With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1313659
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2020 BCBUSINESS 35 BCBUSINESS.CA Most times, when a company hits it big with a product, it becomes a household name. Do that twice, and full-blown ubiquity is almost guaranteed. So it's surprising more BCers don't know that the creator of arguably the two biggest fla- voured alcoholic beverages in history is based in Vancouver. Our story begins in 1981, when a 31-year-old wine rep named Anthony von Mandl bought a majority stake in a Kelowna vineyard. That property would become the storied Mission Hill Family Estate winery as von Mandl's business rose to global promi- nence, winning best Char- donnay at the International Wine and Spirit Competition in 1994 and best Pinot Noir under £15 at the 2013 Decanter World Wine Awards, among other honours. Last year, the World's Best Vineyards Acad- emy named Mission Hill to its annual top 50. "Anthony and Mission Hill have been to the B.C. wine industry what NASA is to space," says Bert Hick, founder and president of Vancouver-based liquor and cannabis licensing firm Rising Tide Consultants. "For me, he's really put our domestic wine industry on the map." Thanks to a lucrative side hustle, von Mandl hasn't exactly been short of cash to grow his wine empire. His Mark Anthony Group also launched what he's called the world's first spirit cooler in 1996. That was vodka-based Mike's Hard Lemonade, which more or less took the world by storm when it debuted in the U.S. three years later. Labatt Brewing Co. bought the Canadian rights to Mike's Hard in 2015 for a reported US$350 million; Mark Anthony still holds the American rights. He's very innovative," notes Hick of von Mandl. "Always seems to be at the leading end of trends." Improbably, Mark Anthony pulled it off again in 2016 with the U.S. release of White Claw, an alcoholic seltzer water beverage that quickly caught on with younger consumers. A noncompete clause meant that von Mandl couldn't distribute the drink in Canada right away, but it made an immedi- ate splash here, too, launching this year to around-the-block lineups and becoming the No. 1 hard seltzer brand in the country. A recent Bloomberg report states that Mark Anthony, which declined an interview request, stands to post about US$4 billion in revenue for 2020. –N.C. F O O D + D R I N K Cl aw ing It s Way Talk about hitting the sweet spot. Creatus Biosciences has genetically engineered a new species of micro-organism to produce compounds from xylose sugars, with applications ranging from biofuels to food additives. Former BCBusiness 30 Under 30 winner Dara Djafarian, president of the Vancouver- based company, oversaw a US$1.5-million funding round early this year. In June, global publication Biofuels Digest highlighted seven-employee Creatus as a "major league prospect" in the industry. –N.C. B I O T E C H N O L O G Y Sug ar, Sug ar As education of every kind goes virtual in the wake of COVID-19, Thinkific has been putting on a master class. The Vancouver company, co-founded by CEO Greg Smith in 2012, lets entrepreneurs and businesses create and sell online courses. Unlike other such learning outfits, which profit by handling course development and distribution, it gives users control of their work, like e-commerce platform Shopify does with merchants. More than 50,000 clients now use Thinkific's subscription-based service; their courses have reached 25 million people in 190 countries. Business only accelerated as the pandemic took hold, with a 200- percent increase in course creation from March through September. By early 2022, Thinkific plans to triple its team to 500. The company, which recently announced $22 million in funding from Vancouver-based Rhino Ventures, an early investor, is posting year-over-year revenue growth of roughly 150 percent. Thinkific projects that, by 2025, its course creators will expand their total haul from today's $650 million to $1.5 billion. –N.R. E D U C A T I O N Right on C ourse Creatus Biosciences president Dara Djafarian