Introduction: Long-time World Brands Duty Free (now Pernod Ricard Global Travel Retail) and William Grant & Sons executive Stephen (Steve) Corrigan is partnering with wife Joanne to bring their idiosyncratically named New York business Havadrink Enterprises to travel retail.
The couple established the business during the depth of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020. Their mission was to create conviviality and a sense of normalcy in communities prohibited by pandemic regulations from gathering in local bars and restaurants.
Amid the darkness, Havadrink brought light to a dark time by delivering professionally crafted, beautifully packaged premium cocktails and safely delivering them house to house.
This year the couple have re-established Havadrink as a multi-discipline enterprise for travel retail, one built on decades of successful international beverage, hospitality industry and educational experience.
The company has partnered with the legendary Dale ‘King Cocktail’ DeGroff (see panel) and Oregon-based Hood River Distillers to bring the DeGroff portfolio of bitter spirits, amaro and aperitivo to travel retail.
The Corrigans are visiting TFWA World Exhibition in Cannes next week (27 September to 1 October) to talk to prospective trade partners.
“With this partnership, Havadrink is poised to shake things up in the exploding bitter spirits, amaro and botanical aperitif category,” the company comments.
“In 2026, the global beverage industry is witnessing a massive structural shift: the ‘modifier’ has become the star,” Steve Corrigan notes. “Driven by an overarching shift toward mindful consumption, sophisticated palates and lower-alcohol options, bitter spirits, amaro and botanical aperitifs have evolved from niche occasions into the primary drivers of global cocktail culture.”
Industry maturity varies regionally, but overall, the category is experiencing steady growth, Havadrink points out. The sector is projected to show a +5.2% CAGR between 2027 and 2035 to reach US$2.15 billion, reflecting increasing global adoption and product innovation.
Just before writer and interviewees departed for TFWA World Exhibition on the French Riviera, The Moodie Davitt Report Founder & Chairman Martin Moodie spoke to Steve and Joanne Corrigan about Havadrink’s mission to bring charismatic, consumer-focused leadership and creative thinking to travel retail brand representation, project management and staff education.
Martin Moodie: Steve, it’s good to see you back in travel retail, albeit in a very different guise – this time with your own company, Havadrink Enterprises, a husband and wife venture. The travel retail drinks sector is ultra-competitive. How would you describe your USP that will allow you to stand out from the crowd?
Steve Corrigan (SC): We’ve thought a lot about that. What are we, who are we? Havadrink brings two professionals – one, in me, with the experience that you and the travel retail trade are familiar with – plus 20 years of experience in the on-premise: hospitality, bars and restaurants.
The latter is key, I believe. How do you bring that hospitality experience to the travelling consumer as they go on holiday? They sit in a beautiful bar or restaurant and they meet the bartender, who introduces them to something interesting. Then they’re looking to bring a piece of that back home.
And if you were to do the Venn diagram of my professional experience, it’s sort of right there in the middle. That’s what I do every day here in Rhode Island at The Café, the restaurant we opened five years ago.
We’re going to be there again tonight and have people who, as they leave, stop me and go, “This was the most amazing experience. I can’t wait to get home and tell all my friends about it”.
We want to bring that feeling to travel retail.
You’re bringing the DeGroff portfolio of bitter spirits, amaro and aperitivo to travel retail. Where do you see your key market opportunities?
SC: First up, it’s the key US airports and cruise lines, which are going to be very important for us given the clear market trends. Land border stores too. Over time we hope to expand regionally and even further afield.
How are you and Joanne going to split your roles?
SC: Joanne’s definitely the brains and the beauty in this partnership, so we acknowledge I’m logistics and security and she’s everything else!
But seriously, Joanne’s background is neither travel retail nor bars and restaurants but all about an innovative educational career.
The two dovetail together, because Joanne brings decades of experience, of teaching people, and creating memorable information. These two worlds come together in Havadrink.
So we’re not simply about our brand portfolio. We can help support other brands in markets that may be far from home; for them Havadrink can serve as a project management company. I have decades of expertise in that kind of thing.
If a brand has just got a host of new listings and they need someone on the ground to do a roadshow at the airports or on the border and do staff trainings, that’s something Havadrink can bring.
OK, so let’s look at your nascent portfolio. Dale DeGroff is a big name in the cocktail, mixology and bar and restaurant world. How does he translate to travel retail?
SC: Firstly, there is no legend in the industry bigger than Dale DeGroff. He is almost single-handedly credited with reviving the entire craft cocktail movement in the USA.
So when you and I were younger, Martin, and maybe were drinking a Bacardi & Coke or having a Smirnoff & tonic, Dale, through his work at the Rainbow Room in New York City, said, no, let’s go back to the pre-prohibition cocktail recipes – the real classic American cocktail books.
He started to meticulously recreate them but with fresh ingredients and interesting modifiers – bitters and different things. And it’s only a slight exaggeration to say that across all cocktail bars, all roads lead back to Dale in some way, shape or form. He’s a regular at my bar and he and I became friends.
We built this little grassroots thing called Cocktail Hour at The Café with Dale DeGroff. And we bring in outside talent, James Beard Award winners etc. He’s a great friend, great partner and of course a legendary, charismatic bartender.
Several years ago, he started the DeGroff spirits line with products – a New World Amaro and a Bitter Aperitivo. Obviously, we already work with those behind the bar {main story continues following the panel below}.
‘King Cocktail’ comes to travel retail Dale DeGroff, popularly known as King Cocktail, is a renowned American bartender and author. In 2015, the New York Times called DeGroff “one of the world’s foremost cocktail experts” and described his book The Craft of the Cocktail as an essential bartending reference. DeGroff rose to prominence as the original Chief Bartender in the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center in New York City. There, his then-unusual emphasis on classic cocktail recipes and high-quality ingredients led to substantial acclaim and emulation by countless bars in New York City and beyond, both at home and abroad. His work had a seminal influence in the creation and subsequent surging popularity of the craft cocktail movement. DeGroff is the founding President of the Museum of the American Cocktail in New Orleans, founded in 2005. The James Beard Foundation awarded him the 2009 Wine & Spirits Professional Award, and in 2015 he was inducted into the Who’s Who in Food & Beverage. DeGroff received the 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award from Nightclub & Bar Magazine; the 2008 Tales of the Cocktail Lifetime Achievement Award; and the 2007 Cheers Beverage Industry Innovator of the Year. He is the author of two best-selling cocktail books: The Essential Cocktail, winner of the 2009 Tales of the Cocktail Spirit Award for Best New Cocktail/Bartending Book, and The Craft of the Cocktail, which received the 2003 IACP Julia Child Award in the First Book category. In 2023, DeGroff today released his second collaboration with renowned absinthe distiller T.A. ‘Ted’ Breaux – DeGroff Bitter Aperitivo and DeGroff New World Amaro. The two products are hand-crafted only from natural ingredients at Clear Creek Distillery, a subsidiary of Oregon-based Hood River Distillers. Now, in association with Havadrink, they are poised to enter the world of duty free. |
And what spurred the move into travel retail with his products?
SC: Honestly, it was a 3 o’clock moment in the morning as Joanne and I were looking out towards the future. What are we going to do, we asked.
And I was thinking, these products are exceptionally and beautifully packaged. It’s duty-free packaging. It pops! The bottles have big high shoulders, beautiful crystal-kind thick bottoms, plus great labels and branding.
I thought of the stories that we could tell. Imagine you bring Dale DeGroff on a roadshow. He will just have you eating out of the palm of his hand. He is a real, classic bartender and raconteur.
Then there’s the accelerating trend behind bitter spirits and mixology. So I had the conversation with Dale and he put me in touch with his partners, Hood River Distillers out in Oregon.
So we’ve signed an agreement with them for duty free. Typically of many US companies, they have done all of their work in domestic markets.
Duty free is a specialist trade channel and that’s where Havadrink comes in.
Will you be taking on other products?
SC: Yes. We have a very interesting line that we are working on. Watch this space.
Again, it’s about being niche, premium and beautifully packaged. It has a cool backstory and taps into cocktail culture and mixology.
In my view, niche is a good position to be. It takes you away from the pack.
SC: Yes. The Hood River Distillers President was asking me about duty free. And I said that for most Americans there’s one of two reasons to purchase in duty free.
One: big consumer brands at a good price or on promotion. So you’re going to get your Johnnie Walker, you’re going to get your Chivas Regal, because it’s going to be the right price. You buy two, you get one free, you bring a gift to your friend, right? Or your boss.
The other side is what we’re talking about, this niche experiential consumer who’s looking for that point of difference.
And how are you going to promote the brand in duty free – to retailers and to consumers?
SC: Mainly, it’s going to be about staff trainings. It’s going to be about being in-store. It’s going to be working harder and smarter than everyone else. And Dale.
I mean if we bring Dale DeGroff on a roadshow and, say, have him at the IAADFS show in March [7-10, West Palm Beach, Florida]. I mean, literally everyone would be at that bar. He’s just got that X factor.
So let’s sum all this up. You’ve got personal credibility in the channel plus the nice angle of your hospitality experience. You’ve got the educational piece with Joanne. You’ve got a really good association with a high-profile individual in Dale DeGroff. And you’ve got the solidity of a high-class distillery behind you. That’s ticking lots of boxes, Steve.
SC: I hope so. And that’s a good segue to some of the creative energy Joanne has created in in her world. She created Mothers for Others after 9/11 and some really intergenerational programmes.
She rolled her sleeves up and found a way to shift paradigms and bring newness into the fields of education. And that is great as we have wonderful stories to tell. I see the opportunity to create something really cool that kind of intertwines travel retail and on-premise. The link might be Dale DeGroff. We have miles to go before we get there. But it’s something kind of fun to shoot for.
I remember when you and I, Martin, did a promotion for Chivas Regal 25 Year Old. The gala dinner was held in the New York Public Library. They had bagpipers and Diana Krall [Canadian jazz artist] played.
Then we went to JFK with DFS for the store launch and then you and Alexander Ricard [then Pernod Ricard Asia Managing Director, now Chairman & CEO] flew a bottle of Chivas Regal 25 Year Old from JFK to Singapore.
Yes, it was the longest flight in the world at the time, although we touched down briefly in Frankfurt. And remember, the bottle had its own seat in business class? And there was I at both ends of the journey telling the story.
SC: That’s the kind of energy and fun we want to bring to travel retail, perhaps a connection with some of these high-end on-premise locations.
‘I like to reinvent the wheel’ – Joanne Corrigan Havadrink is very much a husband and wife double act, with Joanna complementing the drinks and duty-free experience of husband Steve with her innate human connection ability. Here she describes the remarkable life journey that led her to the Havadrink debut in travel retail. Joanne, let’s talk about some of remarkable work you have done in the pas. Can we start with Mothers for Others, which Steve mentioned earlier? Mothers for Others was something I did after September 11 when we were living in the suburbs of New York City. I had a moment when I was reading the newspaper about all the people who had passed. They were obituaries yet were often about people who were still considered ‘missing’. Our newspaper had this whole centrefold of people, and it was full of details about he or she leaving behind a wife/husband and a baby or a pregnant wife and so on. I wanted to just go knock on someone’s door and say, “How can I help you?” So, I literally just sat on my bed and started thinking, “How can I do this?”. I called Red Cross and other people, who started to help me define what I wanted to do, which was to create a respite programme for widows and widowers of young children. I was finally led in the right direction and got with a family services programme in my local county. They helped me develop the programme, and then I found all the volunteers, screened them, and trained them on how to be in the home with somebody who’s gone through this. Then I matched people with widows and widowers. They were volunteers and it was like a big brothers, big sisters kind of a thing where they got matched with a family. Then the volunteers would go, once a week or whatever, and just cook a meal, watch the kids, whatever made the person feel comfortable. With their volunteer in the house, those who were bereaved could just go upstairs and cry in their bedroom or leave the house, whatever they wanted to do as long as they were comfortable with their volunteer. And we did that for a number of families in the county pretty much up until the Red Cross came through with payouts for these families because so many people had donated to help them. Another thing I’m very proud of is that having been a pre-school and elementary school teacher for years, when I had my own kids, I knew if I was going to be a stay-at-home mom, I would need activities. So I found a nursing home right near our home. And I started going there once a week with our first child and then while I was pregnant with our second and then later with both of them. Then I started to bring my friends in. Years later, I returned to the site, to discover it now also housed a nursery school. I started working there, first in pre-school but later, once it started up, an elementary school. We used to call the elder folks in the nursery home our Grams – like our grand friends. We shared the building. So it was in this shared space that I created a pre-school through sixth grade curriculum. Then we started to showcase what we were learning to our Grams and sharing all the beautiful benefits of this shared company [between students and the elderly]. And that ran right until COVID, which crashed my programme pretty hard. At one point I spoke at an intergenerational conference in Oregon where I struck up a connection with a representative from the University of Sevilla, Spain. As a result, my programme was transitioned into an entire programme there. I remember teaching elders about older adults throughout time who have done wonderful things, like the way that Henri Matisse changed his way of creating art when he became bed-ridden. And teaching the kids about older adults and learning how to appreciate and respect and enjoy everything about them. I saw the light and energy the kids brought to those old folks. Older adults in care homes lack responsibility for anything. They lack company, they lack a lot of things that would make them feel important and valuable. So when the kids are around, they get a lot of that. Many people in America live more than 200 miles apart from their grandkids. And so a lot of people don’t have that youth infused in their lives. This was like a situation which replicated that, even though they’re not actually family. It’s healthy for the older adults and helpful for the younger kids and they all seem to really enjoy it. Those are fantastically human stories. How are you bringing those soft skills you clearly possess as well as the professional ones to travel retail? JC: I like to reinvent the wheel. I hope with Havadrink I can contribute with my innovative approach when we’re talking about our products and are talking to teams. I want to find ways to connect to people, to see a need that I can fill. One that really resonates like I have in the past. I don’t know what that is yet; I have to see the hole before I can fill it. |
