MillerCoors Trenton brewery
What: Brewery of 65 beer brands
Where: 2525 Wayne Madison Road, St. Clair Twp.
Interim Plant Manager: Jon Hussey
Plant Manager: Denise Quinn
MillerCoors Chief Executive Officer: Tom Long
Local employees: 550
Website: www.millercoors.com
TRENTON — MillerCoors brewery outside of Trenton celebrates 20 years of producing beer this year.
The brewery, one of the largest employers in Butler County, employs 550 people and has a payroll worth $68 million, said interim Plant Manager Jon Hussey. Last year, employees produced close to 9.4 million barrels of beer and are on track to do the same this year, he said.
The brewery is the largest in Ohio and the second largest producer for MillerCoors.
“We have room to grow. We have capacity left in the brewery,” Hussey said.
The plant this year started producing two new beer brands: Molson Golden and Molson Ice. Production of Molson Ice started about two to three months ago and of Golden about six weeks ago. The new brands won’t likely generate large upswings in overall production volumes for the year because Hussey said Molson is only about 1 percent of the company’s sales.
In the past year, Hussey said the plant has accomplished three major tasks: increasing its safety rate 50 percent, decreasing consumer complaints by 6 percent and upping its overall fill rate, satisfying customer orders, of 14 percent.
After Hussey became interim manager in August 2010 while Plant Manager Denise Quinn was put on special assignment, he said safety was his top priority. The plant implemented safety culture grass-roots teams that have the employees thinking safety first, he said. The teams have also worked to be proactive to identify unsafe conditions. More than 100 issues were identified and corrected without incident, he said.
Beer-making isn’t the same as it used to be. When the plant started operating in 1991, it brewed three to four Miller brands. Now it makes 65 brands, Hussey said. It also makes beer with more than 500 different product configurations, such as 12-packs or six-packs; cans or bottles; and each brand with a different label.
Ed McBrien, MillerCoors president of sales and distribution operations, was in Hamilton Friday for the Great Water Month event. He said the company is still sorting out business details after a merger of Miller and Coors three years ago.
Before the merger, Miller had six breweries, including the local one, and Coors had two. The merger allowed the Chicago-based beer maker to bring products closer to customers, McBrien said.
McBrien said 25 percent of Trenton’s production is legacy Coors brands, which is good for employment. The fact the plant here makes 65 brands provides a safety net to stay busy if one brand is selling better than the other, he said.
But the state of the U.S. economy is a challenge for beer production. McBrien said key beer consumers are typically young adult males who have some of the highest unemployment rates. If they can afford to buy beer, they might be picking a six- pack over a 12-pack, for example.
Beer sales haven’t been down since Prohibition, the outlawing of alcohol in the 1920s, he said.
Hussey said the Trenton brewery’s plans for the future are to stay focused on managing the complexity of a growing number of beer lines and configurations. “That’s where we see our growth in managing that complexity,” Hussey said. “The consumer wants what they want and we need to be able to do that.”
His brewery is the second largest producer in the MillerCoors network of eight U.S. breweries. Part of that volume is because it’s also the second newest of all the breweries, which means it has relatively new technology and processes, they said.
McBrien said the local brewery is a model of efficiency in the company due to its age and a productive work force. He said the company uses a team approach in running the brewery.
“There’s a real sense of pride in how productive they are,” McBrien said of the brewery’s workers.
Besides its economic impact, the brewery strives to be a steward of the Great Miami Buried Valley Aquifer, according to company officials becaue water is a key ingredient in beer.
MillerCoors employees volunteered Friday for the company’s third annual Great Water Month to label storm drains along the Great Miami River to prevent people from dumping harmful products into the drains.
Contact this reporter at (513) 705-2551 or clevingston@coxohio.com.
About the Author