About us

Brew Seeker in a nutshell

Brew Seeker is an independent, privately owned import company in Finland, focusing on brewery products. We are part of Momentin Group, a 30-year old group of companies with beverage import companies in Finland and in the Baltic countries, a restaurant chain in Finland, alcohol retail chain in the Baltics and a small craft brewery in Finland as well. Momentin Group has been the frontrunner for beer culture in general and beer imports in particular, in all the four countries.

Brew Seeker has been operating now for over ten years. We are an independently operating import company doing business solely in Finland. We are a flexible, trustworthy company, keeping good communication going and keeping our promises as well. We are committed to brand building and working long term with our partners, still keeping the flexibility to be able to act fast and strong when needed.

Next a bit more about our company and how we came about.

The start

In the spring of 2011, together with Mr. Teemu Lehto, we returned around a business idea we had been entertaining already a few years back. From the beer connoisseur perspective, the market situation in Finland was a bit bleak and there really were very few interesting novelties around. The distributors (and breweries) at the time were the same as already years before and we felt there was just enough space on the market for a small, dynamic distributor focused on specialities. We shook hands and already in the autumn Brew Seeker was up – if not yet running.

Creating the portfolio

I started to put our portfolio together in August 2011. The fist trip I took to London, headed towards the Great British Beer Festival. During this trip an old friend (Thank You!) got me introduced with e.g. Thornbridge and I also got to know an export company representing multiple breweries. Practically the initial British portfolio at Brew Seeker got sorted out during this trip.

While in London I also bumped into our soon to be product manager Lauri – in the middle of London, in a pub, naturally. We knew each other well already but had no idea that we’ll be working together in the future. His “joyful” greeting echoes still in my mind…

At the Horeca Expo in Gent I managed to sign up a couple more partners and the portfolio started to be broad enough to start with. The first consignments arrived around Christmas time 2011. The feeling was great when the very first order left towards a customer just before the year turned to an end.

 

Muddling through the first baby steps

One can often hear people say that the start is always difficult. This really was true with the first few months of Brew Seeker. I used to work just by myself, with a compact portfolio, in order to get the business off the ground. Relatively quickly I got some precious help from our office team at our mother company. This enabled me to get to my customers more. The first months were full of various difficulties from computer system errors to limited resources – the main issue was that there were too few hours in a day. The business kept on growing as did the number of customers. Soon enough I was in a situation where I desperately needed help.

Growth

The limit what a single person can do was met and hence Lauri joined the company in the spring of 2013. This enabled us to contact considerably more customers and consequently the sales kept on developing. Surprisingly soon we felt that we needed more resources and already at the end of 2014 Ninni joined us. Year 2015 we broke all our records and doubled our sales. We kept on going just the three of us and gained more sales year on year, but in the autumn of 2017 we were crying for help – yet again.

We hired our very first retail sales rep in October 2017 and started to focus more in developing our retail side. At the start of 2018 the alcohol legislation changed which opened the regular retail for larger number of our products, as the legal abv limit became higher. The investment in people has definitely paid off as Tarja and Aleksi are tirelessly and continuously growing the availability and sales of our products in retail across the country.

 

Portfolio widening – and going digital

The portfolio is growing larger all the time and from autumn 2018 onwards we’ve already had three people taking care of our products. Johannes started as product manager and took over many existing partners and sourced many new ones. With Johannes we also have been able to get our digitalisation on the way, we now have a great digital product information management platform, which in turn enables also the eSeeker on-line shop. This all would not have been possible without the invaluable help of Anne from our mother company Momentin Group.

New set of challenges

2020 the industry – the whole world – came across a totally new array of difficulties when the Covid-19 hit. The on-trade became heavily restricted and this resulted the sales and the general opportunities in HoReCa industry to wither. We were also hit badly and for the very first time we had to furlough our people. These trying times came – hopefully – to an end in March 2022, finally. The pandemic era enabled and forced us to focus on developing our retail business and we did exactly that. As the market is now recovering we are still as ready as ever to further develop our business and to evolve ourselves as well.

In the srping of 2022 our focus is in the future and we are committed to bring further interesting novelties for our market. There is always a good reason to have good beer!

Cheers!

Janne