Origlio is a small to medium-sized Pennsylvania business. Much of the money they spend stays in the state.  They are part of the local economy and so are their employees. Many live less than half an hour from the office.  In 2012 their payroll was $15.9 million, and their payroll taxes alone totaled $1.3 million. If you add up their share of the cost of healthcare and pension and profit plans, that's an expenditure of another $4.9 million.

And they are also local consumers. For example, they pay for the beer and soda they distribute even before it reaches their warehouse.  They buy from Yuengling, Sly Fox, Weyerbacher Brewing, Dock Street Brewing and Hank's Beverages. Hank of course is former State Senator Salvatore.  

In 2012, they purchased 2.4 million case equivalents from Yuengling alone.

Their finance people calculated how much money Origlio spends yearly on things like truck tires, forklifts, gas, paper goods and other things you need to run a business. He said that last year they paid $4.5 million to local vendors.

Getting back to marketing, they also do ad buys with local radio stations, Philly Magazine and most of the local newspapers. Last year. Origlio spent just on advertising $5.8 million, approximately $1.1 million was spent on Yuengling alone.  

Charities

Origlio Beverage and its employees actively support many local charities including Philabundance and the Don Guanella School for Boys, a residential and rehabilitative facility for mentally disabled boys from six to 21 years of age.

 Origlio employs nearly 300 individuals and approximately 70% of them are members of Teamsters Local 830.

There is so much more to being a wholesale beer distributor than loading and routing trucks. Origlio Beverage builds brands on behalf of its suppliers and customers, the retailers.  Building brands requires discipline.  It takes a lot of planning, considerable financial commitment, training, selling, manpower and capitol expenditures to get the cases and kegs out the door. When you build a brand, it is important to get the message out that a particular beer is something special. We are close partners with our suppliers and our customers to maximize sales.

Whether a brand is large or small, we sit down with our suppliers annually to jointly develop programming, pricing and marketing budgets using both supplier and Origlio dollars to spend behind the brands.  We actually come up with a detailed schedule for things like building case displays in retail distributor stores, targeting accounts for specific programs, hanging signage and merchandising for special events in restaurants and bars for things like the Super Bowl and St. Patrick's Day. 

Our customer service representatives (a separate department from the sales and marketing departments) go into the trade to offer samples and provide information about a beer's style, taste profile and foods it pairs well with. This is called hand selling and they perform this same service daily while placing orders for customers.

On behalf of our suppliers, we routinely check code dates to guarantee freshness. Out of code beer is trucked back to our warehouse and destroyed.  Very rarely, a bad batch of beer or defective package leaves the brewery.  When that happens we mobilize very quickly to get all of it out of retail.  You may remember that Boston Beer, the makers of Sam Adams, received defective bottles from their glass supplier a few years ago. Our computer system identified for us all the retailers in the five-county Philadelphia market who carried this package.  Origlio was able to collect all of the existing inventory in only 48 hours.  

We can do these things because we have skin in the game and "feet on the street". All in all - 80 people in the sales and marketing departments alone are directly pressed up against these and many other activities.

We have created our own website, Origlio.com, where licensed retailers can order beer 24 hours a day. The web site also has information on beer styles, current trends, alcohol responsibility and articles on beer, written for us by award winning beer journalists. And then there are the product descriptions that even include suggestions on pairing food with the right beer - just like the wine purveyors do. We are also very active on Facebook and Twitter where we are able to connect with both our customers and consumers with daily postings.

Anyone interested perusing Heady Times and Draught Lines may access them for free at Origlio.com. Currently under construction is the company's new website that will contain even more entertaining and informative beer news. Look for it in early winter.