Like ABI, Coke and many other cos, Molson Coors today abandoned its 2020 and beyond guidance. Molson Coors is "withdrawing in its entirety, its financial outlook for 2020 and beyond," co said. Recall, it expected to return to EBITDA growth in 2021. Difficult to make any kind of go-forward call now. At same time, it announced "several initiatives aimed at protecting and supporting employees." Those included a "new voluntary paid leave program for" April "available to any employee whose work must be done on site and is at high risk for severe outcomes of coronavirus." Employees deemed "high risk" by "federal health authorities" can get "paid leave of 60% of their regular wages." Molson Coors also "instituted a thank you pay incentive for brewery and Molson Coors distribution employees, whose work must be done on site." They'll get "an additional $5 for every hour of work." That's additional $200 per week (if they work 40-hr week). Then too, Molson Coors "created a new paid leave policy" so that anyone who is forced to quarantine for 2 weeks still get paid in that time. And Molson Coors also "implemented additional measures to protect our employees… including stepped up cleaning and sanitizing processes and encouraging social distancing."

"Over 300" employees lost their jobs at Deschutes, mostly (~250) from their various tasting room operations, but spanning all departments including sales, marketing, production and admin jobs, founder Gary Fish told Oreg Live. That's over 60% of its entire staff! About 45% of its biz has been effectively shut down as co derives ~20% from taproom sales and another ~25% from on-prem draft. "We did it with an eye toward those employees qualifying for unemployment as quickly as possible, and in most cases we facilitated that action," Gary added. "As soon as the volume justifies it," co hopes to hire back as many folks as possible. But that could be a long road ahead, as Deschutes takin' a methodical, "realistic and conservative" approach toward recovery, sales and marketing veep Neal Stewart explained to INSIGHTS separately. See much more detail on

Today, Constellation announced "a collective commitment of more than $2.5 million to COVID-19 relief efforts," mainly targeted at the hard-hit restaurant and bar industry. In partnership with several of its flagship brands, including Corona Extra, co donated $1 mil to upcoming launch of National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation's (NRAEF) Restaurant Employee Relief Fund. Constellation also pledged $500K to the US Bartenders' Guild - a nonprofit that supports bartenders and other service industry professionals - in partnership with Modelo Especial, while Modelo separately contributed an additional $250K to support first responders across the US.

Extraordinary scale of COVID-19 impacts to US and global economy leading to extraordinary measures. US Senate unanimously passed a stimulus bill estimated to inject some $2 trillion into economy to keep it afloat. Most key measures among those discussed deeply in recent weeks, including direct payments to American citizens, bolstering unemployment support, offering emergency loans to small bizzes that keep employees and targeted bail-outs for hard-hit companies and industries. Bill sets aside a half-trillion $$ for fund controlled by Fed Reserve for biz and industry-specific loans. House will take up compromise bill tomorrow, with hope that it will be signed into law by end of week. It's easily largest stimulus bill ever passed.

Sure looks like domestic brewers did not build inventories Jan-Feb. Fed taxpaid shipments by domestic brewers off 81K bbls, 0.7%, estimates Beer Inst. That followed similar slip in Jan. Taxpaids -154K bbls, -0.6% for 2 mos. Early-yr reports can be a bit funky and still may have not caught up with seltzer surge. Meanwhile, even amidst recent off-premise buying spree, lotsa draft inventory sittin' in distribs' warehouses right now with nowhere to go, we hear. (See above.) So, lotsa puts and takes.

Adaptations due to coronavirus comin' fast and furious. Express got a copy of a message a large distrib sent one of its suppliers in recent days. Supplier had asked whether its brands had been abruptly "withheld" earlier this week from distribs' (thousands of) retail customers. Turns out, distrib decided last week that in the interests of streamlining and safekeeping its warehouse and delivery ops, it would limit number of SKUs it would make available to its customers beginning earlier this week - effectively excluding dozens of small suppliers from its deliveries. Distrib hopes strategy will be very temporary and plans ongoing review, but who knows?

Prior to becoming prexy of Diageo North America, Deirdre Mahlan was CFO for all of Diageo, not just North America. And in our haste, we also misspelled her name yesterday. INSIGHTS regrets the errors.

Just as alc bev producers and distribs have been deemed "essential" by various states, so too have cannabis producers and retail outlets. There are articles all over the map about how cannabis is "essential," staying open and gaining ability to allow curbside pick-ups and online orders in several cases. This is happening in both developed mkts with legal recreational sales like CA, OR and NV (delivery only) as well as newer ones like MI, and several mkts with medical-only sales, ranging from NY, NJ, PA, FL and OH to smaller states like NM, NH and NE, according to Forbes report. Recreational states like MA are making the distinction that only medical operations are exempt from shutdown and similarly WA and IL only allowing medical patients to do curbside pickups despite exempting all cannabis biz from stay-at-home orders.