August 30 – Pallets containing more than 150,000 six-packs were moved this week into the Frank B. Fuhrer Wholesale warehouse just off Route 22 in Salem.
That should kick off the Labor Day weekend.
Summer is by far 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 in southwestern Pennsylvania, ranging from
from national brands like Bud Light to local craft beer like Westmoreland’s Helltown Brewing.
In fact, if you’ve put a lime in 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
intended for retailers including local taverns, restaurants and convenience stores like Sheetz and GetGo. This summer, Michelob Ultra is the company’s best-seller, along with local favorite Iron City, said Darren Eicher, Fuhrer craft and import brand manager.
As with other summer holidays, sales are typically highest in the week leading up to Labor Day.
But preparations to satisfy summertime beverage cravings in 14 Pennsylvania counties — a service area the size of Rhode Island that includes Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Cambria, Clearfield, Butler, Fayette, Greene, Indiana, Jefferson, Lawrence, Somerset, Washington and Westmoreland counties — start long before people fire up their summer barbecues, said Shawn Diven, manager of warehouse operations.
“We’re starting to scale up for the May holidays,” Diven said. “We’re increasing our manpower by about 30%, going from about 53 people to 65 during the day, and from 16 to 23 people on the night shift.”
This year, six students were hired during the summer holidays to help with the deliveries.
“We sell about 40 percent of our beer in the summer months,” Eicher said. “Cinco de Mayo is kind of the kickoff, and we’re extremely busy. Labor Day is kind of the last big hurrah before it all slows down in the fall.”
On the warehouse floor, it’s a bit harder to see how much product is stored. Pallets of craft beer, along with prepared pallets ready to be loaded onto delivery vehicles, are constantly moving on their way to delivery vehicles.
But in another part of the warehouse, a multimillion-dollar automated crane system installed by Nebraska-based Cirrus Tech stacks pallets of mass-produced beer neatly to the ceiling. With no manual intervention required, order pickers enter orders into a computer system and a crane zooms to the precise location of the selected product. A cart with small wheels loads it up and carries it to the pickers, who load what they need before sending the crane off to retrieve the next part of their order.
Diven said the computer even knows the size of the box each beer brand comes in and can stack and arrange pallets within inches of each other to maximize available space.
“We’re the 15th or 16th warehouse in the U.S. to install this system,” Diven said. “We had some IT challenges in the beginning, but it works great. It saves time and it changes your life in terms of how much more efficient and secure you can be.”
Eicher walks through the huge warehouse and a pallet of beer catches his attention.
It sits alone, filled with cases of Singha, a pale ale-style beer from Thailand that doesn’t often make it to the shelves of the Pittsburgh market. Someone says they haven’t had Singha in a long time.
“I haven’t seen them here in a long time,” he said. “That must be a new order.”
But you could probably find a case of just about anything in the warehouse somewhere, as long as it’s brewed by one of the brands Fuhrer sells. As he walked over to the Cirrus tap, Eicher pointed to a partial pallet of Garage Beer, an Ohio-based brand that recently landed some big-name investors: former Super Bowl champions and NFL stars Jason and Travis Kelce.
“Last year we didn’t have Garage Beer,” he said. “Now we can’t keep enough of it.”
In total, the Fuhrer warehouse has the capacity to store almost 20,000 pallets of beer and soft drinks. The company sells around 15 million cases annually.
“This week we are moving about 40,000 cases,” Diven said.
Patrick Varine is a TribLive reporter covering Delmont, Export and Murrysville. Originally from western Pennsylvania, he joined the Trib in 2010 after working as a reporter and editor at the former Dover Post Co. in Delaware. He can be reached at pvarine@triblive.com.
