Riot Wine Co is reinventing the way Australians drink wine with founder Tom O’Donnell challenging the belief that quality wine comes from a bottle, through reinventing draught and canned beverages .
Since its Riot Rosé was launched in 2016, Riot Wine Co has built its product offering to include chilled and ambient still-wine, sparkling and spritz in-can and on-tap. On a trip to the US, O’Donnell identified this as an opportunity for Riot Wine Co to develop a high quality, sustainable draught beverage that was conducive to the Australian lifestyle.
Riot Wine Co became the first and only local brand to make wines specifically for draught. O’Donnell noted the challenges that come from being an industry leader in the draught beverage space “like the transition from cork to screw top wine bottles, people have a mentality that draught beverages are cheaper bulk wine but this isn’t the case. We need people to understand the quality product that we provide. There is no taste difference. If you can taste the difference between bottled and draught wine, we’ve failed.”
“We are revolutionising the way we consume wine. We don’t use additives to flavour or tailor the wines. We just use technique. It’s not rocket science. We are just reinvigorating the process to reduce our preservatives level.
O’Donnell noted that working with Konvoy was an obvious choice as while maximising their efficiencies and financial gains “it would retain its quality and taste as there is no temperature, light or oxygen variation that deteriorates wine.”
“As a small business, we have capital constraints. Konvoy provided an economical advantage where we didn’t have to fork out $100,000 for a keg fleet. Konvoy has enabled the explosion of our business as we can now reinvest what we would have previously spent on Kegs back into the business and ensure our wines are innovative and up to the top standard. ”
Riot Wine Co acknowledged that there is both an increasing demand amongst the Australian customer base for sustainable beverage products but also a need for companies to take accountability of their environmental footprint. Therefore, it was a natural progression for Riot Wine Co to incorporate Konvoy’s kegs into their business model to address their environmental impact.
O’Donnell explored the environmental benefits that come from utilising Konvoy’s keg pooling model, referencing that “a single keg is equivalent to approximately 66 bottles of wine, so if we reuse a keg for 30 years we will be saving 23,000 bottles.”
“At Riot, we want to continue to provide sustainable beverages that are also of the highest quality and Konvoy enables us to do this. We noticed that sparkling wine has the highest level of wastage and so we decided to tailor our kegging processes with Konvoy for sparkling wine and have since launched our draught sparkling wine. We became the first and only people to have sparkling wine on tap that stays sparkling.”
It was Konvoy’s consistency in its customer service that created a mutually beneficial relationship. O’Donnell said that they use Konvoy “to guarantee quality, whether this is maintaining quality relationships or product quality. That's frankly why we use them for our top customers such as Merivale, Rockpool Group or Laundy Group.”
“Konvoy leads the industry and that’s why we use them.”
Konvoy’s proactive business model based on providing a high level of customer service and creating efficiencies for their customers through technology has enabled them to develop a strong business relationship with Riot Wine Co.
O’Donnell referenced the support that Konvoy’s technology provides them stating that “Konvoy’s technology enables us to set and forget. We don’t have to worry about the temperature or location of the kegs. Their tech does that for us. The system and software is just really impressive. These guys are able to integrate, navigate and find a solution on your behalf and that’s pretty impressive”
“That’s why we use Konvoy for end to end control and maximising efficiencies. They free up our time so we can focus on what really matters and that’s creating beverages," he said.
