Despite the pandemic’s harsh effect on the bar and restaurant industries in Ontario, one Ottawa brewery is experiencing a spike in business after building their online store – resulting in the brewery hiring former employees of the airline sector to match its growth.
Overflow Brewing Company, located in Ottawa’s Alta Vista neighbourhood, initially experienced a drastic drop in business and employment at the start of the pandemic, said owners Brad Fennell and Mitch Veilleux.
From March to July, employment rates of bars, which Stat Can refers to as “drinking places,” dropped by almost 50 per cent, according to an analysis of data from Statistics Canada.
Together, Fennell and Veilleux, also co-owner, opened the brewery in 2017. They say until spring of 2020, they made only two online sales.
“On March 16, it started with one [online sale], and then 10, and then 20, and then upwards of a hundred a day,” Fennell said.
Overflow is no longer one of the only craft breweries delivering beer through an online platform, but both owners say offering the service early during the pandemic helped save their business.
From June to July, there was an almost 80 per cent increase in jobs at bars, breweries, nightclubs, and taverns in Ontario, according to analysis of data from Statistics Canada.
Overflow Brewing Company was forced to let go of all their employees at the beginning of the pandemic, but those jobs have since been refilled due to the spike in online sales.
The brewery even had to look in other job sectors, to fill all the jobs now required for their revived business.
50 per cent of Overflow’s new hires were former employees of the airline sector.
“If you can serve somebody up 20,000 feet in the air, in a steel tube, and be relaxed under the pressure, you can certainly work here,” Fennell said.
Shaws said she found the news that former airline workers are finding work at Overflow heartening.
“I think it’s incredibly important that people start looking at other options,” Shaw said.
Shaw urged job seekers to invest in the credentials needed to work in multiple industries. She said the current job market is fierce.
More online sales didn’t make things easier for Overflow, as the flip in their business model came with a new set of problems. “We were running out of beer,” Veilleux said.
According to the brewer, their tanks weren’t big enough to produce the quantity they needed for the high-volume, low-margin business they had transformed into.
“We had to sell our old [brewing] tanks, buy new ones, integrate them, and start brewing with twice the amount of ingredients,” Veilleux said.
At the height of their sales, they were starting from scratch.
The expense of supporting the online sales may have kept revenues remaining high, but affected Overflow’s profits. Due to their high revenue, the brewery didn’t qualify for most programs offered by the federal government.
“We could have used that little bit of relief,” Veilleux said, who said he found this unfair.
In September, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his promise to create one million new jobs for Canadians and reintroduce the financial assistance that was available to Canadians and businesses in the summer.
Although Veilleux and Fennell are proud of how both the provincial and federal governments helped Canadians, they stressed that the businesses providing jobs, like Overflow, must be better supported.
Featured image provided by Brad Fennell and Mitch Veilleux.
