LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- Heaven Hill Brands, the family-owned bourbon giant, is offering retirement buyouts to long-tenured employees and letting open jobs go as it aims to reduce the workforce at its Bardstown, Kentucky, plant where it bottles Evan Williams, Elijah Craig and other bourbons.
The moves come as the broader spirits industry is navigating slowing demand after the business surged during the pandemic and its immediate aftermath.
"While the industry is experiencing softness, Heaven Hill is outperforming its competitors as a whole," Heaven Hill spokeswoman Lauren Newcomb told WDRB News in an email.
In a statement, the company confirmed it’s offering approximately 14 retirement buyouts to long-tenured rank-and-file employees as part of an effort to "optimize its operational framework" at the bottling plant.
The company is also reducing staffing through attrition and consolidating job functions at the plant so that employees will perform a wider range of tasks, according to documents obtained by WDRB and three employees who participated in meetings Thursday in which the company described the changes.
A slide shown to workers says the company is "returning closer to pre-pandemic staffing to support current business volumes" and indicates that the plant swelled from 246 employees to 361 during the surge in demand that started in 2020.
"In response to the pandemic, and the unique workforce challenges and restrictions associated with it, Heaven Hill increased its staffing levels to address the situation as needed," the company said in its statement. "Today, the company is realigning staffing to be more consistent with pre-pandemic standards, carefully considering its operational structure and changing demand while focusing on their people."
Newcomb declined to comment on the plant’s current staffing.
The president of UFCW Local 23D, the union that represents rank-and-file workers at the plant, called Heaven Hill's reorganization "maddening and disappointing" in a statement Friday afternoon.
The union said it filed charges Thursday with National Labor Relations Board over the plan, which it said would cut the number of job classifications available to its members in half.
“Heaven Hill proposed a plan that would significantly cut union jobs and have a massive impact on all distillery workers. Instead of meeting their legal obligation to bargain with the union, the company has chosen to illegally bypass us by going directly to workers and imposing their changes," UFCW Local 23D President Leslie Glazar said in the statement.
Heaven Hill, owned by the Shapira family, is one of the biggest privately held spirits companies in the U.S.
In Bardstown, it stores aging barrels and bottles whiskey distilled at its Bernheim Distillery in Louisville. The company is also putting finishing touches on a $135 million distillery in Bardstown that will double its capacity.
Newcomb said the bottling plant changes have "no impact" on the new distillery, which will open by early 2025.
In the last decade, established distillers such as Heaven Hill and a number of upstarts have pushed the number of aging bourbon barrels in Kentucky to nearly 13 million, according to the Kentucky Distillers Association.
While Heaven Hill’s financials are not public, some of its publicly traded competitors have noted a slowdown in demand recently.
"Demand for spirits has been normalizing after more than two years of outstanding growth," Brown-Forman Corp. CEO Lawson Whiting said on the company’s March 6 earnings call.
Brown-Forman, the maker of Jack Daniels Tennessee Whiskey and bourbons such as Woodford Reserve, said its sales are flatlining after double-digit increases in the company’s two previous fiscal years.
Consumers stocked up on spirits during COVID-19 lockdowns and are now contending with inflation and high interest rates, Whiting told analysts.
Diageo, the alcohol conglomerate that owns Bulleit bourbon, saw its volume decline 5% in the six months ended Dec. 31 while sales were flat.
