The second-generation owner of Mountain Cider Company, Will Gormly, found an opportunity to capitalize on Amazon’s seller offerings to streamline the biggest pain point of his business into a new revenue stream.
The premier cider manufacturer located in Chittenden, Vermont, developed a shelf-stable product 30 years ago that restaurants and coffee shops love. The product solved a need. However, fresh apple cider, the taste synonymous with the holidays, is a difficult product to vend. Typically, it is only available in season and close to where it’s grown. Fresh cider starts to ferment within a week and bottled ciders contain preservatives to keep the product from going bad.
Will Gormly’s dad, Bill, decided to concentrate it. Three decades later, the Mountain Cider Company’s cider concentrate still contains only apples and spice, boiled down to form a concentrate that chefs, baristas and bartenders mix with water to produce a gourmet cider offering.
It’s a wholesale business that works in bulk, but not in retail. Margins are slim, said Gormly, and grocery stores take too much in chargebacks and slotting fees. There wasn’t a store you could reliably go to and just buy a jug of their cider concentrate. It meant that, every time a new wholesale customer would ask, “Where can I try your product,” Gormly was forced to make a box, fill a pint and ship it off—a process that took time and money.
One day, it didn’t add up. Someone could do this better and cheaper.
“I am not a traveling salesman,” he said with a laugh. “Amazon is my salesman.”
Amazon gave Gormly a place to point people who wanted to taste the product and enrolling in Fulfillment by Amazon(FBA) made it economical to sell and ship single jugs. Shipping with FBA costs 70% less per unit than comparable premium options offered by other U.S. fulfillment services. And in a business where margins matter, every penny to Gormly counts.
“It’s beautiful,” said Gormly. “Instead of people calling or emailing us saying, ‘Hey, we want this for our coffee shop, can you send us a sample?’ They just buy it on Amazon, it arrives a day later and they say, ‘Okay, now we want to set up a wholesale account with you.’”
Amazon, he said, is the marketing channel that he’s tapping into to gain wholesale customers across the country and the logistics partner he’s using to handle the small sales that didn’t add up before. Now, those single-unit sales provide a separate revenue stream for the business owner.
It’s working so well that Gormly started selling single pints and gallon jugs on his own site, using Buy with Prime.
“Why not,” he said. His product is already in Amazon Fulfillment Centers and, on average, Buy with Prime increases the chance of an off-Amazon customer purchase by 25% with packages arriving to customers in 1.9 days on average, per NielsenIQ.
“I’ve gotten chain restaurant accounts because their executive chef bought it in the Amazon store and they’re like, ‘Hey, we tried it. It’s already good. We have the recipe developed, send us a pallet.’”
And that’s happened more than a few times, said Gormly. As a small business with just two employees, Gormly said Amazon is helping him where and when he needs. It’s giving him the chance to scale and streamline—two things that often don’t go hand in hand.