Back in October, I wrote a blog about some of the big things that happened in 2019 and how they had affected our business. In case you need a refresher, 2019 was a really big year for us. We started canning our own cider (each can filled by hand!), released Fleeting Youth as a permanent seasonal on draft and in cans, and saw massive growth on the distribution side. All of these things combined to make us profitable, a huge milestone for any small business.
2020 is shaping up to be another really big year for us. My word for the year, when it comes to the business, is DOMINATE. I shared it with our staff at the holiday party, and I’m sharing it here: we are going to DOMINATE in 2020. Here’s how we plan to do that, and we hope you’ll come along with us for the ride!
Move our tasting room to The Assembly development on E. Washington Street. Along with moving our physical location, we’ll also be expanding our kitchen and our food menu so we’ll be a full-service restaurant instead of one that focuses mostly on sandwiches, snacks, and salads, as we currently do.
The new tasting room will have about twice as much space, twice as many seats, and a beautiful, European-style patio. We’re excited to be closer to downtown, even if just by half a mile. We’re excited to have more built-in traffic with the TWG offices sharing the space with us and three stories of apartments above us. While we’ve loved our spot in the Neidhammer building, parking has always been a problem for our customers, and not having a built-in customer base kept us just off the radar for a lot of folks. We can’t wait to put ourselves on the map in a bigger way through this tasting room, and for the challenges and opportunities having a full-service restaurant will bring.
Grow our distribution footprint by 50%. Our distribution sales have been really healthy year-over-year. To grow by 1.5x is a pretty serious goal at this point. In fact, we may not be able to do it just within Indiana. While it’s outside of our full control, we hope that you’ll find Ash & Elm Cider products in more grocery stores in Indiana in 2020, and that you may be able to find us in some surrounding states by the end of the year too. In order to do this, though we’ll have to…
Increase our production capacity. Again. Even though we got a big new fermentation tank in early 2019 and bought a canning line, we’ve already maxed out our capacity. We recently got three new fermentation tanks up and running and literally just sealed the deal on a new automatic canning line. This means we actually have the physical capacity to make all the cider we want to sell in 2020, and our labor won’t have to increase too much to do that. In other words - increased efficiency! Always a good goal for a business.
Open an online store for people who can’t make it to our tasting room! This has been a goal for a while, but I’m putting it in writing - we are going to start selling our cider online in 2020! There are lots of legal hoops we need to jump through, but our goal is to put our special bottled ciders and our Cider of the Month ciders online for folks who want to get a taste of some of our special releases. We’ll start small - just in Indiana - but as we get our bearings, hope to add on additional states. It’s going to be a great way to share some of our really special ciders with our far-away friends!!
Do a better job of sharing our story. We’ve been open for almost 4 years now (can’t believe it!!), and in retrospect, there are aspects of the Ash & Elm Cider Co. story that we need to do a better job of sharing. We want people to know what makes our cider different from anyone else’s. We want you to know where we get our apples, how we work with local orchards, and who the people are who make our business run.
2020 is shaping up to be a banner year. As always, we so appreciate everyone being a part of the ride, and appreciate your patronage, interest, and excitement. Cheers to the new year!