Cranes

Idea

Introduction

We believe Cranes is one of the most innovative on trend alcoholic drinks on the market. A lightly sparkling 4% alcoholic drink, Cranes is brewed purely from crushed cranberries, with added juice for real flavour. It comes in three distinctive flavours: Original Cranberry, Raspberry & Pomegranate and Strawberry & Kiwi.

Our drink is 100% natural, has an incredibly high juice content of over 16%, low in calories with just 99 calories per bottle, only 5g added sugar and a delightful twist of the natural sweetener stevia. This achieves great natural taste and meets the consumer demand for healthier drinks to fit with a generally healthier lifestyle. Cranes compares favourably to fruit ciders that are generally very sweet and high in calories, and white wine which is both very high in calories and alcohol content.

We’re an incredibly innovative company which lead to creating our unique drink but we are always looking to provide something different for our customers. We recently collaborated with one of the top UK mixologists to develop a divine cranberry and blood orange liqueur and called it simply Cranes Liqueur, which also makes fantastic cocktails.

As a thank you to everyone who decides to join us on this journey, we are happy to offer the following investor perks:

If you invest over £500:

• 20% discount on our website.

If you invest over £1000:

• 20% discount on our website
• and we will send you a bottle of Liqueur and mixed case of the Cranberry ‘ciders’.

Intended impact

Cranes was developed by identical twin brothers Dan (left) and Ben (right).

We live near Cambridge and enjoy keeping fit and healthy, and play rugby for one of the local teams. We were at University a few years ago, and like most students enjoyed socialising out with friends, which needless to say often involved a drink! Being health conscious, nothing would beat a vitalising glass of cranberry juice and it got us thinking what if we brewed the cranberries? . . . and that was the beginning of Cranes.

We believe that people always want choice in every aspect of their lives. When it comes to drinking alcohol there might be a good choice of drinks with various alcohol levels, all sorts of flavours, and visibly different products, but there’s much less information about what actually goes into a lot of alcoholic drinks, such as how much sugar, where the alcohol comes from, or how many calories the bottle contains.

The current label legislation does not require the manufacturer to declare the nutritional information of an alcoholic drink (unlike for foods), which means people don’t really know what they are drinking. For example, some branded flavoured fruit ciders have as much as 51g of sugar per 500ml bottle and only use flavourings with no real juice.

Cranes is high in juice and has only 5g of added sugar. It would be wrong to claim an alcoholic drink is healthy, but in moderation it remains an important part of how a lot of people socialise and relax. So we think people will always enjoy a drink, but that they will increasingly look to choose a drink that has healthier ingredients, but obviously still tastes great! We think we provide that choice.

Substantial accomplishments to date

When launched at the BBC Good Food Show in November 2014, both adult women and men clearly loved Cranes. The brand and product was then recognised by the industry as one of the top 100 best new products at IFE 2015 (International Food & Drink Expo).

How and why?

Recipe:

First we had to perfect the drink itself. Doing so took time and we enlisted the help of a food technologist to get the recipes right – balancing flavour and sweetness carefully.

Brand:

We spent time crafting the brand logo and label design to convey quality and heritage. The name itself is simple and strong. Why Cranes? We discovered that in the 17th century cranberries were discovered in America and were given the name “craneberries” after the small, pink blossoms which resemble the head and bill of the Sandhill crane. Then we spent time and energy developing the brand with an FMCG marketing expert and brand design agency. We carried out market research with focus groups in London and Cambridge which showed that the concept, the name, brand design and the product itself resonated with young adult consumers, had strong appeal and real stand out, and they loved the taste.

Production:

We started brewing on a very small scale on a local farm near where we live, and then once we knew we had a good product we scaled up production investing in new fermentation equipment. We knew it would be better to outsource the final mixing, bottling and labelling to an established company given the prohibitive set-up costs and found Brothers Drinks Ltd, based in Somerset.

Sales:

Within five months of bottling we were stocked by Ocado.com who support new innovative quality products. We are now also stocked by Shire Foods of Norfolk, a wholesaler who also distributes to retailers and farm shops. Talks have started with supermarkets, pub-chains and other retailers and initial responses have been very encouraging. We have just agreed a listing with Nectar who are the south’s leading distributor for the on-trade. We are also selling at a variety of exhibitions and festivals across the country. We are getting great feedback, people love the fact it’s unique – and particularly that it is only 4% alcohol, made from real juice and has low sugar content.

These initial accomplishments have given us confidence that Cranes can become a very successful consumer brand.

Monetisation strategy

Our brand is trade-marked and we are confident that our recipes are difficult to replicate. Though we don’t ‘own’ cranberries, we believe Cranes can become synonymous with the fruit and all it offers and we aim to manage these elements (the brand and recipes) closely as they form an important part of the intellectual property that we aim to create value from.

We brew the cranberries ourselves at Top Farm just outside Cambridge, and outsource the mixing and bottling to Brothers Drinks Ltd, who understand specialist quality brands (they bottle for premium tonic waters and a number of other top brands). Once Cranes is palletised, the bottles are sent back to us for us to store and distribute from the Farm.

This means we operate a relatively capital light business model, where the investment in the brewing equipment is sufficient to satisfy up to 800,000 bottles per annum and with a small investment we can increase this. The bottling capacity at Brothers Drinks is significant and will help us to expand rapidly. Our low overhead model means our current set-up can potentially generate sufficient profit to re-invest in larger brewery facilities when demand increases and if demand spiralled there is an option of outsourcing all production to Brothers Drinks Ltd.

When it comes to sales generation, we are working with Boutique Beer Brands (BBB), a company that specialises in drink sales with a number of success stories under their belt. They are working with us to develop our on-trade sales, and have already developed interest with Matthew Clark and Mitchell & Butler with listings in Nectar. Exports are being overseen by Andy Hall, an ex Director at Fosters who has worked with RTDs (ready-to-drink product) in Export, which will be starting in July, with a pitch for listing to Canada the LCBO (Liquor Control Board of Ontario).

Use of proceeds

The focus this year is to drive growth by increasing the distribution of Cranes and investing in PR and marketing to raise awareness and trial of the Cranes brand.
Specifically, we will use the funds to:

• Increase distribution and support sales in the on-trade through BBB

• Raise awareness and trial at more events and festivals across the UK

• Hire a PR agency to help drive awareness through coverage in press, radio and social media channels

• Deliver a targeted advertising campaign in London and East Anglia

• Production and inventory