Equity stake in Liquid takes Paramount to a whole new level

After more than a decade of closely working together, two of Australia’s largest family-owned liquor wholesalers have entered into a joint venture to become the largest independently owned liquor wholesaler in Australia, collectively servicing more than 9,000 on-premise customers along the eastern seaboard.

The Rowe family's Paramount Liquor (Paramount) has taken an equity stake in Queensland-based liquor wholesaler Liquid Specialty Beverages (Liquid) owned by the Harch & Terlich families. The families say that the partnership was a natural fit given their strong family legacies.

Darren Terlich, Director of Liquid said, “Our family values and customer-service driven business models have always been aligned. When the opportunity arose to join forces with Paramount Liquor, we felt that it was the perfect time to make the move.”

Paramount operates in Victoria, South Australia, New South Wales & the Australian Capital Territory while Liquid services the Northern Rivers of New South Wales all the way north to Port Douglas in far north Queensland, through its two warehousing facilities.

Director of Paramount, Nathan Rowe, said the partnership is focused on delivering exceptional results to customers.

“We’ve both always been confident in our ability to deliver a best in class on-premise wholesale solution in our respective markets,” Rowe said, “However, with the evolution of the Paramount Liquor business over the past 24 months and the expansion of our offering into retail, we see this new venture together with Liquid as taking our customer-centric service offering to the next level.”

With close to 90 per cent of the nation’s population living within the new Paramount & Liquid network, their position in the Australian liquor market is set to strengthen.

Integration will commence in early 2022 in a partnership that operators say will see Paramount sit as the umbrella brand. Suppliers and customers are expected to benefit from a single, on-premise focused solution, including the unified ordering portal that was launched by Paramount earlier this year.

Supplier partners’ brands will be marketed and distributed nationally across five distribution centres, totalling more than 50,000sqm, and career opportunities are expected to expand for the group’s more than 400 existing staff members.