Pallets holding more than 150,000 six-packs moved through the Frank B. Fuhrer Wholesale warehouse just off Route 22 in Salem this week.
That should get the Labor Day weekend going.
Summer is far and away the busiest season for beverage wholesalers like Fuhrer, which opened the 335,000-square-foot distribution facility — about six football fields of space — a little less than a year ago. Fuhrer primarily distributes beer and soft drinks from 75 suppliers throughout Southwestern Pennsylvania, ranging from national brands such as Bud Light to local craft beer such as Westmoreland’s Helltown Brewing.
In fact, if you’ve popped a lime into your Corona in Southwestern Pennsylvania since 1987, that bottle came from a Fuhrer warehouse.
It was delivered to a Fuhrer warehouse by Corona’s parent company, Constellation, before being loaded onto a Fuhrer truck bound for retailers including local taverns, restaurants and convenience stores such as Sheetz and GetGo. This summer, Michelob Ultra is the company’s top seller along with local favorite Iron City, according to Darren Eicher, Fuhrer craft and import brand manager.
As with other summer holidays, sales tend to pick up in the week leading up to Labor Day.
But the prep work to satisfy summer drink cravings across 14 Pennsylvania counties — a service area roughly the size of Rhode Island that includes Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Cambria, Clearfield, Butler, Fayette, Greene, Indiana, Jefferson, Lawrence, Somerset, Washington and Westmoreland counties — starts long before folks fire up their summertime grills, warehouse operations manager Shawn Diven said.
“We start ramping up for the holidays in May,” Diven said. “We increase our manpower by about 30%, and go from around 53 people to 65 during the day, and from 16 to 23 people on the night shift.”
Six college students on summer break were hired this year to help with deliveries.
“We sell about 40% of our beer during the summer months,” Eicher said. “Cinco de Mayo is kind of the kickoff, and then we’re extremely busy. Labor Day is kind of the last big hurrah before it slows down in the fall.”
On the warehouse floor, it’s a little tougher to see just how much product is stockpiled. Pallets of specialty beers, along with prepared pallets ready to be loaded onto delivery trucks, are constantly shifting around on their way to delivery trucks.
But, in another section of the warehouse, a multimillion-dollar automated crane system installed by Nebraska company Cirrus Tech houses pallets of mass-produced beer stacked neatly all the way to the ceiling. With no need for manual control, pickers enter orders into a computer system, and a crane zooms to exactly where the selected product is located. A small-wheeled cart loads it and brings it down to pickers, who load what they need before sending the crane away to pick up the next part of their order.
Diven said the computer even knows the size of box each brand of beer arrives in, and it can stack and order pallets within inches of one another to maximize space.
“We’re the 15th or 16th warehouse in the U.S. to install this system,” Diven said. “We had some IT challenges at the beginning, but it works great. It’s a time-saver, and it’s a life-changer in terms of how much more efficient and safe you can be.”
Eicher makes his way through the massive warehouse and a lone pallet of beer catches his eye.
It’s sitting off by itself, stacked with cases of Singha, a lager-style beer from Thailand that doesn’t make a lot of appearances on shelves in the Pittsburgh market. Someone mentions that they haven’t had a Singha in a long time.
“I haven’t seen them here in a long time,” he said. “Must be a new order.”
But one could probably find a case of just about anything stashed someplace in the warehouse, as long as it’s brewed by one of the brands Fuhrer handles. As he walked toward the Cirrus crane, Eicher pointed to a partial pallet of Garage Beer. It’s an Ohio brand that recently gained some famous investors: former Super Bowl champions and NFL stars Jason and Travis Kelce.
“Last year, we didn’t have any Garage Beer,” he said. “Now we can’t keep enough of it.”
In total, the Fuhrer warehouse has the capacity to store nearly 20,000 pallets of beer and soda pop. Each year, the company sells about 15 million cases.
“This week, we’re moving about 40,000 cases,” Diven said.
Patrick Varine is a TribLive reporter covering Delmont, Export and Murrysville. He is a Western Pennsylvania native and joined the Trib in 2010 after working as a reporter and editor with the former Dover Post Co. in Delaware. He can be reached at pvarine@triblive.com.
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From the brewery to your fridge
In the U.S., most major breweries contract with wholesalers like Fuhrer to distribute their brands over large geographic areas.
Brewers like Constellation, Coors and Anheuser-Busch make deliveries to Fuhrer, which in turn shepherds the beer to clients across its 14-county distribution spectrum — places ranging from smaller local beer distributors to bars, grocery stores and convenience stores like Sheetz and GetGo.