Rum to the rescue? How Bacardi is tweaking production to fight the coronavirus
While the coronavirus may be driving us to drink, there’s a more pressing issue: washing our hands.
Now, one of the world’s largest rum factories, the Bacardi plant in Puerto Rico, has tweaked its production lines to pump out ethanol needed to make hand sanitizers.
Olein Refinery, a Puerto Rican manufacturer, is using the Bacardi alcohol to produce more than 1.7 million 10-ounce bottles of hand sanitizer, much of which is being given to police, nurses, non-profits and others on the frontlines of the coronavirus.
Jose Class, the vice president of supply chain and manufacturing for Bacardi in Latin America and the Caribbean, said that, to his knowledge, this production shift is unprecedented since the Puerto Rican branch of the company was founded in 1936.
“I don’t think we even did something like this during World War II,” he said.
The sprawling, 127-acre complex in Cataño, on the northern coast, produces 80 percent of Bacardi’s rum, or the equivalent of 200 million bottles a year, and employs about 400 people.
.jpg "Bacardi Puerto Rico Provides Raw Materials for Hand Sanitizers (2).jpg")
Other Bacardi sites are following suit. The Bacardi Bottling Corporation in North Jacksonville, Florida, will begin producing 120,000 units of hand sanitizers this week, all of which will be donated. And eight other plants in six countries are expected to join the effort.
While the Puerto Rican plant has never had to deal with a pandemic before, it has seen its share of business adversity on the battered island, Class said..
After Hurricanes Maria and Irma raked the island, along with other parts of the Caribbean and Florida, in 2017, the company put $3 million into relief efforts.
While there are parallels between this health crisis and the hurricanes, which produced widespread infrastructure collapse, there are also key differences, Class said.
“What the community needed [after Maria] was different. Then, they needed food, water, a little bit of joy,” he said. Now what the island needs are ways to stay clean and disinfected amid a rapidly moving and contagious virus.
.png "Hand Sanitizers and Bacardi (1).png")
The temporary production shift began March 17 and will continue as long as needed — and it won’t affect rum production, the company said.
The initiative comes as Puerto Rico is entering a second week of lockdown and curfew in hopes of curtailing the spread of the virus. As of Tuesday, the U.S. territory of 3.2 million had reported 39 cases and two deaths.
As the U.S. government has acknowledged that the health crisis could leave hospitals overrun, it’s been asking the private sector to play a bigger role. On Sunday, President Donald Trump said he’d given Ford, GM and Tesla the go-ahead to retrofit their production lines to churn out hospital ventilators.
Class said this crisis is one where everyone gets to be part of the solution.
“We have ways to fight this. Just the simple act of washing your hands and being careful about your social interactions helps,” he said. ”We need to overcome this as soon as possible so we can start celebrating again.”
This story was originally published March 24, 2020 at 2:21 PM.
