Iron Heart provides canning option for mixed culture beverages

After nine years of having to avoid the growing trend of mixed culture beverage products, Iron Heart Canning, the nation’s largest mobile cannery, has a solution, launching a first-of-its-kind mobile canning program for sours and live cultures, products fermented with Brettanomyces or other wild yeasts, Kombucha, probiotics, and other mixed fermented products.

“As the craft industry continues to grow more competitive, we believe that offering canned mixed fermented products will allow our customers to differentiate themselves in a big way on crowded retail shelves,” said Tyler Wille, CEO of Iron Heart.

Initially launching in select geographies, with plans to eventually offer the service across their entire footprint, Iron Heart will deploy dedicated canning lines and related equipment to the program to fully isolate the service from its traditional mobile canning offering, where they have strict policies to only package clean products. Iron Heart has also tailored specific cleaning, sanitation, and quality control practices to the mixed fermentation canning to package the products with the highest quality possible.

“At Iron Heart, there is nothing more important than protecting the quality of the finished product,” said Wille. “To this point in our history, we have been unable to offer packaging services for mixed culture products due to the heightened risk of cross contamination with traditional clean fermented products, which is the core of our business. Now that we have the resources to dedicate equipment exclusively to mixed culture canning, we are able to offer the Craft Industry an option for packaging these products, while maintaining a clear line of separation from our core canning service.”

Iron Heart will debut the program in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York City and Eastern New York, New Jersey, Eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Eastern Tennessee, Minnesota, and Western Wisconsin. Over time, Iron Heart will expand the service offering based on demand and the availability of equipment.