A recent initiative introduced by a beer trade organization to push for nutritional information on beer labels could have far-reaching implications for local breweries.
The Beer Institute represents the biggest breweries in the United States, including MillerCoors. They recently published a Voluntary Disclosure Initiative and are asking their members, who brew more than 80% of the beer sold in America, to comply with these new guidelines.
“This initiative will help expand the type of information provided to consumers and will ultimately empower their decision-making regarding the beverage of their choice,” said Dan Roth, Director of Communications for the Beer Institute.
Alcohol is one of the only food or beverage products left in the United States that does not have its nutrition information available directly on the label.
While most everyone agrees to a need for more transparency and information about the beer being produced, it’s not as simple as gathering it and providing it to the consumer. While MillerCoors, HeinekenUSA, Anheuser-Busch and a couple of craft brewing consortiums under the Beer Institute have all agreed to comply with these guidelines by 2020, smaller craft breweries don’t find the guidelines feasible for their business.
According to Russ Klisch, President of Lakefront Brewery, it can take up to four weeks to receive the statistical analysis of any beer sample he sends out. Those samples can’t be sent until the beer is bottled. Hypothetically, that beer would have to sit until the analysis is returned. Once the brewery receives the information, they’d have to design the label and add the details and apply them to the beer. It’s just not a feasible situation, especially for craft brewers who make multiple seasonal and one-off beers.
For their part, MillerCoors began including nutrition information on bottles and packaging, starting with their Miller64 brand back in 2014. According to MillerCoors Director of Media Relations Jonathan Stern, they’ve been at the forefront of the push for more information on beer labels, adding the information to Miller64 just six months after the Alcohol and Tobacco Trade and Tax Bureau put out their own guidelines for beer nutrition information.
Now, they have the information on the full range of Blue Moon Beers, Henry’s Hard Sodas, Coors Banquet, Milwaukee’s Best and IceHouse and have had discussions with Leinenkugel’s on how to incorporate the guidelines on their line of products.
“While it is a very involved proposition, we believe it’s the right thing to do because consumers want it and are demanding to know what goes into everything they consume, whether it be a food or beverage,” said Stern.
The need for more nutritional information on beer is, in some ways, linked to an FDA ruling that restaurants that have more than 20 locations have to include calorie counts as well as fat, sodium, carbohydrate and fiber information for any beer or alcoholic beverage on their menu. The compliance date was pushed back to December 1, 2016, but is quickly approaching. The rule only applies to beers on the menu for more than 60 days a year, meaning seasonals and one-offs are excluded, but any major breweries’ product will need to have this information available.
There can be a bit of a catch-22 in this call for more nutritional information. The Beer Institute quotes a Nielsen survey and says overwhelmingly, beer drinkers want more information about the food and beverages they enjoy. Craft brewers continue to make one-off and seasonal beers in response to customer demand for new, interesting flavors. It seems almost impossible for the two demands to be met simultaneously.
The Brewers Association is a trade group that represents many craft brewers in the US.
“(We) support transparency in labeling. Our members already invest substantial time in complying with extensive federal regulations so that consumers can make informed choices when purchasing beer. While we appreciate the Beer Institute’s efforts to support additional nutritional transparency, we recognize that the approach the large brewers have taken may not be feasible for smaller brewers, many of whom offer dozens of small scale, seasonal products every year,” said Brewers Association director Paul Gatza.
According Gatza, one way craft breweries are working to provide information for consumers is to create a database in of information about styles of beer as opposed to specific, individual brands. He said the Brewers Association is working with the FDA and USDA to have that information available in the USDA Nutrient Database.
Though that information won’t be provide the exact nutritional data for each beer produced by each craft brewery, it should give consumers enough information to make the choices they want and help Brewers Association members comply with the FDA menu label requirements. It seems a feasible compromise that gives the public the information they want while still providing the variety of beers that have helped craft beer see double-digit growth over each of the last eight year.
For his core product and the few seasonal beers that are consistent, Klisch imagines he will be able to have a standard recipe and use statistical analysis from previous batches on the next round of production, allowing him to comply with the guidelines for at least some of Lakefront’s products.
Lakefront has two advantages over some of the other breweries in town - a back label, already used on his products that would be adaptable to adding this information, and the sales numbers that allow him to absorb the cost of these changes.
For a new brewery like Good City Brewing, co-founder and brewmaster Andy Jones said these initiatives could be cost-prohibitive if ever made into law.
Jones also notes that a single sample or analysis isn’t the end, as their core ingredients can change or be affected by the growing seasons. What was true of a sample in March may not be the same in December. It’s not just the cost of one sample (approximately $500) they’d have to absorb and budget for, but constant re-checking, as well.
Klisch hopes that if any of the initiatives become law that the government and the industry will follow the example of other food regulations already in place. He mentioned restaurants who aren’t responsible for providing detailed nutritional information if they gross under a certain amount of money.
“Smaller restaurants aren’t required to do it because it’s cost prohibitive. The same concept should be applied to smaller brewers. I don’t think smaller brewers should be required by law to do this,” Klisch said.
Henry Schwartz, President of Mobcraft Brewing, isn’t too concerned about how the guidelines would affect their production.
“You’d have to be 40 times our production volume to have to adhere to some of those,” he said, adding that the equipment needed to do in-house analysis is too sophisticated and expensive for a brewery Mobcraft size. “It’s out of our league.”
Klisch noted that changes in transparency aren’t new to the beer industry. He remembers a time when brewers weren’t voluntarily providing the information about alcohol by volume (ABV), fearing “content wars” where consumers would only buy beer with the highest alcohol content and breweries would have to meet those demands. That clearly hasn’t been the case and most breweries now provide the ABV% on their products.
For now, the Beer Institute’s Initiative provides uniform guidelines, but they aren’t mandatory. Having the power and support of 80% of the country's’ beer production behind them seems to give the Beer Institute the advantage. It’s a situation that craft brewers will continue to monitor while trying to find a way to meet the public’s desire for more information while not compromising their business and their product.
