Crown Packaging reevaluates its craft business

After aggressively adding more than 350 craft beer clients in 18 months, Crown Beverage Packaging - a leading supplier of aluminum cans for beverage manufacturers - is now struggling to keep up with demand from the very customers it sought, and is considering altering the ways it services craft customers.

Over the last week, Crown began informing a number of craft breweries that it would no longer be able to fill orders of printed aluminum cans.

“We were told that they wouldn’t be able to reprint our cans at any time and that we needed to find a new supplier or a new package variety,” said Heather Sanborn, the co-founder of Portland, Maine’s Rising Tide Brewing Company.

Rising Tide isn’t alone. At least three other brewers shared similar stories on an online forum hosted on the Brewers Association website, noting that Crown has “no capacity for small volume accounts in 2016.”

Ron Skotleski, Crown’s director of marketing, said he was “surprised to hear and read some of the rumors. I can tell you, point blank, that Crown is committed to the craft segment. We are huge proponents of craft and have helped hundreds of breweries get into canning.”

Nevertheless, Skoleski said, Crown is “reviewing the number of new startup breweries we can continue to service every year. This is a very fluid situation and we are trying to adopt our business model to grow with craft,” he added.

Part of the problem for Crown may be the smaller minimum order requirements that are preferred by craft brewers, according to a source familiar with Crown’s business.

Over the years, Crown has allowed its smallest craft customers to purchase half-truckloads of aluminum cans - about 12 pallets or 100,000 cans, the company told Brewbound. Competitor suppliers Ball and Rexam typically require customers purchase full truckloads. Going forward, Crown will likely require that customers order a full truckload, the source said, and it has already begun evaluating customers on annual sales volumes.