Diageo has confirmed a “pause” of its intention to add a fourth distillery to Crown Royal Canadian whisky’s production footprint in the country.
In March 2022, the brand owner’s North America division lined up a CAD245m (then-US$191.2m) spend on a new facility in Lambton County, Ontario, near the US border. The distillery will have an annual production capacity of 20m litres of pure alcohol, Diageo said at the time, and would be its first original carbon-neutral facility in Canada.
Local reports last week, however, cited the Mayor of St. Clair Township in the county as saying he’d been advised that the plans had been put on hold. “We started a meeting, and they just came out and said that they were doing a pause,” Mayor Jeff Agar told CTV News. “They didn’t say they were closing, or anything like that. They just said they were doing a pause for right now.”
When contacted by Global Drinks Intel, a company spokesperson confirmed the decision, “given the dynamic nature of our broader business and our emphasis on productivity”.
The spokesperson added: “We will be revisiting plans and timeline at a later date, as part of our regular review of investments and priorities across our supply chain footprint.”
In data released by US trade association the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States this week – to highlight the risk of President-elect Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on Canadian imports – Canadian whisky was shown to have been in long-term decline in its main export market. Since 2013, when US exports totalled US$309.5m, the category’s ten-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) declined by 4.2%, totalling $202.5m last year.
In its original announcement in 2022, Diageo claimed Crown Royal is the world’s top-selling Canadian whisky and North America’s most valuable whisk(e)y brand.
