National Beer Wholesalers Association‘s Distributors Against Human Trafficking initiative has just trained it’s 26,000th distributor employee to “spot signs of this terrible and pervasive crime,” NBWA Chairman Pat Blach of Blach Distributing told attendees at NBWA’s 84th annual convention and trade show.
“We have been overwhelmed by the incredible response,” he said. “We initially set out to train 10,000 employees by the end of 2021, yet by April, we had already exceeded that goal. So, we raised our goal again to training 25,000 employees by the end of the year. I’m proud to say that we’ve just passed our goal with more than 26,000 distributors trained!”
The Beer Across America survey, which NBWA conducts with the Beer Institute, found that the total beer industry, from brewers to retailers, generates more than 2.2 million jobs, providing more than $103 billion in wages and benefits to American workers and families, he said.
And he noted that the NBWA Beer Purchasers’ Index was the first to alert distributors to problems in the seltzer market as it reported the largest single drop ever in the FMB/seltzer index.
To remind retailers of beer’s importance, NBWA has developed its Beer First toolkit that helps distributors demonstrate that beer is a valuable category that “brings consumers to their outlets and generates lift, velocity and profits.”