Workers at Stone Brewing Company’s sprawling facilities in Richmond, Va. went public today with a union drive to secure higher pay, more consistent scheduling, and better working conditions.
“We’re here to fight for jobs that are worth staying with as careers,” one worker told VinePair in a text exchange on the eve of the announcement. They requested anonymity to speak about the drive without fear of retaliation, noting that a vocally pro-union employee had recently been fired. “We’re also here to make a world-class product and be fucking excellent at it every day.” An organizer with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters’ Local 322 delivered a request for recognition at the brewery Monday afternoon. VinePair has reviewed a copy of that letter, which was addressed to Joel Pipman, the vice-president of brewing operations at Sapporo-Stone Brewing who has been on the job for less than a year after being hired away from Anheuser-Busch InBev’s Williamsburg facility in October 2023. This piece will be updated with more details once an official petition is filed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
An August 2023 report by Richmond BizSense put employment at Stone’s Richmond operations at around 160. The union’s proposed bargaining unit includes around 90 workers at both its brewhouse in Richmond’s Fulton Hill neighborhood and a warehouse east of the city in brewing, packaging, warehousing, quality assurance, maintenance, and hospitality, according to VinePair’s source. They said around 70 percent of those workers have signed union cards despite Sapporo-Stone management’s deterrence tactics, which have included the introduction of outside consultants describing “the evils of unions,” increased in-person visits by high-level bosses, and “a big letter telling us they love us and know they f*cked up and hope we can forgive them.” Last week, Sapporo-Stone executives descended on Richmond for an ice-cream social with the workers. In the current worker’s view, “[t]he company has responded poorly” to the drive.
Sapporo-Stone Brewing, the recently adopted moniker of the stateside subsidiary of Japan’s Sapporo Holdings, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Sapporo-Stone Brewing was the 12th-largest brewery by volume in the country in 2023, according to statistics compiled by the Brewers Association, and its recent upgrades have boosted its capacity to around 700,000 barrels. It leads all Japanese brands in the import segment, and its flagship, Sapporo Premier, has posted off-premise percentage growth in the mid-teens for much of 2024. Stone’s core brands (if not its full portfolio), have found growth this year, too: Brewbound’s analysis of NielsenIQ scan data through May 25 shows Delicious IPA, Buenaveza Salt & Lime lager, and its eponymous Stone IPA up 12.5 percent.
The drive unfolds against the backdrop of steadily increasing costs of living in one of the biggest population-gaining cities in the country. Median home prices in Richmond have increased ~50 percent since 2019, and the salary required to purchase a starter home has nearly doubled, according to one estimate. Coupled with Sapporo-Stone’s ambitious growth plans, some employees feel stretched to a breaking point. “Pay has been bad,” the worker said, noting that management issued some raises after learning of the drive earlier this year. “Work-life balance is laughable, they’ve lied and pulled back on promises regarding scheduling several times […] Staffing has been cripplingly bad in some departments, and most are planned to be skeleton crews.”
Also at issue is the nature of Stone’s changing culture within the larger multinational conglomerate that now owns the firm. “[I]t’s almost unanimous in the joy and passion that the workers have for the job,” said the source, who has worked at the company for approximately two years. (VinePair has verified their job title, and is withholding it at their request to protect them from retaliation.) “Stone did create a good culture. Sapporo probably wants it to die, but so far it is staying alive and strong. People are curious, hardworking, and willing to call bullshit when they see it. One of the Stone core values was ‘revolutionary spirit,’ and that legacy is still here with the union.”
Founded in San Diego County in 1996, Stone expanded to Richmond during a much sunnier era for the craft brewing industry. “A facility on the East Coast will allow us to meet demand for our beer, ensure we are providing our fans with the freshest beer possible and also serve as a distribution hub for states located east of the Mississippi,” co-founder and then-chief executive Greg Koch said in a 2014 statement heralding the company’s site selection of a 14-acre, municipally owned lot in an industrial section of Virginia’s capital city. Stone, then still independently owned and recognized as a craft brewery by the Brewers Association, received more than $30 million in bonds and grants from city coffers, and another $5 million from the Commonwealth, to augment its own $74-million investment to build the plant, which opened in 2016 with 150,000 barrels of annual brewing capacity.
Instead of a beachhead for Stone’s triumphant conquests on the East Coast, the Richmond facility would become a cautionary tale of overexpansion in an industry in the early throes of a sales slowdown that continues today. There are few higher-profile examples of that slowdown than the fading fortunes of the West Coast pioneer last decade. In testimony during a federal trial over Stone’s trademark infringement claims against Molson Coors’ Keystone Light brand in 2022, then-chief executive Maria Stipp shocked industry insiders by revealing that the brewery that built a brand by sneering at corporate sellouts had itself been exploring a sale as a result of sinking sales and a looming $434-million payout to investors. Stone’s lawyers argued that Keystone’s rebrand had cost the firm some $174 million, and the jury seemed to agree at least in part, awarding the brewer $56 million in damages in March 2022. However, the company’s multi-year slide tracked with stiffening headwinds for craft brewers, as well as its own compounding failures to revitalize its portfolio and sustain expensive pushes into Shanghai, Berlin, Napa, Calif., and of course, Richmond.
While most macrobrewers rely on unionized workforces (many represented by the Teamsters), the vast majority of the country’s nearly 10,000 craft breweries are non-union due to a mix of cultural, economic, and logistical factors. But this is Sapporo USA’s second encounter with organized labor in its brief tenure in the American craft brewing industry, and the current drive echoes the previous one at Anchor Brewing Company in San Francisco, which the subsidiary acquired in 2017.
In 2019, workers at Anchor organized with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union’s Local 6, citing concerns over cost of living and the corporate owner’s spotty stewardship of the Bay Area’s historic steam-beer brewery. In July 2023, VinePair broke the news that Sapporo USA (SUSA) was suddenly shuttering Anchor, throwing its century-and-a-half legacy to the mercy of an opaque liquidation process that only recently concluded. At the time, members of Anchor Brewing Union told VinePair’s Hop Take that the parent company’s decision followed failed efforts to launch domestic production of its flagship rice lager in the unusual, spatially constrained brewhouse on Potrero Hill. Acquiring Stone in 2022 gave SUSA a brand-new plant in a commercial district in Richmond with plenty of room to expand. The company “had a brand new toy with Stone,” as one now-former union worker at Anchor told VinePair’s Hop Take column in July 2023. “They have more up-to-date facilities. They can produce Sapporo, we couldn’t.”
As Anchor was turned over to liquidators last summer, SUSA announced plans to invest $40 million into Stone’s Richmond plant, adding a dozen new 1,000-barrel fermenting tanks. Richmond BizSense reported in August 2023 that the firm projected the additions would allow it to produce 360,000 barrels of beer annually by 2025.
Organizing efforts at Stone’s Richmond plant began less than a month later.
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