GROW
Collaborative Effort Marlborough Cooperative celebrates a decade of growing
Ben McLauchlan. Photo Jim Tannock
TONY SKINNER
AS IT approaches its 10th anniversary, Marlborough’s cooperative of grape growers is confident it’s well positioned to grow its model in the decades to come. The Marlborough Grape Growers Cooperative (MGGC) produces wines for overseas clients, regarding itself as a B2B company rather than being overtly consumer-facing. Chief Executive Mike Brown says the collective, which was incorporated in October 2012, offered a beneficial option for growers wanting to own their own wine company. “This is a very different structure. A co-op has elements of both a family company and a corporation. But the one thing is the growers own it, and that’s our defining difference our growers own the wine company.” The MGGC is travelling a well-trodden road, in New Zealand at least, with more than 18% of the country’s GDP
generated in co-op structures. By contrast, a little over 1% of Australia’s GDP is generated through co-ops. “It’s a structure that suits Kiwis really well, for a couple of reasons. There is that history of collaboration within New Zealand. But also, given our size, the need to scale,” Mike explains. “Any decent-sized wine region around the world probably has a co-op structure of some kind. So if you look through the French regions, they’ve all got co-ops. I think we’ve probably got a lot to learn from some of those co-ops as well, because they’ve been doing it in some cases for 100 years.” For growers, one significant difference between belonging to MGGC and being a contract grape grower is that profits from trading are returned to the co-op members. MGGC Chair Ben McLauchlan, who is also a grower for the
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18 / Winepress June 2022
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