New Belgium Brewing, North America’s largest craft beer platform, relies on major operations in Asheville in Western North Carolina, which suffered catastrophic destruction from Hurricane Helene this fall.
The disaster tested the company’s leadership team—and stakeholder capitalism mission.
“We’re still dealing with the Asheville flooding crisis,” says Shaun Belongie, CEO, New Belgium, Bell’s Brewery, and Distinguished Vineyards. “Fortunately, pretty early on, we could confirm that all of our coworkers were safe. That was obviously the first priority. And fortunately, we have not had a significant number of coworkers who have had major [personal] property losses. There have been some, which unfortunately is too many.”
The flooding caused extensive damage to the Asheville campus, along with all the infrastructure devastation across the mountain town.
After ensuring all the staff were out of immediate danger, Belongie’s second priority, he says, was “to return some sense of normalcy to the group … We’re looking to bring people back to work probably in a couple of weeks. The challenges continue, and I think we’re in a state of shock. During the several weeks of trying to recover, we’re all running on adrenaline.”
People First
New Belgium, founded in 1991 in Ft. Collins, Colorado, has always been committed to what it calls, “Human-Powered” leadership.
“If widely adopted, we believe Human-Powered Business will greatly accelerate the pace of solutions to our biggest challenges,” Belongie has said. “While also building stronger, more profitable, and more resilient businesses over the long term.”
The “physical and mental health” of the company’s 1,300+ employees hasn’t been as critically connected to the resilience of the business since the height of the lockdowns.
Co-Founder/Owner, Kim Jordan, who built her company, “the only way a social worker would: People first,” instituted fully-paid healthcare premiums for employees who need the support. All staff can access free onsite medical clinic care complete with a physician. New Belgium also provides living wage compensation and fosters in its “coworkers” a deep commitment to philanthropy and advocacy.
All of this came into play after the historic storm. “For example, we have crisis counselors who are on-site when we bring people back to work,” says Belongie. But in the meantime, because the company also has substantial operations in Colorado, Virginia, and Michigan, many of those coworkers contributed to help their colleagues in North Carolina: “In the midst of all of that, what’s been amazing to see is the response,” says Belongie. “The outpouring of support from coworkers that were not in Asheville has been incredible. [By early December 2024] we’ve had $100,000 of donations from our coworker base.”
Much of those funds went directly into one of the company’s nonprofit support groups, The New Belgium Coworker Assistance Fund, a 501(c)3, charitable organization independent of the company that workers formed to provide financial support to those who need assistance. It was conceived after the company’s Fort Collins, Colorado community suffered catastrophic hardships from the High Park Fire in 2012 and the Larimer County Floods in 2013. Other donations from far-flung New Belgium employees went to assist the greater Asheville community. “So, that’s pretty incredible,” says Belongie.
To the Rescue—in a “Speedboat”
Lion Group (Kirin Holdings, Japan) is New Belgium’s parent company. The $500+ M brand portfolio, since merging brewery operations with Bell’s Brewery in 2022, includes many household names in craft beer, including the likes of Fat Tire Ale (the US’s first certified carbon-neutral beer); Voodoo Ranger IPA (one of the top in growth across the industry); and Juice Force (launched in 2022, “the biggest innovation by sales in craft beer history,” Belongie boasts).
The enterprise’s brands continue to outpace industry growth in part because of its leadership philosophy, which includes a willingness to act as front-line First Responders in crises such as the Covid 19 pandemic and natural disasters.
Says Belongie, “you have to be prepared as a leader to jump in and do whatever job is necessary. That might be way outside the scope [of your job description], but it’s necessary based on what that coworker community needs at that moment. So, I and several of the executive leadership team [from the Ft. Collins HQ] were on the ground in Asheville. And the job at that time was: ‘Hey, we need diapers and dog- and cat food. And we don’t have that here in the Asheville community. Can you bring that in from Charlotte?’
“And that was the job. So, that was not necessarily what I was thinking I would be spending my time doing … But I think it does call on you as a leader to think more broadly about what you need to do for your coworker community.”
“How can we change the way business is done?”
Belongie, formerly CMO, joined New Belgium in 2018. He’s been CEO since 2023. He spent many years working at and with Fortune 500 companies, including Nestlé & VF, both notable for their efforts toward greater sustainability: Why did he choose New Belgium?
In part, it was the company’s transparent “open-book management” policy. In part, its quest to source all its energy from renewable sources.
But mainly, it was because New Belgium “was a company that was really trying to push the boundaries of what a business could be. The idea of, How can we change the way business is done? That was really attractive to me.
“I don’t ever like to kind of put down a big company like Nestlé, or Kraft Foods where I worked, because those companies, to the extent that they are able to move, can have a huge impact, just given their scale. The challenge is … that they move very slowly. They’re like oil tankers.”
“And I saw New Belgium, to extend this metaphor, as a speedboat; it could move fast.”
And fast, it moved, when the historic combination of heavy rain, life-threatening flooding, and catastrophic landslides along the mountains threatened the Asheville campus and killed about 200 across six states, becoming one of the deadliest hurricanes to strike the US mainland in the last 50 years.
At moments like that, you’re reminded of what’s really important, says Belongie. “It really starts through the lens of profit-at-all-costs being the wrong mentality. Thinking about other stakeholders is where it starts. The model was built out over time and in fact, from the beginning, when Kim [Jordan] and Jeff Lebesch, the two co-founders, went to Rocky Mountain National Park before they had ever brewed a bottle of beer, and said, ‘What are the kind of foundations we want to put in place, what we will end up calling the principles of the company?’
“We’re driven by people and their motivation to build the company and grow together. We do right by people in the sense that we really think about how we can comprehensively take care of people, reward people who are contributing so much to our business, who are driving our business forward. It starts there, but then it really builds upon these interconnected principles,” Belongie argues.
“And those are the same [principles] we’re using today, thirty years later, which is pretty incredible.”
The story of the Asheville flooding response is only one angle on the Human-Powered Leadership mandate at New Belgium. The industry is primed for a massive transformation toward regenerative agriculture and circular economic strategies, says Belongie—and New Belgium aims to model that for the industry.
Meantime, let’s raise a glass to the Asheville community.