After a well-received launch, Harpoon Brewery will stagger sales of its seasonal collaboration variety pack with Dunkin’ Donuts, due to a short supply of cans.
“Demand for this package has significantly exceeded expectations,” Dan Kenary, CEO of Harpoon’s parent company, Mass. Bay Brewing Company, told Brewbound.
The Dunkin’ partnership has been fruitful for Harpoon, with Dunkin’ Coffee Porter selling 140,000 case equivalents since the beer’s launch in 2018.
This year, Harpoon forecasted sales of 40,000 case equivalents of the Dunkin’ Dozen Mix Pack; each variety pack contains a 12-can mix of four beers brewed with Dunkin’ products: Dunkin’ Pumpkin, Dunkin’ Coffee Porter, Dunkin’ Boston Kreme Stout and Dunkin’ Jelly Donut IPA. However, the nationwide can shortage brought on by fundamental shifts in consumption due to the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the Boston-headquartered brewery’s plans and instead the company will pulse the market with the release.
“Instead of having it come out of the market sooner, we are spreading production over a longer period of time and potentially pushing some orders into November in order to find cans to support those orders,” Kenary said. “We are confident that by taking this approach we will have enough cans to support our entire production plan.
“We are trying hard to come up with workarounds the best we can,” he added.
Harpoon is hardly alone in finding cans tough to come by.
Ball, the world’s largest manufacturer of cans, has struggled to meet demand for cans as brewers around the world shifted their production from kegs to cans in order to sell in off-premise retailers. In an effort to meet demand, Ball made upgrades to two of its existing plants, and the company is building two new facilities. But the company expects “industry tightness at least through the first half of 2021,” Ball strategic communications director Scott McCarty told Brewbound.
“Given the continued unprecedented demand for Ball’s sustainable aluminum beverage packaging, we are working closely with our customers to help them forecast their needs,” McCarty said. “As these needs are currently being communicated, we anticipate tight supply conditions are possible throughout 2021. Our ongoing domestic capacity investments will favorably impact industry supply in the back half of 2021, and we look forward to providing more supply to our customers.”
Ball’s new production facility in Pittston, Pennsylvania, is expected to come online by mid-2021, which McCarty said should provide “incremental relief.” Together with another new plant in Glendale, Arizona, and improvements made to existing plants, Ball said it expects to increase production by 6 billion units by the end of 2021.
The increased output won’t be enough though to meet the growing demand. One Midwest brewer told Brewbound its Ball representative told them to expect the shortage to last until 2022.
“My sense is that this is affecting brewers across the board, and is growing with time,” Kenary said. “We‘d encourage the craft beer brewing community to help shift their consumers to purchase bottles where it makes sense to help out with this shortage.”
Mass. Bay Brewing Company — whose brands include Harpoon, UFO, Clown Shoes, City Roots Cider and Arctic Chill Hard Seltzer — didn’t feel much of a crunch at the outset of the pandemic, when many smaller breweries were feeling a tightening in their supply chains.
“We were experiencing some challenges, but we were able to work through them,” Kenary said. “Now, however, it has become more of an issue. October is going to be tough for us as we have seen some significant cuts from our can supplier. And this could potentially continue to be an issue for us going forward.”
Arctic Chill, the hard seltzer that Mass. Bay produces with Worcester, Massachusetts-based Polar Seltzer, is packaged in slim cans, which were in tight supply all summer due to the overwhelming popularity of hard seltzers and other top-selling products that use them, such as Anheuser-Busch InBev’s Michelob Ultra.
“We are still experiencing some challenges with the slimmer cans, but are doing well for the time being,” Kenary said. “We were proactive about securing what we needed for our Arctic Chill relaunch, but as we are seeing less and less seasonality in the hard seltzer category, this could potentially become an ongoing issue.”
Arctic Chill was recently renamed from Arctic Summer and the rebranded packaging is rolling out now.
“With seltzer being in such high demand this past summer, we were actually able to work through all of our Arctic Summer inventory right as we were preparing to produce Arctic Chill, so we had a very clean transition between the two with no overlap,” Kenary said.