Based in the heart of Chicago’s burgeoning beer district, Great Central Brewing Company is a contract brewery that also makes its own line of German-inspired beers. The state-of-the-art facility provides brewers with tools they need to create their own product and increase production when they’re operating at capacity.
With its growth trajectory and current expansion project, the company was looking to make room for additional production capacity and find alternative storage for the large quantities of pallets they traditionally housed for clients within their four walls. After partnering with a packaging supplier (Berlin Packaging), the company was able to save more than $2 per case of beer while increasing overall production.
By using the packaging supplier’s warehousing services, Great Central and its clients now order cans on-demand and have them delivered from the supplier’s 100+ warehouses nationwide, as opposed to stockpiling them, which takes up space within the facility. This also allowed the company to add in five new 200-barrel fermenters, five new 100-barrel fermenters as well as four new 50-barrel fermenters increasing the overall output from Great Central from approximately 25,000 barrels per year to an estimated 45,000 annually.
Thanks to the partnership, Great Central’s clients save anywhere from 5 to 12 cents per can, or $1.22 to $2.88 per case of beer. For an up-and-coming brewery, this savings is significant, especially when compared to the alternative of ordering a full truckload worth of cans, which only covers one SKU at a cost of $15,000 to $18,000 per truckload. Great Central now receives product on-demand while the packaging supplier manages the inventory and bulk purchasing process.
Thanks to the storage spaced saved, the brewing company is now able to produce enough beer to fill 12 to 14 empty pallets of cans per week. They’re expecting that number to increase to 22 to 24 pallets per week by the end of summer 2018.
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