Ontario premier Doug Ford has stressed he will remove Diageo’s Crown Royal whisky from local store shelves once the group’s bottling facility in the province shuts next month.
When asked at a press conference yesterday (5 January) whether Ford would be pulling the Canadian whisky from LCBO shelves, he said: “100%, I am”.
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In the briefing, broadcast by Global News, the premier said bottles would be taken away “as soon as they close that plant”.
Diageo announced plans to close the Amherstburg facility in August. Operations at the Crown Royal bottling site are due to cease in February.
Ford added that he was solely focusing on Crown Royal products “for now”.
According to Global News reports, the premier’s office said in September it was too soon to say whether other Diageo brands could be removed from the shelves and noted “every option is on the table”.
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By GlobalDataWhen the closure was announced last year, Diageo said Crown Royal would continue to be “mashed, distilled and aged in Canada”.
The group’s Canadian headquarters and warehouse operations were expected to remain in the Greater Toronto area, while bottling and distillation locations would also remain in Valleyfield Quebec, as well as in Gimbli, Manitoba.
Ford however told reporters yesterday that while a “little production” was happening in Manitoba and Quebec, “it’s all going to Alabama, mark my words”.
He added: “They said they were going to invest in St. Clair, Ontario… they pulled the carpet out from underneath us. All I’m saying is that as a businessperson, if you have your number one customer spending hundreds of millions of dollars, why would you try to hurt that customer?”
Diageo revealed plans to invest C$245m ($178m) in a new distillery for Crown Royal in St. Clair township in 2022. It had then estimated construction would start later that year and be complete by 2025.
By 2024 however, it became clear this timeline would not be met. The company confirmed to Just Drinks in November that year it had put construction of the new distillery on hold.
A company spokesperson then said it had “decided to pause the development of our facility in Lambton County’s St. Clair Township” on the basis of “the dynamic nature of our broader business and our emphasis on productivity”.
The company was expected to “be revisiting plans and a timeline at a later date, as part of our regular review of investments and priorities across our supply chain footprint”.
Early last year, Diageo announced plans to inject $415m into a new production and manufacturing site in Alabama in the US.
The Johnnie Walker maker then said the site in Montgomery, Alabama, would “enhance” its North America supply chain operations and “support” the future growth of its export business.
