Where to Put the Beer: Channel Placement for Truly Gluten-Free Beer
Your distributor's map is where beer sells. It is not where the gluten-free customer lives, which the regional data shows, and it is not where they shop, which this page shows. The customer is the same one on every page of this section: someone who reads labels, asks a question before they buy, and walks when the answer is vague. That customer decides the channel, and the brewery's job is to be on the shelf they already stand in front of.
Watch on YouTubeWhere to Put Gluten-Free Beer: Not the Gas StationThe doors that actually sell this beer, and the ones that waste a placement.
The customer picks the channel
The gluten-free buyer does homework. They read the label, check the ingredient panel, look up the brewery, and ask the person behind the counter what the beer is made from. That behaviour is documented, and it points at a kind of store: one where the staff can answer, where the shelf already carries food this customer trusts, and where a gluten-free claim is understood before the beer arrives. Specialty grocery, health-oriented retail, and restaurants used to ingredient questions shorten the bridge between seeing the beer and trusting it.
A convenience-store cooler answers nothing. Nobody there knows what sorghum is, the customer who reads labels is not in that aisle, and the beer sits until it is out of date. The fastest-moving beer door in the county is the wrong door for this beer.
Bard's target location profile
Bard's wrote the placement down. The 2020 sales plan, the internal planning document for the relaunch, set a target location profile for every distributor to work from:
Off premise. Grocery locations that have wellness or health sections internally or stores that specialize in health and nutrition. Examples include Sprouts, Whole Foods, and Hy-Vee with Health Markets. Large and medium liquor stores.
On premise. Restaurants that have a gluten-free menu.
The same plan drew the line between the two channels that most breweries blur. On-premise accounts, bars and restaurants, "are not focused on volume, they are focused on getting the consumer introduced to the beer and making subsequent purchases at off-premise locations." Off-premise accounts, where the customer takes the beer home, "are the primary volume drivers." A restaurant with a gluten-free menu is where the customer meets the beer and keeps the table; the liquor store and the grocer are where the cases move.
Two more things the plan recorded. Legacy locations, the accounts that had carried Bard's before, "have been recently shown to have a higher adoption rate as well as significantly better velocity", so the relaunch went back to them first. And the whole plan ran on two metrics: the number of points of distribution, and the average sales velocity per point. Its low-end planning assumption was one case per point per month.
Where the beer sat: the 2014 placement record
At its widest, Bard's was on the shelf in 6,453 locations across the United States and Canada, per the retail location list dated 28 August 2014. We classified every location by its name. The method is rough, a store called "Market" can be a grocer or a liquor store, and about a fifth of the names give no clue at all, so read the table as the shape of the placement, not a census:
| Channel, by store name | Locations | Share of the 6,453 |
|---|---|---|
| Liquor, wine and beer stores | 3,020 | 47% |
| Grocery and supermarket | 842 | 13% |
| Restaurants, bars and taprooms | 840 | 13% |
| Health food and natural grocers | 455 | 7% |
| Convenience, gas and general stores | 88 | 1.4% |
| Not classifiable by name | 1,208 | 19% |
Half the doors were liquor stores. A fifth were grocers and natural grocers. An eighth were on-premise. Roughly one door in seventy was a convenience or gas store, and that is with the classification catching every "Mart", "Stop" and "Express" it could.
The same list, read by chain, is the plan's own national target list with its 2014 legacy store counts: Whole Foods 184 stores, Total Wine 70, Sprouts 56, Wegmans 47, Kroger 30, Publix 25. Those are the chains where a gluten-free aisle already existed and where the beer had already earned a slot.
One more thing the list shows: the two biggest state and province counts after California and Colorado were British Columbia and Alberta, both private liquor-retail markets. Where the liquor store is the grocery store for beer, gluten-free beer found its door.
What moved: sixteen weeks of the 2019 relaunch
Placement is where the beer sits. Velocity is whether it moves. The relaunch gives one dated read on that: a distributor retail-account report covering sixteen weeks from 28 April to 13 August 2019, 290 accounts, 609 case equivalents. Same name-based classification, same caveat:
| Channel, by account name | Accounts | Cases, 16 weeks | Cases per account |
|---|---|---|---|
| Liquor, wine and beer stores | 160 | 317 | 2.0 |
| Grocery and supermarket | 30 | 93 | 3.1 |
| Restaurants and bars | 12 | 16 | 1.3 |
| Health food and natural grocers | 2 | 4 | 2.0 |
| Convenience and general stores | 9 | 37 | 4.1 |
| Not classifiable by name | 77 | 142 | 1.8 |
Read it with the sample sizes in view. Liquor stores were more than half the doors and half the cases. Grocery moved half again as much per door as liquor stores did, which is the turn the target profile was written for. Restaurants moved the least per door, exactly as the plan expected of a trial channel. Health food and natural grocers were two accounts in a sixteen-week relaunch window; the natural chains had not been re-signed yet, so the 2019 read says nothing about them either way.
The convenience row is the one to be honest about. Nine accounts, and two of them, an Ohio carryout and a Massachusetts general store, account for most of the cases. Nine accounts and two outliers are not evidence for or against the channel. The case against the gas-station cooler does not come from this table. It comes from the customer, from Bard's own profile, and from a placement record in which those doors were one in seventy.
The two numbers
A placement plan is doors times cases per door per month. Everything else is detail.
| Doors | Cases per door per month | Cases a year |
|---|---|---|
| 250 | 1 | 3,000 |
| 250 | 3 | 9,000 |
| 1,000 | 1 | 12,000 |
| 1,000 | 3 | 36,000 |
The one-case row is the plan's low-end planning assumption. The three-case row is what grocery doors ran in the 2019 window. The arithmetic is ours. Set it beside the market estimate: a thousand doors at three cases a month is 36,000 cases a year, a little over a tenth of one percent of the national volume. Placement, not market size, is what a brewery controls.
How to pick your doors
- Start with the liquor stores that have a craft wall and staff who work it. They were half of Bard's doors and half its cases. Ask the distributor for the accounts that already carry sorghum or millet beer; those buyers have had the conversation.
- Get into the natural grocers and the health food stores. Fewer doors, the right customer, a gluten-free set that already exists. The plan named Sprouts, Whole Foods and Hy-Vee's Health Markets; your region has its own.
- In grocery chains, ask where gluten-free is merchandised before you take the slot. A chain that runs a gluten-free section puts your beer in front of the customer who is looking for it. A chain that mixes gluten-free into the general set puts it in front of nobody. The plan flagged that question for every chain pitch.
- Use restaurants with a gluten-free menu for trial, and count them as trial. One beer on that menu keeps a table and sends the customer to the liquor store. It will not carry the volume, and it is not supposed to.
- Go back to legacy accounts first if you have them. They re-adopt faster and turn faster.
- Skip the convenience cooler unless the account is a destination carryout with staff who know the beer. It is the fastest door in the county for lager and the slowest for this.
- Measure cases per door every month, and prune. A door that does not turn is a door your distributor stops visiting. Fewer doors that turn beat more doors that sit.
What this page is not
It is not a distributor contract, a chain-buyer playbook or a forecast. The placement record is Bard's, 2014 to 2020, and the channel tables are our classification of store names in two dated documents, with the limits stated above. Chains reset, retailers close, and a region's natural-grocer set is its own. Use the profile and the two numbers, and build the door list for your own territory.
Sources
- Bard's Brewing, Sales Plan 2020, version 8: an internal planning document for the 2019–2020 relaunch. The target location profile, the on-premise and off-premise roles, the legacy-location finding, the points-of-distribution and velocity metrics, and the national chain target list with its 2014 legacy store counts are quoted or transcribed from it.
- Bard's Brewing, retail location list, 28 August 2014: 6,453 locations in the United States and Canada. The channel classification by store name is Gluten Free Brewer's.
- Distributor retail-account velocity report for Bard's Brewing, sixteen weeks, 28 April to 13 August 2019: 290 accounts, 609 case equivalents. The channel classification by account name is Gluten Free Brewer's; individual accounts are not published.
- Where the Audience Lives for the regional data this page's opening refers to.
- The arithmetic in "The two numbers" is Gluten Free Brewer's. Decision owner: Craig Belser, 2026-09-23.