The nation’s largest mobile cannery is getting bigger.
Iron Heart Canning has added new warehouses in Chicago and Springfield, Massachusetts, bringing its total number of warehouses to 28 throughout New England, the Mid-Atlantic, Southeast, and Midwest.
“We want to be local wherever we are,” Tyler Wille, Iron Heart’s founder and CEO, told Brewbound.
As such, Iron Heart operates warehouses within an hour and a half of its customers.
The Springfield warehouse — the third Iron Heart location in Massachusetts — will service the cannery’s Western Massachusetts clients, while the Chicago warehouse will help to open new business opportunities in Illinois and Wisconsin.
“It’s a fantastic beer market,” Wille said of Chicago. “And we’re really looking forward to being able to service that market and build some really good local partnerships there, and expand the amount of canning that’s done in the Chicago area.”
With this latest expansion, Iron Heart has also added five new canning lines across the company ahead of its busy season, which usually runs from April through June. However, Wille said the season may push further into the summer due to uncertainty caused by the pandemic around summer demand.
“People are really hesitant to commit because they really have no idea where their demand is going to go and what’s going to happen as this summer unfolds,” he said. “Right now, we’re very busy within a three-week window, but very light outside of that, and everything is booking very, very short notice.”
As such, Wille expects this year’s busy season to run from June through August, as clients gauge how much consumers are willing to return to on-site locations, and whether they’ll be seeking draft or canned beer when they do go back.
Even as the demand for canning is currently unpredictable, Iron Heart is seeing a continued popularity of ready-to-drink canned products and increased demand for sleek (slim) 12 oz. cans.
“We’re doing way more 12 oz. sleek canning right now than we were even anticipating,” Wille said. “We’re struggling to issue our supply because we’ve actually gone way, way, way over where we thought we were going to be with them at this point.”
Iron Heart currently services about 650 active breweries, distilleries, and wineries, according to Wille. Through a network of three to four core aluminum brokers and “extensive contracts,” Iron Heart is confident in meeting demand, despite aluminum shortages industry-wide. Wille estimates the company will buy approximately 80 millions cans this year.
The company has also expanded its rental program with some of its larger customers. The resource allows clients who are packing enough cans to create a permanent extension of themselves at Iron Heart warehouses with a dedicated canning line.
Last February, Iron Heart acquired Michigan Mobile Canning, a mobile canning business operating out of Kalamazoo, and Indianapolis. Although the company is keeping an eye on the emerging canned cocktails markets in Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee, Wille said he isn’t planning additional expansion projects until after the summer.
“Our biggest focus as a business is on our current customer base that we’re committed to,” he said. “We know right now that the demand for our customers is kind of uncertain, so we need to make sure that we have our existing customers taken care of before thinking about expanding anymore.”