Woodchuck Hard Cider takes on the big guns - USA TODAY
MIDDLEBURY, Vt. — It’s Monday morning and the new $34 million Woodchuck Hard Cider cidery is a ghost town. The 85,000-square-foot bottling and packaging floor, a roller-coaster line of bottles that sail by at a rate of 600 bottles per minute when it’s up and running — that’s 10 every second — sits idle, emanating a kinetic energy you can almost feel. From Tuesday to Thursday, the production line runs 22 hours a day, then 10 hours on Friday before taking the weekend and Monday off. “That gives our maintenance guys a full day,” said Dan Rowell, the 47-year-old CEO of Woodchuck Hard Cider. Rowell said Woodchuck experimented with running the production line 72 hours straight, but that didn’t go over too well with workers. Woodchuck needs long hours of production to keep up with the demand for hard cider in America these days, which has exploded. Major players such as Heineken , Boston Beer Co. — makers of Samuel Adams — MillerCoors and Anheuser Busch all have hard ciders, jumping on Woodchuck’s bandwagon. Still, Woodchuck remains the second-biggest cider maker in the country, Rowell said. Before Boston Beer Co. passed Woodchuck by with its Angry Orchard hard cider a few years ago, Woodchuck had the market wrapped up with a 62% share. Source: www.usatoday.com
