A Maryland distillery has halted production of its whiskey and rum products in favor of mass-producing hand sanitizer to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
How’s that for free-market innovation?
The move, which started first as a joke at Twin Valley Distillers in Rockville, Maryland, aims to alleviate the strain that the coronavirus outbreak has put on the availability of sanitizing products in the state, a local ABC News affiliate reports.
STORY: The distillery plans to be open seven days a week, from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.
“If that means we need to set up a tent out here and sit in folding chairs eight or ten hours a day, having people roll up in their cars, then we’ll do that,” Shair added.https://t.co/J1gNyViEfO
— Kevin Lewis (@ABC7Kevin) March 18, 2020
The owners experimented first with a recipe that called for ethanol, glycerol, aloe vera gel, lemongrass oil, and vitamin E oil. As they messed around with the recipe, they also applied for a license to produce the sanitizer. They were approved almost immediately by the federal government, which, honestly, is a sentence I thought I would never write.
“The federal government said the application typically takes three weeks for approval. We got approval in two days,” the distillery’s general manager, Jonathan Shair, told the ABC affiliate.
He said the idea to halt liquor production to focus their time and efforts on meeting the high demand for hand sanitizer started first as idle chatter over dinner at a bar. But as he thought about it more, he decided it was something that should be moved from hypothetical to reality.
“We started talking about hand sanitizer,” Shair said, “and out of the seven or eight people, and the bartender that was there — every single one of them took my [business] card and said, ‘Hey when you’re ready, I’ll buy it from you.'”
The distillery’s founder, Edgardo Zuniga, who immigrated to the United States from Costa Rica 29 years ago, said he embraced the hand sanitizer plan partly because he was open to new ideas, but also because he understood the seriousness of the viral pandemic.
“I kind of feel like it is wartime. Every company is pitching in to help out,” he said.
Zuniga added: “I studied a lot of American history. During World War I, World War II, the American Revolution, the country came together to help out. … I told my wife, ‘Maybe we should help out. We have a lot of alcohol. Let’s do a test run.’ So we did a run just to test it, and it came out perfect.”
Shair stressed elsewhere that the distillery was not looking to profit from the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’re not out here to make a killing off of the coronavirus,” he said in what is probably not the best choice of words. “It’s not obviously our goal. We’re here to fill a need in the community, and if that can help us keep afloat in the meantime, great.”
NEW: Twin Valley Distillers in Rockville, Md. has turned its production line of whiskey and rum into a hand sanitizer factory.
The idea started as a joke but has now become a reality.
It’ll begin selling four and eight-ounce bottles of hand sanitizer by Friday. @TwinValleyDist pic.twitter.com/96668Q4XRE
— Kevin Lewis (@ABC7Kevin) March 17, 2020
Twin Valley produced 500 four-ounce bottles and 300 eight-ounce bottles for its first day of sales. It priced the four-ounce bottles at $4 and the eight-ounce bottles at $6.50. It also capped the number of purchasable bottles at two, explaining it was looking to discourage hoarding, which has become a real problem recently.
Within mere hours of offering its sanitizer for sale Wednesday morning, it sold out of all 800 bottles.
“We never expected to be this busy,” Zuniga said. “There were people waiting outside at 8 a.m. for me to open the door.”
He has already ordered another 950 eight-ounce bottles to make another batch.
He added: “I got calls from Texas, California, Maine, even an email from someone in Hawaii. People want to know if we can ship bottles, but we’re focusing on Maryland right now.”
Even better than Twin Valley’s success is the fact it is not the only distillery to adjust production to match the demands of COVID-19. Falls Church Distillers in Fairfax County, Virginia, is working now on its own sanitizing product, which it hopes to have ready by this weekend. Cotton & Reed distillery in Washington, D.C., is giving hand sanitizer away with every purchase of rum, in addition to giving groceries and hand sanitizer away to service industry workers.
When the free markets work, we win.
