Halifax brewery shifts to local ingredients to combat supply chain issues

A Halifax brewery is using local ingredients in an effort to combat supply chain issues impacting the industry.

Mark Huizink, co-founder of 2 Crows Brewing Co., said the industry has seen its fair share of challenges during the pandemic, and his brewery is no exception.

“The bigger thing that's been more long term is the supply chain issues,” said Huizink. “We've had months where we couldn't source cans, ingredients were taking a long time to get to our doors and prices were increasing.”

In an effort to cope with these struggles, he said the brewery has made the move to source ingredients locally in the Maritimes.

“We have been dealing with a few of these suppliers for a fair bit of time and we realized that they were making some world-class products and so we decided to focus our attention on these guys,” he said. 

Given the supply chain issues impacting businesses across the country, Huizink said the move was a no-brainer.

According to Huizink, his brewery didn't qualify for a lot of government support because many of those programs were based on revenues.

“We didn't see a lot of decrease in revenues, what really took a hit for us was margins,” he said. “With increasing price of inputs but also having to put everything in a can as oppose to selling beer in bulk or kegs, basically.”

Huizink said they're slowly making the shift to get most of their grain from Shoreline Malting Co., which is based out of P.E.I.