Going soft on a whisky windfall

TARA Macdonald may be worth a fortune but she is not a woman who flashes her cash.

As the youngest daughter of David Macdonald, the former chairman of Glenmorangie whisky, she's from one of the richest families in Scotland, though she betrays no conspicuous signs of wealth.

Dressed in a simple green top, baseball pumps and jeans, and glowing with pregnancy, she is camouflaged among the Edinburgh mothers playing with their children in a coffee shop in Edinburgh's Stockbridge.

At 40, she is anticipating the birth of her third child, though today she has other matters on her mind. She wants to talk about her return to the drinks industry.

Macdonald and the rest of her family kept a low profile when in 2004 they ended their historic connection to Glenmorangie and sold it to French firm Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy. The £300m deal netted the family £105m. The family retreated, saying the bare minimum about the transaction, but Macdonald has decided to break her silence in order to promote her return to business though her own soft drinks company, Suso.

The venture into carbonated fruit juices represents a break from the safety blanket of the family, but the link to the past is never far from the conversation. "I feel such a major part of the history (of Glenmorangie]. Obviously the brand had been in my family for many years, so it was part of our everyday life," she says.

It's hardly surprising that the Glenmorangie name keeps cropping up. The whisky brand had been in the Macdonald family for over a century after it was founded by Roderick Macdonald and Alexander Muir in 1893.

Tara, the youngest of David Macdonald's four daughters, worked in the company for 11 years, beginning as a European sales manager, before managing the supply chain at Glenmorangie's bottling and warehousing plant in Broxburn, West Lothian. She later became head of customer services, sitting on the general management board, before managing the Fallen Company, a spin-off luxury vodka brand that was swiftly dropped after the sale to Moët Hennessy.

"When I left Glenmorangie Moët Hennessy didn't take Fallen forward because they had their own vodka, Belvedere. They wanted to look at Glenmorangie as a whisky house rather than expanding out into other product categories," she explains.

The buy-out of Glenmorangie generated huge interest at the time, not least because of the silence maintained by the Macdonald family, whose 15 members collectively pocketed 35% of the selling price. David Macdonald, who retired as chairman in 1995, was understood to have held close to a million shares which sold at £17.17 a share. Tara's elder sister Alison was company secretary at the time of the takeover.

However, questions have lingered in drinks analysts' minds as to whether Moët Hennessy overpaid. Sources close to the luxury French brand's main rival in the bidding process, Pernod Ricard, said afterwards that £300m was not justified by the company's performance.

Macdonald concedes that competition may have played a part in pushing up the price, but stresses that it was fair. "I wasn't surprised at the number of people who wanted to purchase the brand and I guess the competition for that increased the price," she says. "It was just a general supply and demand kind of thing. It was a good price and I think that Moët Hennessy really believed that they could put more premium into Glenmorangie to realise the margins that would realise that price for them. Their ambition for the brand is huge, so from that point of view the company will benefit from the investment that it's going to get, and thrive."

Watching now from the sidelines, Macdonald is impressed with what Moët Hennessy has achieved so far.

"I saw some people from Glenmorangie at a party recently and yes there have been changes, but I think what Moët Hennessy are doing with the brand in order to take it to other markets around the world, Asian markets especially, is good. There's a lot of demand there, it's good for Scotland."

She describes the sale as "very emotional" but hints that the family had little choice other than to sell up. With her father having retired and inheritance laws making it increasingly difficult to keep the shares in the family, it was time for the Macdonalds of Tain to part with the brand.

But they weren't going to exit without ensuring that their employees' futures were secure. She says one of the key reasons why Moët Hennessy was chosen was because it guaranteed to maintain Glenmorangie's 250-strong workforce in Scotland, and keep its bottling plant at Broxburn open. That security, she argues, has helped the family to move on emotionally from the firm which had been in their blood for generations.

"I know it's in good hands. I know Moët Hennessy is a fantastic brand. Because of that, because we know the people at Glenmorangie are still employed because Moët Hennessy were able to maintain much of the employment – one of the key things of selling the company to them – we know it's alive, it's breathing, it's there, it's not dead."

She is excited by the prospects for her new venture and will do well to replicate the success of the team behind Innocent, whose fruit juice she is drinking as we talk. Launching a drinks brand at the fickle youth market is a big risk, but this is her chance to do something for herself, without the support of her family or big business.

"I always wanted to do something on my own that I actually created and developed," she says.

Macdonald founded Suso along with former Red Bull managing director Harry Drnec, whom she met while working for Fallen Vodka during her final year at Glenmorangie. After securing £4m of backing from private equity firm Smedvig Capital last year, the company has managed to build up a management team that reads like a who's who of the soft drinks industry.

Alongside Drnec, who is chairman of the company, Suso has recruited Andrew King, former chief executive of PJ Smoothies, and Coke's Sean Uprichard, to the executive team. With her third child due in September, Macdonald will act as a non-executive director and work on special projects.

Although the rest of her family are not involved this time, she says they are keeping a close eye on Suso's development. "My dad is very interested and is probably just quite proud that we're creating something new and different."