Gallo enters beer category

Wine giant Gallo has announced its entrance into the beer category through a partnership with lager brand Montucky Cold Snacks, the latest in a slew of cross-category investments by the US company.

Gallo’s entrance into the beer category highlights its ambition to keep up with changing tastes, having identified a trend in consumers switching between categories.

“Today’s consumer is shopping brands, flavours, and occasions across beer, wine, spirits, and RTDs,” said Ernest J Gallo, the company’s CEO.

The company has made a number of recent acquisitions and developed partnerships across a range drinks categories. “With Montucky Cold Snacks, combined with our expansion of High Noon into vodka iced tea, our partnerships with Canelo Álvarez on VMC and with Lotte on Soonhari Soju, our recent acquisitions of Fishers Island Lemonade, Salt Point, and Waterbird, and our continual wine innovation, such as VIBE by Vendange, we are constantly trying to bring new and better experiences to the consumer,” he said.

The latest, a strategic partnership with Montucky Cold Snacks, is the wine giant’s first venture into beer. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Britt West, executive vice president and general manager at Gallo, said the company’s entrance into the beer category offers “an exciting new opportunity to reach consumers in different usage occasions, and we look forward to collaborating and growing Montucky across the beer distributor network.”

He added: “We believe core lager is a big category with room for fresh and innovative propositions.”

Montucky Cold Snacks was founded in 2012 by Montanans Chad Zeitner and Jeremy Gregory.

Over the last 5 years, Montucky has grown from 130,000 cases to nearly one million cases in 2023.

Montucky’s American Style ‘Cold Snack’ is a sessionable lager with an ABV of 4.1%. A press release announcing the partnership said that the beer is “targeting domestic premium lager pricing where it is currently sold”.