Buy Your Beau’s Online – Forced Offline!

Today is a very sad day for beer lovers in Ottawa! It should have been a very happy day with the launch of Buy Your Beau’s Online or BYBO. BYBO is a partnership between Beau’s Brewery and Operation Come Home. The service was designed to allow lovers of Beau’s Beer in Ottawa to order their beer online and have it delivered to their door. The innovative home delivery service was intended to provide employment to at-risk youth, as well as raise money to fund programs and services for the Operation Come Home.

Today, the same day as the launch of the program, the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO) informed Beau’s Beer and Operation Come Home that they could no longer continue their home delivery service. The AGCO  was acting on a complaint from an unspecified brewery. (I hope who ever complained will come forward to explain their reasoning!) Since the reasoning is a little complicated to explain I am taking it directly from the Beau’s media release:

“The nature of the complaint, brought to the attention of the AGCO by a competing brewery, is a technicality in the Home Delivery Service license’s wording. It states that alcohol intended for home delivery can only be purchased from the LCBO (a crown corporation), or The Beer Store, a foreign-owned, privately held corporation run by the parent companies of big breweries Molson, Labatts, and Sleeman.The Home Delivery Service license makes no mention of microbreweries or small wineries, whose presence in the market has flourished in recent years. Microbreweries like Beau’s All Natural are currently allowed to sell alcohol to the public under a Manufacturer’s License.”

So pretty much unless you’re the province of Ontario or one of the huge foreign companies  that controls the Beer Store, forget about operating a delivery service. I understand that it was a business decision but all businesses should look at more than the bottom-line when making decision. While this program would have mostly likely increased sales for Beau’s, it would have also given at least two young people who haven’t had a lot of chances in life a chance. It would’ve given them a chance to make some money, to gain work experience and to feel like a contributing member of the community. If helping get the life of a young person on track isn’t a good enough reason to let this program move forward, then maybe an economical argument would work.The cost of keeping a youth in the shelter system is not easily defined, but estimates are between $30,000 – $40,000 per year. Would it not be better to have them earning $30,000 – $40,000 a year or more and have them pay into taxes. That’s my rant for this evening but please make your voice heard so that we can get this decision changed and have Buy Your Beau’s Online back online!

For more information check out the Beau’s blog HERE 

Beau’s Beer  – www.beaus.ca or on Twitter @beausallnatural

Operation Come Home – www.operationcomehome.ca