overview

Started thirteen years ago by college buddies Jim Watkins and Wade Thompson, Minneapolis, Minnesota-based Sociable Cider Werks has grown to way more than just a craft cidery.

Watkins and Thompson met at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. After graduation, they both went into investment banking, working as private bankers on Wall Street. “They stayed good friends and got tired of all that the industry comes with,” says Sociable Cider Werks Operations Director Olivia Schumack. “They wanted to come back and make something for themselves.”

In 2013, at the height of the craft beer boom, the pair returned to Minnesota. Although brimming with newly opened breweries, the Twin Cities lacked something: a craft cidery. Schumack explains that Wade’s father-in-law had been homebrewing his own European-style cider. Both fans of the homemade alcoholic apple beverage, Watkins and Thompson, decided to make their own garage-brewed version with the intention of scaling up.

On the day after Thanksgiving 2013, Sociable Cider Werks opened as the first craft cidery in Minnesota.

Presently, Sociable, which produces about 13,000bbls annually, has eight unique brands, including Freewheeler apple cider, Training Wheels hazy blueberry cider, and the newest on the menu, Pinch Flat prickly pear cider, among others.

Beyond that, Sociable Cider Werks has grown into a beverage manufacturing and co-packing facility. “We co-pack for ten other brands nationwide, as well as our three brands here in Minnesota,” says Schumack.

In addition to Sociable Cider, the company creates Squoze Hemp seltzer and Superior Soda. Squoze is a line of THC-infused fresh-fruit flavored beverages that incorporates different hemp strains. Superior Soda is a line of four-ingredient, low-calorie soda made with real fruit. Schumack says that about ninety percent of the co-pack facility is now THC beverages.  

challenge

In the early days of Sociable, the skeleton crew of just a few guys could easily handle all the aspects of the business on paper. Schumack points out that in the early days, everything was all in one central place where they stored the paperwork.

But as the company grew from cider to soda, hemp-infused seltzers, and now copacking, as well as from less than a handful of people to about fifty full-timers, keeping track of all the moving parts became too overwhelming and time-consuming. The company was spending more than a day logging all the information into its paper system.

Turning to a comprehensive, streamlined brewery management platform, like Ekos, became a necessity.

“We had heard [Ekos] was useful at other breweries,” Schumack says. “Since it’s so focused on breweries, we didn’t really consider another software.”

In 2016, after using pen and paper for 3 years, Sociable switched to Ekos. Schumack explains how, when Sociable had just a three or four-man team, they’d package kegs in the daytime, deliver them in the afternoon, and bartend in the evening—that worked just fine.

“But in the last ten years we’ve just grown so exponentially … my job is managing those co-packing brands; I can’t imagine doing it without Ekos,” says Schumack. “We knew it was going to be a tool to set us up for success.”

results

Schumack says as Sociable self-distributes its THC seltzers and non-alcoholic brands, she has been utilizing the Ekos Beverage ERP feature more regularly. “I use all the production batches and backend for production planning and producing.” She says they also use the logistical backend for what they warehouse for clients.

It’s a lot of work to navigate through. But Schumack says that Ekos has helped reduce the load, saving around ten hours a week logging information into the company’s system.  

brings the team together

With staff spread across on-site, off-site warehouse, and even remote locations, Sociable likes Ekos because “it provides a central hub that anyone can access from anywhere,” says Schumack. “It allows us to track customers and update things in real time.”  

ROI with reporting

Additionally, she says that the reporting helps her accurately cost products and supplies, instead of having to plug it into a spreadsheet manually. Schumack says the reporting has “absolutely” saved the company money, though she says it is difficult to calculate the exact figure.