Wholesalers Outlook Beset with Some Clouds Lately, Though Many Doing Better Than Expected

Dear Client: Back in spring, we published a mostly “rosy” survey of distributors, who foresaw a “sunny skies” outlook for the season based on the return of on-premise and robust RTD/seltzer sales. That was tempered a bit by staffing and supply issues [see BBD 03-26-2021]. Now that we’re three-quarters through the year, we executed another robust distributor survey on their outlook, supply, and more. Roughly 90 distributors from all sizes of beer wholesaler outfits from across the country weighed in