westons cider

Westons Cider has unveiled plans for three additions to its Rosie’s Pig range of canned craft fruit ciders, on the back of booming sales over the past financial year.

It is eyeing three additions to the range, which currently consists of Rosie’s Pig Hand Brake Cloudy Cider with Damson and Rosie’s Pig Flat Tyre Cloudy Cider with Rhubarb, over coming months. “One of them that we’re just finalising now is even better than the rhubarb one. It’s quite a different take on a fruit flavoured cider,” Westons commercial director Geoff Bradman told The Grocer. “We’re also looking at seasonality. Cans will be a focus for us moving forward.” It was also eying new brands and extensions to existing bottled lines, said commercial director Geoff Bradman, stressing that the overall range of SKUs would not necessarily get larger. “There’s stuff that we do frankly where there is duplication and we have quite a few smaller brands that we could quite easily curtail.”

The news comes after revenues at the cider maker grew by 3.9% (£2.2m) to £61.3m for the year ending 31 March 2017. Operating profit ger was up 7.8% (£293k) to £4.05m, according to the company’s latest results.

Last month, Westons unveiled a major corporate rebrand, with plans to grow the business by 40% in five years.”I don’t think they’re challenges - more opportunities - but there are numerous things happening right now we have to adapt to, such as keeping abreast of the pace of consolidation,” said Bradman. “Look at this week alone: Tesco and Booker, Co-op and Nisa, and minimum unit pricing. Ordinarily you would only have one or two of these things to deal with in a quarter.”

Westons Rosie’s Pig Flat Tyre and Stowford Press Low Alcohol were both awarded gold medals in The Grocer Drink Awards earlier this month. Sales of Henry Westons Vintage were up £3.5m (2.2%) over the last 12 months, with Old Rosie up £500k (13.7%) and Stowford Press £300k (7.4%) [Nielsen 52 w/e 9 September 2017].