As supply chain pressures and shipping delays are felt around the world, New Zealand is being hit by a nationwide dearth of bourbon, with shortages also hitting the craft beer and chicken nugget markets.
“It’s a pain all right,” said Neil, a worker at the Bottle-O store in Mt Eden. “There’s a shortage of bourbon at the moment. We can’t get anything from out of America, apparently.”
For months, retailers – and some particularly loyal customers – have struggled to top up their supplies. The worst shortages were hitting premixed ready-to-drink (RTD) beverages, particularly bourbon and cola mixes, which are highly popular in New Zealand. “Bourbon RTDs are like our bread and butter, actually – if you sold bread in a liquor store,” said Neil. “They’re very popular here.”
The shortage was confirmed by Brendon Lawry, the chief executive of the Liquorland NZ chain, who said suppliers nationwide had “been experiencing shortages of bourbon for production of RTDs for the last four to six months”, partly because of shipping delays. “We are hopeful that it is a short-term issue,” he said.
Internationally, shortages in the liquor industry have been brewing since 2021, partly driven by people drinking more spirits during the pandemic. Diageo, the liquor multinational behind such whisky brands as Johnnie Walker and Crown Royal, warned in January that it was facing shortages in the face of increasing demand, the Wall Street Journal reported. Many spirits can require months or years of ageing before making their way to liquor store shelves – making it hard to suddenly escalate production.
“It’s like an unfortunate perfect storm,” said Robert Brewer, the chief executive of industry organisation Spirits New Zealand. Brewer said the shortage in New Zealand was a mixture of global shipping delays, rising popularity of spirits and a supply chain bottleneck coming out of Kentucky and Tennessee, where bourbon is usually made.
Dr Bill Wang, a supply chain management specialist at the Auckland University of Technology, said the Covid-19 pandemic era “is putting global supply chains under intense pressure and disrupting trade”. To get around some disruptions, “many businesses are seeking alternative supply from local, regional cooperation”, Wang said – but that strategy wouldn’t help products with a single origin point, like bourbon.
New Zealand is a nation of heavy drinkers, with a growing enthusiasm for straight liquor as well as wine and beer. Figures from Spirits NZ, which accounts for about 96% of the market, indicated more than 2m litres of straight bourbon were sold in the year to April 2022 – to a population of about 3.65 million adults. That’s despite the impact of Covid, which Brewer said “hit us overall by about [a] 10-12% drop in sales”. Pre-Covid, it was 2.2m litres of bourbon – a 22% increase from two years prior. On top of the straight liquor, the industry has sold 70m litres of RTDs and about 400m of wine and beer. On a per-capita basis, the total “means that every New Zealander drinks an average of almost two standard drinks per day”, according to alcohol harm organisation ActionPoint.
While the bourbon shortage has been noted nationwide, it is not the only alcohol under pressure, as carbon dioxide shortages begin to trouble craft beer brewers and RTD manufacturers. Producers around the country have struggled to get affordable carbon dioxide supplies – used to create fizzy drinks, a range of food products and some beers – since the country’s last remaining CO2 producer announced it would be conducting maintenance until August.
Dylan Firth, the executive director of the Brewers Association of New Zealand, said smaller craft brewers were worst hit.
“This is more of an issue for the smaller guys who don’t have a [CO2] capture process. Because CO2 is produced in the fermentation process, some larger breweries will have the ability to capture that,” he said.
As well as fizzy drinks, CO2 is used in food production – including chicken nuggets, which have been documented to be missing from supermarkets in recent months. “I don’t think it’s dire straits yet,” Firth said. “If this maintenance kind of work continues, or goes over later than August, that potentially could have wide-ranging issues.”