CIFT Assists Toledo Spirits with PPE

Founded in 2013, Toledo Spirits is a craft distillery that makes premium spirits in a historic warehouse in downtown Toledo, Ohio. Their award-winning spirits are designed with care and made for great cocktails. The company's mission is focused on a committment to creating engaging spirits using meaningfully-sourced ingredients. The owners are firm believers in source transparency, and will gladly introduce anyone to the farmers they work with for their grains, fruits, and botanicals.

Faced with the prospect of being forced to shut down as a non-essential manufacturer in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Toledo Spirits saw an opportunity to not only help their community but also to continue to support their employees by being agile and transitioning to the production of hand sanitizer for healthcare and personal use.

Toledo Spirits was so successful in this endeavor that their demand for low-proof ethanol to distill outpaced their ability to ferment. They located a supplier of bulk industrial ethanol but this supplier's minimum order requirements were more than Toledo Spirits could process on their own. 

This is where CIFT and the Ohio MEP, part of the MEP National Network™, were able to provide assistance. Utilizing a broad network of craft distillers throughout the state of Ohio, CIFT identified additional distillers who had made the transition to sanitizer production, and connected them with Toledo Spirits. These new partnerships provided the distillery with the ethanol needed for production. Toledo Spirits could now produce at their maximum scale, thus increasing the overall amount of sanitizer available to Ohioans.