Distilleries and Breweries Pivot to Producing Hand Sanitizer

After a weekend barrage of social media posts documenting sanitizer shortages and soap aisle raids across America’s supermarkets, Melissa Hanesworth and Tara Engel felt they had to act. The two women also knew they were in a position to do something: They had jobs in manufacturing and public affairs at the New York-based North American division of Pernod Ricard SA, the $35 billion French spirits empire behind Absolut vodka and Jameson Irish whiskey. On March 16 they came up with a proposal to retool the corporation’s distilleries for something the country was in dire need of—industrial quantities of hand gel, a cleanser broadly sold out across the country since the outbreak of Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

They took their idea to Pernod Ricard’s regional head, Ann Mukherjee, who immediately signed off and began supervising a bat-out-of-hell turnaround. Within 48 hours, Hanesworth and Engel had placed a bulk order of chemicals and worked with the White House coronavirus task force to obtain clearance from regulators to begin manufacture. By March 20, Pernod Ricard’s facility in Fort Smith, Ark., where it makes Malibu coconut rum and Seagram’s gin, had produced 1,000 gallons of hand sanitizer. By the next day, President Trump was lauding the company at a news conference as a shining example of corporations stepping up to the challenge of fighting the global pandemic.