In an effort to combat hand sanitizer shortages, the FDA has allowed businesses holding distilled spirits plant permits to make and sell sanitizer. Ogden’s Own Distillery, the maker of Five Wives Vodka and Porter’s Whiskey, began selling a sanitizer product on Friday.
“We’re actually going to start putting sanitizer in gallon jugs for some of the industrial and medical people who reached out to us within the next half hour, and those will be ready to go. Within a couple hours, we hope to have people being able to bring their own containers to our facility and fill up. And I’m actually working with about 10 different retail outlets right now that will take some gallon containers that we can have people bring their own containers to refill and just buy from them by the ounce,” said Steve Conlin on Friday morning, the owner of Ogden’s Own Distillery.
Ogden’s Own production of hand sanitizer will not only help Utahns access the disinfectant during the pandemic, it also allows all of the Ogden’s Own employees to keep working.
“In the building here with we're limiting our total occupancy to 10 people in the whole building,” Conlin said. “So we'll produce what we can with 10 people and keeping 6 feet apart from one another. Everyone is wearing, you know, latex gloves. And we have plenty of hand sanitizer. In our store, we're only going to allow one or two people in at a time as we go through this.”
Conlin said they will be selling the sanitizer for essentially the price it costs them to produce it. He said retailers who distribute it may mark it up a little more, but it should still be priced at standard hand sanitizer prices. While he doesn’t want any price gouging to happen, he also hopes sanitizer sales can provide smaller businesses a little more revenue and help them stay afloat.
The most updated sanitizer information can be found on the distillery’s Facebook page. Conlin said sanitizer production should not limit the availability of the distillery’s standard products.
