It was nice to see members of RCSE on Friday even if it was at a virtual meeting! Laura Lane McKinnon announced that previous member Larry Silbermann is now the United Way Board Chair and current member Terry Enoch is the United Way Campaign Chair - congratulations! It was also discussed on the call that Eric Meyerhoff is recovering from Gall Bladder surgery at Pruitt Home Care. If you would like to send Eric a note, please mail it to:
Eric Meyerhoff at Pruitt Health
Room 401
12825 White Bluff Road
Savannah, GA 31419
For our first Zoom Meeting, Laura Lane McKinnon reached out to Chris Sywassink at Ghost Coast Distillery to talk to the club about how they are making hand sanitizer.
Chris began the meeting saying that a core philosophy of Ghost Coast Distillery is to give back to the community any way that they can. They quickly realized that they could help keep some of their employees (they did have to lay off a few) and help the Savannah area by making hand sanitizer. The process for making alcohol and hand sanitizer is similar in that they use a lot of the same ingredients. For their hand sanitizer, they use 170 proof alcohol, 1% glycerin (this helps the mixture gel), 3% hydrogen peroxide, and a bittering agent so people won't want to ingest the sanitizer. The recipe is from the WHO and FDA. Once all the ingredients are mixed, they test to make sure the mixture meets all the parameters set by the WHO and the FDA. Once that is done, the sanitizer moves to the bottling side of the operation.
The hand sanitizer is sold by the case. Each case contains 12 one liter bottles and sells for $121.80. The hand sanitizer is sold to everyone with about 64% of sales going to the general public. The price point of the sanitizer allows them to keep employees, pay bills and stay afloat during this time. So far, 30,000 bottles of hand sanitizer has gone out the door. The only possible constraint in production would be the supply chain on bottles and caps. As long as it stays positive, they will be fine to continue making sanitizer at the same rate. If need be, they can flip the production line from hand sanitizer back to alcohol consumption products within 30 hours. If you would like to purchase a case of hand sanitizer, please email Jack in order to place an order: jack@ghostcoastdistillery.com