More than one million bottles of Carlton Dry beers were pulled from store shelves across Australia after dozens of complaints about the Carlton Dry beers were submitted regarding broken glass seen inside the bottles.
Voice Telegraph reports that Carlton & United Breweries, an Australian subsidiary of London-listed company SABMiller PIc which purchased the company in 2011, issued a statement on December 3, that it is recalling more than one million bottles of Carlton Dry beers due to reports of glass shards found inside the beer bottles.
After about a dozen of complaints came into Carlton & United, reporting about “a chip at the top of the glass beer bottles,” Carlto issued a recall of the large batch of the beer bottles. The Carlton Dry beer bottles that were recalled were from one production run in Queensland in October. The Carlton Dry beer bottles in question were also marked with a “3” on the cartons or a “3A” or “3B” on the bottles. The expiration dates of the beer bottles that were recalled were within July 19 to July 20, 2016.
While there were only a handful of bottles that were seen with the broken glass, SABMiller took it upon themselves to recall all the beer bottles that were produced alongside the incriminating bottles, saying that they had to do so to protect their customers and the quality of products that the company produced. The company, regarding the recall, said the following in their statement :
There may be an issue with one batch of stock as a result of packaging the product. This sort of thing is rare but we take the quality of our beers seriously.
Spokesperson for Carlton & United Jennifer Howard said that there were only a dozen or so who reported about the chip at the top of the Carlton Dry beer bottles and the company is already taking measures to investigate where the fault took place. The company believes that the chipping at the top of the beer bottles may have occurred during the bottling process, but they are still chin-deep into identifying the real source of the mishap.
The recall is only limited to Carlton Dry beer bottles and not cans.
Will the recall of the Carlton beer bottles cause the company much problems? Well, citizens might be discouraged from buying Carlton Dry beer for some time, just to take precaution. This may be a huge blow for the company’s image, especially since the holiday season is just around the corner, but Springfield Business Journal reports that in terms of inventory, the recalled Carlton Dry beer bottles only represent 1 percent of the company’s stocks on the shelves since Carlton & United sells an estimated 240 million bottles of Carlton Dry bottles a year.
Carlton Dry Beer bottles are now starting to be recalled at major retailers across Australia such as Woolworths, other retail liquor chains, bars and hotels. It’s almost summer and holiday season in Australia, the time of the year that beer and liquor sales are at its highest, and the glass shards issue will surely hit Carlton & United’s sales this year.
Recently, SABMiller was purchased by its biggest rival and the world’s biggest brewer, Anheuser-Busch InBev. According to CNN Money , Anheuser-Busch InBev is responsible for 18 of the world’s 40 most popular beers, with Bud Light and Budweiser at tops 3 and 4 respectively. Anheuser-Busch InBev owns not only a couple of breweries, but also some of the oldest brands, with famed Belgian wheat beer Hoegaarden in its portfolio, dating back to 1445.
SABMiller owns five brands in the top 40: Miller Lite, Castle, Chibuku, Carling Black Label, and Aguila. Carlton Dry might not be in the world’s top 40 list but in Australia, it remains to be one of the most famous beer brands in the Oz market.
[Image via SABMiller]
