As the primary distribution and sales channel for beer in Ontario, The Beer Store operates 441 stores and services 600 government-owned Liquor Control Board of Ontario retail locations. Handling hundreds of millions of bottles every year, The Beer Store runs a complex bottle-deposit/return system and has a commitment to recovering all of its beer packaging

This makes the Beer Store a global leader in the practice of “extended producer responsibility” – taking back all of its packaging material. From bottles, caps and plastic six-pack ring holders to boxes and bags, the Beer Store accepts all packaging at each of its retail locations.

The company estimates that it has diverted more than 70 billion beer bottles from Ontario landfills. “It’s hard to find the background history because the Beer Store has just always been operating like this” since its founding in 1927, says communications manager Sara Taylor.

The Beer Store stocks hundreds of varieties of beer, and its distribution centers ship more than 24 million cases and 500,000 kegs across the province each year. The user-pay system holds a 10-cent deposit on each bottle and can, which can be reclaimed when they are returned to a Beer Store location. The bottles are sanitized and reused between 12 and 15 times during their lifecycle. The company also picks up more than 100,000 tons of beer packaging annually and has a system-wide recovery and reuse rate of 99 percent.

Taylor credits the success of the program to Ontarians’ history of recycling. “Consumers have just adopted that habit and made it part of what they do,” she says. “As a result, the return rates on these containers are fantastic.”

With return stations at all points of sale, the Beer Store makes it convenient for customers to bring back their packaging when buying more beer. Over the years, the company has invested in computers, terminals and security features to handle the collections.

In February 2007, the province implemented a deposit system for all of the wine and spirits containers sold at Liquor Control Board of Ontario retail locations and hired the Beer Store to handle bottle returns. The 10 percent increase in containers wasn’t a problem, Taylor says, but the Beer Store would now be receiving different types of bottles that had to be collected and sorted, and varying deposit amounts would have to be refunded.

“Our computer values were all focused on one deposit value,” she says. “We needed a solution that would not add any time at the point of sale for our employees.”

Colin Haig, program principal for SAP Retail, says that the SAP POS software is a key to operational processes at the Beer Store. The system can adapt very quickly to changes and, with little more than minor tweaks to the software, the Beer Store was able to deploy the new business rules automatically over the network. Now, at each Beer Store POS station, employees can accept numerous types of bottles and either give customers cash back or apply the returned deposit toward the next purchase.

“The whole process and transaction only takes a couple of seconds,” Haig says.

More retailers turning green
Using the POS system to track sales and returns, the Beer Store is able to create logistical efficiencies by ensuring that trucks leave with enough full bottles, yet still have enough space to return empty ones. The ability to make rapid changes in operating processes is a major advantage as more retailers move toward green practices, Haig says.

“For retailers, that kind of agility is a very big deal; they don’t necessarily know what is coming around the corner,” he says. “Every retailer faces the challenge of how quickly they can respond to [industry] changes.”

For its efforts, the Beer Store was one of the first companies presented with the Eco Logo designation by the Environmental Choice Program, a Canadian organization with a five-step certification process that ranks a company’s commitment to the environment.