Major Brands Inc., St. Louis, sued Mast-Jägermeister and Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirit after Mast-Jägermeister replaced Major Brands as its Missouri distributor with SGWS.
Jägermeister terminated the contract because Southern Glazer’s offered it $10 million, then increased the amount to $25 million, said Richard Walsh Jr., an attorney who represented Major Brands. An attorney representing Jägermeister and Southern Glazer’s denied that, adding Jägermeister sales with Major Brands had been declining for 10 years, and Mast-Jägermeister wanted a national distributor.
“It is a very, very good thing for the good people at Major Brands,” said CEO Sue McCollum. “It’s very good for the Missouri franchise law and it’s very good for Missouri companies that play by the rules.”
CEO Sue McCollum told a federal court jury that “It affects Major Brands‘s reputation when we lose a brand and we are terminated, because the presumption is in a franchise state you’ve been terminated for good cause.”
The attorney for Jägermeister denied McCollum had been “surprised” by the termination, saying Major Brands filed a 70=paragraph, nine-count lawsuit within 34 minutes after Jägermeister’s CEO told McCollum of the termination. Sales of Jägermeister represented just 2% of Major Brands revenue from 2008 to 2017, he added.