this week. Prior to the event, hosted in its London headquarters, Jessica Mason discovered more about the McLaren partnership and Brown-Forman’s newest JD launch.
Brown-Forman has many reasons to be proud of its latest offering from Jack Daniel’s. Not just because the bottle itself is packaged in such a way as to emulate the halo safety structure used on McLaren Formula 1 race cars, but also because the product echoes McLaren’s well-known Papaya orange accents too.
Custom-engineered
The new Jack Daniel’s Halo MK1 bottle, which has been fitted with custom-engineered McLaren Formula 1 packaging, is part of the brand’s partnership with the “iconic McLaren Formula 1” team and has been described as the distillery’s most premium and limited global release in its entire history.
Speaking to the drinks business about the whiskey, Brown-Forman senior manager, global strategic partnerships Jeremy Scoones said: “The partnership with McLaren started in 2023 and runs until the end of next year. Initially, it was a three year contract, and then we extended it for this year and next year.”
Here, Scoones hinted that the partnership has been so successful that if talks were to ensue over extending it for a few more years he could see how this would “make sense”.
“We’re in year four already of our partnership with McLaren. It’s gone very, very quickly. We’re already discussing about potentially renewing,” he added.
Why is a whiskey maker from Tennessee partnering with a Formula One team? Scoones explained that “over the last few years, if you follow Formula One, the popularity has exploded, so we’re seeing sold-out races, sold-out VIP hospitality, tickets are hot, there’s been a huge amount of coverage on social media, and what’s driving all of that are several things”.
Reaching a new demographic
He pointed out that “Formula One has a new owner, Liberty Media, which is an American company, and they’ve really opened the sport up, especially on social media, whereas before it was quite a closed sport. There’s now Drive to Survive on Netflix and there are a lot of new fans that have come to the sport through that, and then now Hollywood’s getting involved with an F1 movie with Brad Pitt. There are a huge number of new fans coming into the sport, but not just an increase in numbers and eyeballs, but also the nature of the audience is changing”.
“Only a few years ago, most F1 fans would have looked like white, middle-aged and slightly balding males, and that’s changing,” Scoones highlighted and revealed that now “over half of the new Formula One fans are female, and over a quarter of them are aged between 21 and 32 so a much younger demographic coming in. This is really interesting for us”.
Partner Content
When asked, why McLaren? Scoones also said: “Well, we really honestly couldn’t have partnered with another team, there’s no other team with which we have a really authentic connection with, and that really comes down to our founders, who were both bold, independent spirits. So, on our side, obviously, Jack Daniel, and on McLaren side, Bruce McLaren, both of them were pioneering, they weren’t afraid to take risks and they really pushed the boundaries and innovated – that provides a really nice authentic base.”
Part of popular culture
He added: “The main reasons that we’re doing the partnership: one is about presence and prominence at the point of sale, which obviously these wonderful looking bottles really help us do, especially with the papaya colouration, and it’s also about meaningful difference, so making sure that Jack is part of popular culture, and this growth in fandom really enables us to do that.”
According to Scoones, for the Halo MK1, “around 12,600 bottles have been made”. Not that this has been an agreement that has not been a high value tie-up. When asked how much has been invested in Brown-Forman’s Jack Daniel’s partnership with McLaren, Scoones admitted that, as an approximation, that “it’s several million a year”.
The Halo MK1’s design mirrors the “halo” shape of a McLaren Formula 1 race car and the whiskey’s bottle features hand-finished cork and custom medallions. Added to this, the packaging includes the same metal, micro-suede and carbon fibre print that McLaren uses for its Formula 1 cars.
GTR as well as global
As well as going out globally, Brown-Forman has been eyeing travel retail as an additional platform to show it to the world. In fact, as Scoones explained: “We wanted to actually bring it to market earlier, but it’s been quite a complicated project, as you can see from the packaging” and we “wanted the branding to be exactly on point, but it will be in GTR later on this year”.
Scoones told db: “While on a standard LTO [limited time offer], the liquid is the same every year, but this one is different from a standard No.7 and has a higher ABV [the Halo MK1 is 58.7% ABV] and this is a completely new liquid that’s never been released by Jack before”.
Jack Daniel’s brand ambassador Cam Dawson said: “The reason that we picked 58.7% ABV is because Bruce McLaren’s first racing number was 58 and that was in an Austin 7 and so we are giving a little nod with that point seven there.”
Scoones added that it was “liquid that we had in the distillery, and we’d been sitting on it for a few years waiting for a special way to use it”.
Halo MK1 will retail at around £500 per 1 litre bottle.
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