This is the story of Societe Brewing’s experience of becoming a regional brewery in the post-pandemic world and learning how to build their costs of goods sold (COGS) from the ground up. The hardest question is where to start.

This seminar provides actionable steps for breweries of any size to begin the long process of understanding the cost of production. From the brewer’s perspective, it explains how this process, while at times tedious, actually sets you free and allows you to make informed decisions in the brewery. We will discuss actionable changes Societe made in the brewery that helped to manage, track, and reduce COGS. While COGS reduction seems to be at odds with quality, we discuss how, through collaboration with the team, we weaved COGS data directly into our quality system.

Learning Objectives:

• Define COGS and learn how Societe worked with its accounting team to map them correctly
• Understand the Unit Economic Process and how to use it to validate your bill of materials (BOM)
• Discuss what Societe put into other costs, and how it uses the profit and loss (P&L) statement as a tool to validate new hires, raises, and maintenance expenses
• Talk through how Societe collaborated and challenged its entire operating system, providing actionable changes it implemented to reduce COGS
• Understand Societe’s quality system and how it made COGS another part of its data process