On July 10, Ron Schroeder, a fixture in the cruise industry and key member of the Marine Hotel Association, and the director of the travel retail and leisure team, MillerCoors, will retire.

Schroeder has also held a director position on the Marine Hotel Association’s Board of Directors for the last five and a half years.

Schroeder got his start with Miller Brewing Co., holding positions in both distributor sales and managed chain.

“Over nearly four decades, he has made an impact on every class of trade in the on-premise and established our ship chandler business,” said a statement from MillerCoors.

Schroeder received two President’s Awards from then-Miller President John Murphy early in his career in the 1970s. As the region manager for Miller Brewing’s Viking region, he took Miller from the No. 3 brewer in Minnesota to No. 1 – in 18 months. He led the cross-functional team that developed the transportation package that got Miller Brewing on 11 airlines (up from one) by bringing Miller Lite, Miller Genuine Draft and Foster’s packages.

In the mid-1990s he ran a chain account specialist team to increase sales with off-premise chains in Arizona, taking the business from double-digit declines to double-digit growth in three years. Ron was the catalyst on two occasions to get brand marketing involved to make Miller High Life the “Official Beer of Bowling.” 

“He showed incredible bias for action in almost single-handedly building our ship chandler business after the launch of MillerCoors.”