Building a Winning Private Label Partnership: Donovan’s Country Cream for Morrisons
At Fortitude Spirits Group, home of ICB Distillers, we pride ourselves on being one of the UK’s leading partners in private label spirit and liqueur development. Our spirits manufacturing business is trusted by major retailers to deliver quality, innovation, and speed to market.
A standout example of this is our partnership with Morrisons to create Donovan’s Country Cream Liqueur, an exclusive range that has become a true customer favourite.
How we built an exclusive brand for Morrisons
Seeing the global trend for Dubai-Chocolate, Fortitude Drinks pitched the idea of an exclusive Dubai-Chocolate flavour country cream liqueur, under an exclusive brand called Donovan’s. With the growing popularity for cream liqueurs in 2025, it was clear that this had huge potential to expand beyond Dubai Chocolate into exciting and quirky new flavours.
From concept to shelf, we worked closely with the Morrisons buying team to develop a distinctive brand that captures the warmth and indulgence of traditional Irish-style cream liqueurs, with a modern twist.
Our in-house experts led every stage of development, from liquid creation and flavour innovation to packaging design and brand execution, ensuring every detail reflected Morrisons’ quality and value credentials.
In the end, we launched with three unique variants: Donovan’s Dubai Chocolate Style, Strawberries & Cream, and Original Country Cream. The incredible success of the Dubai chocolate cream liqueur and the attractiveness of an exclusive brand convinced Morrisons to expand the range into new seasonal SKU’s.
Building a brand
The new production team at ICB Distillers were extremely excited by the challenge to come up with new, innovative flavour SKU’s. We presented a range of options for future releases, together with eye-catching designs. We used a limited-edition product drop methodology to drive hype and limited availability, designed to excite shoppers and drive incremental sales.
The Donovan’s Pumpkin Spice Latte Limited Edition made a show-stopping debut on Morrisons’ Halloween Drinks Gondola End Display, delivering exceptional engagement in-store.
This was followed by two festive favourites including Black Forest Gateau and Speculoos Caramelised Biscuit, rounding off a successful year of NPD innovation.
Success through partnership
This collaboration highlights how our category expertise and proactive approach enables us to anticipate trends and deliver products that resonate with customers. Thanks to our i-house liquid development and product development expertise we were able to rapidly bring new products to market, and together with Morrisons, we’ve built a brand that brings excitement to the cream liqueur category and demonstrates the power of true partnership.
