Good first impressions aren’t about handshakes or eye contact or a certain look; they’re about tone. It’s all about good vibrations (think The Beach Boys or Marky Mark featuring the Funky Bunch). When Matt Leslie and his business partner Kevin Pederson launched their business back in 2014, they weren’t only tasked with setting the tone in British Columbia where new craft breweries were – and still are – popping-up every month; they were starting something that would quickly resonate coast-to- coast. West Coast Canning was Canada’s first mobile canning endeavour but Matt would be the first person to tell you that being the first out of the gate wasn’t the most crucial element to reaching 90-plus customers throughout BC and Alberta.
“People are leaving their jobs; they’re re-mortgaging their homes to start these craft breweries,” he explained. “That’s why people look for a company like us when they’re ready to can their product. They want someone who cares as much about the business and about craft beer as they do – and that’s us. They’re basically giving us their “baby” and asking us to wrap it up.” Kevin’s andMatt’s attention to detail has even earned both of them nicknames in the craft beer industry: they’re widely known as Mr. 473ml andMr. 355 ml, respectively. Spotlight on Business had the opportunity to chat with Mr. 473ml in late 2017 and it turns out that their reputations have earned thema lot more than nicknames. A little over a year agoWest Coast Canningmerged with Canada’s secondmobile canning company, Sessions Craft Canning out of Toronto, to become the nation’s foremost full servicemobile packaging solution for craft breweries, cideries, distilleries, and wineries.
By David MacDonald H ow is it that West Coast Canning was the first to the punch in the mobile canning game, Matt? ML: Kevin, my business partner, had the idea back in 2012. Kevin’s the guy who’s always looking for the new thing. He’s the guy who saw it all coming down the pipe. We were watching the US market and there were a lot of guys down in Colorado doing well servicing the craft beer market. A couple of years later craft beer really started to take off in BC. Breweries like Brassneck, 33 Acres, and Parallel 49 were doing really well so Kevin and I started to revisit the whole idea. I was in Victoria at the time; he was in Prince George. We started pre-selling the idea and people were really into it. Cans were a bit of a novelty – and difficult to get into – but we decided to go ahead. We purchased the equip- ment, got the truck, did some training and went to work. A year later, over 20 breweries opened in the province and we really started to get busy – now there’s over one hundred in BC alone. That was more or less how the whole thing started. And I understand that West Coast Canning has a birthday coming up – is that right? ML: In March of 2018 we’ll be four years old. We have clients we’re working with now who we were working with three years ago or even longer. We’re working at a much higher capacity now and so are most of them. We see some of these brewers once a week now. It’s been wild to see these guys grow. If it wasn’t for riding their coat tails we wouldn’t be where we are today. They get busier and then as a col-
lective we get busier. It’s been really neat to be a part of it and to see the industry grow as whole.
There are breweries we work with that I wouldn’t even put in the category of clients; they’re friends. These are people we text, we see on weekends, we see around our neigh- bourhoods. It’s pretty darn cool; it’s a really cool industry for that sort of thing. Matt, what does 90-plus clients and four years in business look like in cans? ML: I actually just checked with someone in accounting and it’s actually up to 9.5 million cans now – we’ve done over 700,000 since filling out the research questions for your magazine. We’ll be close to 10 million by the end of 2017. What that- computed to over the summer with the summer months being our busiest time was about 25,000 cans a day between our three canning lines in BC and Alberta. It was a fair bit. Six to 8 months down the road we brought in the shrink- sleever. We realized that the barrier to entry was not just the packaging equipment but also the can itself. We were outsourcing cans at the time in the shrink-sleeve can format – and they were expensive. So we decided to bring that in-house and we saved the breweries we worked with a fair amount of money – and we made some more money on our Originally we started with just the one canning line in 2014.
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FEBRUARY 2018 • SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
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