About the Company
William Grant & Sons is one of the world's most admired independent spirits companies, founded in 1887 in Scotland. The company is home to some of the most iconic whisky and gin brands globally — including Glenfiddich, The Balvenie, Hendrick's Gin, and Sailor Jerry Rum.
With over 2,600 employees spread across distilleries, bottling facilities, and offices in Scotland, Ireland, the United States, India, and Mexico — spanning 48 locations across 6 continents — William Grant & Sons operates at the intersection of craft precision and global scale. In 2025, the company partnered with Vantage Fit to build a structured, inclusive wellness programme that would serve the full diversity of its workforce: from distillery floor workers to global office teams.
The Challenge
Wellness initiatives existed within the organisation, but lacked the structure, inclusivity, and data visibility to drive meaningful, sustained behavioural change across such a diverse global workforce.
- With over 2,600 employees across 48 locations and 6 continents, achieving consistent wellness engagement was logistically difficult and nearly impossible to measure at scale.
- Manufacturing wellness programmes often see skewed gender participation — William Grant & Sons needed a genuinely balanced approach that would resonate across its diverse workforce.
- Existing efforts produced no data on participation trends, habit formation, or long-term behavioural change across sites.
- Distillery and bottling workers have very different physical demands from office staff — one programme had to serve both workforce profiles equally well.
The company needed a platform that could unite production-floor workers and global office teams around a shared wellness experience, while delivering the data visibility HR leaders needed to demonstrate real impact.
The Approach
William Grant & Sons implemented Vantage Fit as its centralised wellness platform, running a multi-activity programme from March through October 2025 covering every dimension of employee health — physical activity, sleep, hydration, nutrition, mindfulness, and mental well-being.
1. Physical Activity for All Roles — Step challenges, run tracking, and squat sessions gave employees across distillery, bottling, and office roles a way to stay active and compete meaningfully, regardless of work environment.
2. Yoga & Mindfulness — Dedicated yoga tracking and mindfulness minutes encouraged recovery and mental balance — critical in high-craft, high-pressure environments where precision and focus matter.
3. Hydration & Nutrition — Water intake and nutrition logging supported employees in building consistent healthy daily habits beyond physical exercise alone.
4. Sleep Tracking — Sleep quality monitoring supported shift workers and global teams across time zones, surfacing organisational health patterns that would otherwise remain invisible to HR.
5. Data Visibility & Insights — Real-time HR dashboards gave leadership visibility into gender participation splits, activity trends, and wellness outcomes across all 48 locations.
The programme ran for 8 months with multi-activity challenges running simultaneously — ensuring that employees with different roles, schedules, and physical demands could all participate meaningfully.
Results
The programme delivered measurable, consistent wellness outcomes across every tracked dimension — and a standout result in gender inclusion that reflects the platform's genuinely multi-dimensional design.
- 49.3% women participating — near-equal to male participation at 45.1%, a rare result in beverage manufacturing wellness programmes.
- 4,000–5,000 average daily steps throughout the programme period, with a peak of 6,819 steps recorded.
- 18.81 km — the highest individual run distance logged during the programme.
- 393 squat reps — the highest recorded, reflecting steady strength engagement across the workforce.
- 375 minutes average yoga time per participant — strong mind-body adoption, particularly among office teams.
- 7 hours 51 minutes average sleep duration — above recommended baseline, consistently tracked org-wide.
- 3 litres average daily water intake per individual — well above WHO recommendations.
- 1,700 minutes total mindfulness minutes logged across the organisation.
"William Grant & Sons has always believed that our people are our greatest asset. Vantage Fit gave us the tools to invest in their wellbeing in a meaningful, measurable way — and the results speak for themselves. Seeing near-equal participation across genders tells us this programme resonated with everyone, not just a segment of our workforce."
— People & Wellness Lead, William Grant & Sons · Bellshill, Lanarkshire
