We helped a lot of breweries launch multipacks (12-packs and variety packs) in 2020. Variety Packs have been a perennial best seller in craft beer, though mostly for larger breweries (call it, somewhere around 8k+ bbls per year). But we saw a sharp uptick in smaller breweries getting into this format last year as well.
The pandemic and “mission-driven shopping” trend drove a lot of demand for variety packs, along with traditional 12-packs. (Market research company IRI tracked 12-packs of 12oz craft cans growing at more than 52% YOY in 2020. And Drizly reported that 12-packs accounted for 42% of all beer sales throughout 2020.)
Doug Veliky over at Revolution Brewing (and the fantastic Beer Crunchers blog) put together a great breakdown of why the 12-pack format is working so well right now. You should go read it directly from him.
If you can get the cost of goods sold (COGS) and production figured out, this is definitely worth exploring. Here are a few tactical things to think about if your brewery is considering this offering.
1. A carton packaging machine is a major capital investment. You can get around this by using folding 12-pack boxes that don’t require glue. In our experience though, these rarely look as nice as glued up boxes (the graphics never seem to align properly). But this is all about tradeoffs and doing everything you can to get your beer out to your fans quickly (during COVID-19, anyway).
2. Breweries usually include a rotational or seasonal beer in each variety pack to keep people interested. This presents a problem with how to communicate what that new offering is at scale. Printing a new run of cases every time you add a new beer is usually out of the question for smaller brewers because you want to print as many of one design as you can to get the per-unit cost down.
So what can you do?
Stickers? Check boxes? A window in the packaging to let the seasonal beer peek through? Or, should you simply call it a “surprise seasonal” so you don’t have to mess with this issue at all? Yep, these all work. I can’t tell you which works best because your project context, brand and budget should drive that decision. But if you want to include a seasonal in your variety pack, you will need to figure this out. So think about it now.
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