With her only foray into the drinks industry as the manager of a successful village pub over 20 years ago, with the interim spent as an operational specialist in other sectors, Dannie McDonald, now Managing Director of Gunner Cocktails, seems to perfectly epitomise the phrase "from bar to boardroom". Dannie's leadership of Gunner Cocktails has injected innovation into the drinks sector and reinvigorated a sports club favourite.
In 2019, Dannie and her team were tasked with helping to reimagine the traditional Gunner cocktail- an infusion of ginger, natural bitters, and lime first mixed two centuries ago - and duly obliged when they put the erstwhile hand-mixed beverage on tap, rendering it faster and easier to serve across bars, pubs, and sports clubs. The following year, the company launched ‘The Saint', a non-alcoholic, ready-to-drink, canned version of the cocktail, which will this year be joined by its first alcoholic counterpart, ‘The Rum Sinner'.
From bar to boardroom
As a trained business coach, she has worked with start-ups, emerging SMEs, and multimillion turnover international companies. In 2020, she took the next step in her career, when she joined the team at Gunner Cocktails.
From her commercial experience, and historical work on the beverage sector's frontline, Dannie gained insight into the dynamics and intricacies of the sector. When it came to helping build the Gunner Cocktail brand, Dannie's awareness of consumer demands and knowledge in leading other brand's to success lent her invaluable insight into marketing and trade.
The drink of kings (and queens)
When she began her journey with Gunner Cocktails, Dannie re-entered a sector affected, as many industries are, by gender imbalance. Despite an equal gender distribution across entry level positions, women make up less than 25% of executive roles in the sector. Yet, it is emblematic of Dannie and indeed Gunner to forge their own path and shake up, and not stir, the drinks industry. Nowhere is this more evident than in revenue figures for Gunner which show that under Dannie's stewardship, company sales have doubled year-on-year since the launch of ‘The Saint' in 2020. Forecasted 500% growth for 2023 is further evidence, were it needed, that Gunner and its managing director are destined to, in Dannie's words, "take over the world".
How to go about this? Identifying trends among consumers is a very good start and Gunner have responded acutely to research which shows that not only is the distribution of senior management roles unevenly spread across the genders, but so too is the consumption of low/no-alcohol drinks. While 26% of British men now drink lower-alcohol drinks, only 14% of the overall adult population have taken up the trend.
To offset this, Gunner has focused its efforts on producing female-orientated and gender-neutral branding and marketing. The absence of female-orientated branding across the drinks industry can be gauged from the fact that, in 2020, the world's leading whisky brands posted 3,896 images featuring men, with only 1,707 including women. Furthermore, as a cocktail which was originally non-alcoholic, Gunner takes care to emphasise its unique and delicious taste over its place as a non-alcoholic alternative, to prove itself a drink in its own right.
The result? A drink that can be enjoyed by everyone, as long as they embody the same spirit of adventure and endeavour that its founders have managed to condense into a 330ml can. Stocked at The Hurlingham Club, Royal Ocean Racing Club, Masterpiece and many more, it is clear that Gunner appeals to athletes and trendsetters in need of a drink to match their exploits.
These are exciting times for Gunner. Moving forward, Dannie and her team will continue to address the evolving challenges facing alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages, in this really busy sector, through a mixture of deep-rooted expertise and astute innovation, with retail markets firmly on the horizon, to create a cocktail that pours an age-old recipe into the modern era of the drinks industry.
