Putting Our Fresh Beer Community First

We're constantly impressed by the passion of our beer community, people just like you! We promised that we were going to be as transparent with you as we could, so to that end we’ve talked to our Product Development team to see what’s been on their busy schedules over the past few weeks, and how they’ve been keeping customers front of mind in their own words.

Our Product Development team is constantly planning and executing developments for our incredible products. From the inside workings of the Pinter all the way to the packaging, they constantly innovate Fresh Brewing technology, bringing new ideas and products that have never been seen before, anywhere! Going from a team of two all the way to a full award-winning team filled to the brim with astounding expertise.

Not the standard month…

Once the reports of the rare Pinter 2 failures came to the team, they jumped straight into action. Our Head of Pinter Development, Jed said “It was unexpected, so immediately we had to restructure our team and priorities to allow us to divert resources to get to the bottom of what had happened and to deliver a solution as quickly as possible for our customers”. Whilst the team had been working on new (top secret) developments for the future of the Pinter, they knew right there and then that getting customers to make amazing Fresh Beer again was the priority.

Speaking of his own experience Ronan, our Head of Technical Project Management had a big job on his hands, “My biggest focus was to create a clear plan for our teams to work through - to design solutions and then validation of the solution. This plan could only work from enormous efforts across our PD, Operations, Quality, testing teams... and so many more.”

Putting plans into action

The plans were set up and then it was about quickly getting to the bottom of the issue so that we could keep our community in the loop. Jed said “Due to the incredibly low frequency of the failure, we needed to approach the situation from all possible engineering angles. We drafted in multiple external experts to help diagnose specific potential root causes and review the safety of the Pinter as a whole”.

Over the next few days and weeks the Product Development team kept pushing to find the cause and solution to the fault we were facing, Ronan mentioned the importance of a new team; “Whilst the rest of the business continued to make plans, our team continued to test, hypothesise and gather evidence. We relied heavily on the involvement of the new Recycle & Repair team, who carried out a multitude of investigatory tests.”

Jed then talked us through how the team thoroughly tested and validated the solution. “We narrowed our potential root causes down to two very quickly and with pretty high confidence that these were the only two contributing factors; the hard part was validating the proposed changes. Alongside our partners, using state-of-the-art computer simulations, we got stuck into hands-on validation, we ran accelerated life testing with incremental changes on the Pinter until we were satisfied that we had done everything to ensure the Pinter fault had been eliminated. Once the computer analysis results were back and confirmed our real-life testing we initiated all process and physical changes to the Pinter.  A thorough validation plan was built to test the final state of the Pinter before signing off the solution which we’re very happy to say happened.”

A bright future for Product Development at Pinter

Whilst a challenging time for the team itself, with late nights and early mornings to make sure we provided the right solution as quickly as possible for our community, it has also given the team a chance to reflect and get even more excited about the future of the Product Development’s team at Pinter. Jed, who has been here since the beginning of Pinter told us “The quality of innovations that are bounced around the group on a daily basis is leagues above what we were achieving when the company was much younger”. Dom, an Industrial Designer on the PD team, said “People often forget that Pinter didn't exist 18 months ago. Now I am part of a 12-strong, diverse PD team with great skills and expertise across a broad range of sectors. As a keen Pinter user myself, it's super exciting to be a part of a design-led and community-driven company and directly influence the future of Pinter.”

But it wasn’t just the Product Development team…

The whole of Pinter has banded together over the past few weeks to make sure that we could put our community first during a challenging time. Here’s a small snapshot of what each team’s focus was since that first announcement in April.

• Customer Care team: Committed to answering your queries and delivering the best possible customer service
• Brewing team: Starting quality trials and making sure that beers were still as tasty on reduced carbonation settings
• Marketing team: The team committed to updating the Community as soon as they were able to
• People team: Consistently supporting our staff, so they can better support you 

We hope this gives you an insight into the importance we place on putting our customers first, even when things don't go as planned. We will continue to innovate and make sure you have the best experience possible with the best Fresh Beer and we can’t wait for you to see what the future holds.