Reliability and Flexibility

Mobile pallet racking in a brewery’s cold warehouse.

January 18th, 2021 - 2 min read

Like many bars and restaurants, Abnormal Beer Co. was hit hard by the COVID crisis. Fortunately, its investment in Spacesaver mobile pallet racking in its cold warehouse paid off by allowing the brewery to quickly make the switch from kegs (used for in-person dining and events) to canned product (used for take-out). The mobile racking system also allowed the company to rent cold warehouse space to other breweries in the area.

Abnormal Beer was San Diego’s first brewery-winery-restaurant and, due to COVID restrictions, it was forced to temporarily close its dine-in operations starting in March 2020. “We skipped a beat for about a month,” said Jeff Milton, who manages logistics for the enterprise. “We had to close the restaurant and we took some time to regroup and think about everything. And then we hit the ground running.”

Reorganizing Pallet Racking

The Abnormal brewery had remained in operation during the restaurant’s closure, and staff noticed an interesting trend: as in-person restaurant sales declined, sales of canned beer skyrocketed. The business had purchased its own canning line the previous year, so they fired it up to full capacity and started canning 240 cases per day. “Now we can it instead of keg it,” Milton said.

Abnormal can store canned and kegged product in its own cold storage facility, thanks to a Spacesaver ActivRAC® Mobilized Storage System that optimizes space. The system consists of pallet racking on a carriage-and-rail system that’s powered by electronic controls.

cold storage pallet racking beer storage

heavy-duty mobile storage pallet racking abnormal beer

Read the full case study to learn more about why Abnormal Beer installed mobile pallet racking in the cold warehouse. View Project.

Flexiable Storage Solutions

The ActivRAC mobile pallet racking system saves so much space that Abnormal is able to rent out storage to other breweries as an additional revenue stream. It’s been invaluable to have flexible space in the cold warehouse and a reliable way to access every pallet position, Milton said. That’s especially true at a time when Abnormal and its cold storage clients are switching up product lines to meet new demand. “Sometimes we’ll get a company that needs to store 40 pallets of product for a month, and then they move it out. Then we have other clients that take up a steady amount of space continually, from month to month.”

“It’s been very reliable.”

– Jeff Milton

As of January 2021, the restaurant is open again, albeit with strict limits on capacity, and most of the kitchen staff have returned to work. Milton said he’s grateful for the ActivRAC system’s reliability and flexibility, along with the customer service he received from Spacesaver and the San Diego-based distributor. “Overall the system has been really good,” he said. “Customer service has been phenomenal, and it’s been a pleasure to work with Spacesaver.”