Pep Natta
Antoni Nadal Destil-leries was founded in 1898 and over its 125-year history it has witnessed the Cuban War of Independence, two World Wars, the Spanish Civil War, the Franco Dictatorship, the Cold War, the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Perestroika, the establishment of democracy in Spain and the creation of the EU. Not much then!
This firmly established company has produced the hugely famous and emblematic liquors Palo and Túnel for decades, but its portfolio includes over three hundred drinks. It produces and bottles all kinds of liquors, creams and spirits, including gin, vodka, rum, and whisky under the km1 brand. To be completely fair, they don’t actually distil their whisky themselves – they buy it directly from Scottish producers, which is why their bottles have the “Scotch Whisky” designation of origin.
Pep Natta
Tailor-made products: exclusivity at your fingertips
One of the Mallorcan company’s most innovative and ground-breaking projects is the recent launch of the “Tailor-made Product” business line, which lets clients design their own drink and even their own brand.
Pep Natta, distillery director and one of Antoni Nadal Destil-leries most long-established employees, with 32 years at the company, gives the following example: “Imagine a hotel comes to us, or a restaurant chain whose hallmark is lilies and rose petals, and they want us to develop a liquor with botanicals based on these two flowers. We make it for them, we bottle it, and we label it under their own brand so that, in the end, what you’ve got is an exclusive product, something that belongs to their company alone.”
Making liquors
The idea came, as great ideas often do, at the worst of times: “[...] in the middle of the pandemic, with hotels closed and consumption at rock bottom, we weren’t selling anything. Our salespeople did anything they could to sell,” recalls Natta, laughing, “and we came up with a fun way to sell, offering some pizza restaurants the opportunity to develop their own exclusive liquor and to label it with their brand. It was a huge success!” In the end, given the great results of this ‘pilot experience’, the company decided to establish it as a business line and today it’s one of its areas with the greatest annual growth.
Growth, innovation and sustainability
The fame of liquors Túnel and Palo, as typically Mallorcan as a good ensaimada, has to a certain degree eclipsed the actual name of the distillery that produces them. But they’ve enabled the business to expand to the point that they’re now sold in both Spain and abroad, and are exported to a large number of European and Latin American countries.
A large part of the brand’s success is inexorably linked to sustained investment over the years that has given the distillery first-class facilities that enable it to produce 80,000 litres of liquor per day and place an impressive 6.5 million bottles on the market each year.
Antoni Nadal Destil-leries is also committed to protecting the environment and takes enormous care over aspects that help to reduce its carbon footprint and make its business activity more sustainable. The company grows its own ecological botanicals in facilities that waste the minimum amount of water possible, and in recent years it has invested heavily in actions that work towards decarbonisation, from installing solar panel fields that reduce its dependence on fossil fuels, to building cisterns that collect rainwater and applying innovative distillation techniques that reduce the amount of water used to produce its liquors by 10%. So, despite being 125 years old, the company is in better shape than ever. And we hope it celebrates many more anniversaries to come!
