John Sleeman was looking for cans of Sleeman Cream Ale at a store, but couldn’t find them. “There were no cans,” the founder of Canada’s third-largest brewery said.
Instead, he settled for bottles, because Sleeman Breweries Ltd. and other Canadian beer brewers are struggling to get enough cans to meet their needs in the midst of a months-long can shortage in North America.
The can shortage means consumers’ preferred brand of beer — or pop, for that matter — might not always be available in the kind of package they want it in. But brewers this week said that, in most cases, they aren’t actually running out of packages to put their liquid in, just the most popular package.
The Canadian brewing industry is facing what Beer Canada, the major trade association for brewers, has called a “perfect storm” when it comes to cans.
Even before the pandemic, beer drinkers were switching to cans from bottles in increasingly larger numbers.
For the rest of this article: https://financialpost.com/news/retail-marketing/no-need-to-panic-but-beer-makers-are-running-out-of-cans