Although union workers went on strike Saturday at Molson Coors’ Fort Worth, Texas-based production brewery, the company’s top executives said the facility is brewing, packaging and delivering beer using “current employees” as of Monday.
During a presentation at the Consumer Analyst Group of New York (CAGNY) conference on Wednesday afternoon, Molson Coors CEO Gavin Hattersley said the company’s contingency plan began playing out Monday morning, including a resumption of production at the Fort Worth brewery.
“We packaged beer, we brewed beer, we delivered beer,” he said. “And in fact, we actually delivered more than our contingency plan actually suggested we should. So the brewery is off to a great start.”
Molson Coors CFO Tracey Joubert added that the company is “using current employees to … make the beer in Fort Worth at the moment.” She said the cost to the company has been immaterial thus far.
However, Local 997 secretary-treasurer Rick Miedema said the costs being incurred at the brewery are greater than what company execs are letting on.
Miedema told Brewbound in a statement: “Molson Coors is using current management employees to ‘attempt’ to run processes. They transported management from other breweries, paying to put them up in hotels, and giving them meal allowances. All this, including the downtime, has cost the company more money than compared to the package we had on the table to close the contract deal.”
Molson Coors chief communications officer Adam Collins told Brewbound in a statement: “Less than 48 hours after the strike at our Fort Worth brewery began on Saturday, the brewery was brewing, packaging and shipping beer. Thanks in large part to our salaried teams from across the company, we are shipping more than we had expected from Fort Worth under the contingency plan, plus we have five other breweries across the U.S. that are unaffected.”
On Saturday, 420 members of Local 997 walked off the job after the Teamsters and Molson Coors were unable to reach a new three-year contract. They are seeking pay raises and the end of a tiered system for health care and retirement benefits.
Molson Coors has the option to shift volume to five other production facilities if needed, Hattersley said. The company also has had “a big chunk of contract brewing” volume open up in Q4 of 2023 and Q1 of 2024. Volume of flavored malt beverages (FMBs) previously produced in Fort Worth, such as Topo Chico Hard Seltzer and Simply Spiked, could return to contract producers, Hattersley suggested.
“Our contingency plan is in place, it’s working,” he said. “We feel really good about it. Well, we don’t feel good about the fact that we’re on strike, right, but I feel really good about the fact that we’ve got a good contingency plan. We’re in day three of brewery operations [and it] is working really, really well.”
The 200,000 sq. ft. variety packing facility is the only Molson Coors U.S. brewery producing Topo Chico Hard Seltzer, Vizzy Hard Seltzer and Simply Spiked FMBs, along with Steel Reserve and Leinenkugel’s Summer Shandy. The “$65 million fully automated variety packer facility came online” in 2023, according to the blog.
The facility is capable of producing 1.7 million barrels of beyond beer offerings annually, according to the blog. Those increased capabilities allowed the company to be “entirely self-sufficient” for production of beyond beer offerings and eliminated the need for third-party vendors for final variety pack assembly, Jim Crawford, VP of operations at the Fort Worth brewery, told the blog in 2023.
The Fort Worth plant, which opened in 1969, employs 520 workers with an hourly wage of $36, per the company’s website. The facility produces around 8.2 million barrels of product annually, amounting to 72 brands and 332 SKUs, according to a fact sheet on the website.
Editor’s Note: This post was updated on Thursday, February 22, to include comments from Local 997, Molson Coors and other information about the Fort Worth facility.