FDBusiness.com

BrewBroker has unveiled a new online marketplace for the global brewing industry. It brings everyone together who wants to brew beer enabling them to trade directly with breweries and suppliers on one platform – making beer production smarter, more accessible and more profitable.

After successfully raising £390,000 seed investment via crowdfunding platform CrowdCube last year, BrewBroker has signed up more than 85 industry suppliers, across the UK and Europe, including Brewhouse & Kitchen and Kegstar and over 70 buyers, to bring the platform to market.

Whether a brewery, pub, restaurant, retailer or aspiring brewer, BrewBroker provides a solution connecting these businesses with a network of brewing, packaging and logistics partners at the click of a mouse. The BrewBroker solution can work for breweries that need to scale up, to a start-up beer brand looking for a cost-effective route to market. Or bars, restaurants and retailers looking to source their own brand of beer to a beer lover wishing to create a one-off beer for an event.

With no formal process or facilitator in place, identifying the supplier with the relevant services and capabilities, let alone capacity, is a time-consuming task. Additionally, negotiating pricing, contracts and handling payments securely and transparently are all challenges that BrewBroker aims to solve.

It was in response to seeing the challenge of industry colleagues launching a new beer brand, and the difficulties of navigating the network of breweries and suppliers, that prompted co-founder Toby Chantrell, to develop the BrewBroker marketplace. The team has since spent a year working with breweries and suppliers to build, test and bring the concept to market.

Ben Morgan-Smith, co-founder of BrewBroker, says: “Seeing first-hand the challenge of bringing a new beer to market, we could see there was a real need for a solution providing increased levels of access and demystifying the process of creating a beer brand. Our huge brewing industry currently has no way to easily communicate and trade within itself. From giant brewers at the top to the small craft and entrepreneur brewers in their infancy, there is no one place to go to expand or make their brewing dreams come true.”

The platform already has a network of over 85 suppliers covering kegging, canning, bottling to design and labelling with plans to grow this to several hundred over the coming months. Suppliers are based throughout the UK including: Harbour Brewing Co., Hogs Back Brewery, Laine’s Brew Co, Brewhouse & Kitchen and Kegstar alongside international brewers based in France, Denmark, Spain and Croatia.

Since launching last year BrewBroker has already begun to build a network of over 70 buyers ranging from start-up beer brands, established breweries through to a growing list of independently owned restaurant and pub groups, as well as consumers.

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Pictured (L-R): Ben Morgan-Smith and Toby Chantrell, co-founders of BrewBroker.