| We hope you and your team are all safe and as well as can be. Thank you for your continued support.
When team Kegstar planned and practised remote working on the 9th March we never envisaged the nature of what was to come. The soft and hard impact on our hospitality and brewing industry has been both frightening and enlightening. The speed at which so many operators have adapted to contactless take-outs, dial and delivers, click and collects, buy now drink and eat later vouchers has been inspirational. All of which with rigorous new health and safety measures, social distancing, often less staff and still a smile.
The collaboration campaigns of SIBA & CAMRA #pullingtogether, hospitality staying strong for our industry with #unitedwestand, the independent and locally focused #beerinittogether, #savepublife from the might of AB Inbev’s Budweiser Brewing Group, Brewgooder’s #oneonus pay it forward NHS support and the overarching #strongertogether movement which is also a key theme of the hospitality industry in our new Netherlands business, are awesome and will only help us all get through this somehow and with a new resilience.
Like many of you we started this only 4 years ago worrying about if we’d ever get this off the ground. Here we are again almost forced to reset the dial but for totally different reasons. We’ve set our own focus through this to make sure we don’t write off any situations and we reach out more than ever. In the last +2 weeks, our tight team of 15 have contacted our regular trading customers, venues, partners and suppliers with the primary focus of supporting and listening given none of us have a playbook for this and the world keeps changing fast by the day. Thank you for your kind words, support and feedback.
We are working very hard to ensure that our customer experience is as normal as it can be and keeps improving through this, whilst also taking every opportunity to create the safest environment for everyone we work with. We’ll keep evolving with the situation but right now, here’s a summary of the kinds of stuff we’re up to.
Billing & Paying: We’ll always look to help to ease the burden on your business in the fairest way possible for us both, so that we get through these tough times together and come back stronger than ever. In short, we’ve relaxed the order cancellation process and fees, created a process to collect or protect empty unwanted kegs and casks, created temporary measures to help spread the cost of Rental Fees and extended the Slow Fee period by +30 days to 120 days, all of which we will continually review.
Cleaning, Delivery & Collection: We took early measures with our supplier partners to prepare to wind down our physical operations, trying to find a balance while meeting your keg and cask needs. With last Friday night’s news, we accelerated “tucking in” all our operations for “hibernation” to protect all our teams and assets as best as possible and ensure we are ready to get started quickly for you. Our partners are running our operation facilities with the same ethos on a skeleton staff so we can react where and if needed. We have tried to keep our network of collection specialist and telephone “keg wranglers’ working and safe for as long as possible but we have now “tucked in” both these services too across the UK, Ireland and The Netherlands. Every keg or cask not currently in a secure cellar, bar, pub, taproom or yard represents huge risk for us all and we’d welcome your support to help encourage our industry to look after everyone’s full or empty kegs and casks anyway possible. In extreme cases, we will collect kegs and casks through the safest means possible.
Scanning & Doing Two Lots of Good: We teamed up in 2019 with “The Benevolent: The Drinks Industry Charity”, now known as “The Drinks Trust” www.drinkstrust.org.uk so that every scan for collection contributes £0.01 to charity. In 4 years, we’ve had more than 7.5m scans, so it should soon rack up. There will be many of us who may need this kind of help so please help encourage looking after our full or empty kegs and casks by scanning them for collection or delivery and raising money for our industry colleagues in their times of need. At least by knowing where they are we stand a chance of getting them back when this blows over.
Contact Us: Please stay close and please #dontwriteoffreachout (our adopted ethos to get through each day). We’re available as always on 0800 5345000, renteurope@kegstar.com, Instagram and Twitter (just click below) with our new website www.kegstar.com going live in the coming days with a regular blog and further updates.
The situation we’re in is unprecedented and exceedingly tough. We’ll stay optimistic to see the innovation across the drinks and hospitality industry along with the brand building in can, bottle, crowler and growler that’ll happen. In the meantime, we’ll get ready to help get more of your great beverages and brands get to more happy draft drinkers.
Thank you for your continued support. Please stay safe and well.
Christian & The Kegstar Team
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