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Despite months of economic and health-related uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, things have still started to shift into “known-knowns” and “known-unknowns” as former Secretary of State Donald Rumsfield once said. The rapid and necessary rise of off-premise alcohol sales has been met with lack of clarity of how long it would need to last. The brief dominance of grocery stores as a monolith of sales has at least given way to convenience stores.
There is still plenty of action-reaction to come, but at least one of the known-knowns we can bank on in the months and years to come is that 2020 will have been a momentary spike upward in the continued slide of beer’s overall downward trajectory.
This sets up an important scenario for breweries of all sizes:
Start preparing now as a recession takes hold. There’s time to identify strategies for whenever it might end, and trajectories for beer sales flatten and decline.
The other option: wait it out, see what’s to come, and potentially get left behind.
Lucky for us, we already have a data-driven idea. Sign up to read more.
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