Nick Ngo still vividly remembers the spring of 2020, and the sudden wave of new shops making the same acrylic barriers as his business.
Scott Thompson, founder and distiller at Mad Laboratory Distilling in Vancouver, made the switch from his usual production of whisky and other spirits to making alcohol-based hand sanitizer and wipes during the pandemic. “They were like, ‘We need more, more, more, more,’ And I’m like, I can make this much, this is what I can do. And really having to prioritize who got it first.… I was a wreck.”
Many distillers devoted up to 80 per cent of overall production to hand sanitizer after the government put out an emergency call for supplies, Dyck said. When regular supply chains resumed and the price of sanitizer plummeted in 2022, B.C. switched back to original suppliers and told distillers to stop production. They were left with “hundreds of thousands of litres” of sanitizer but no major demand for it, said Dyck.
Most of the businesses that popped up almost overnight to cut and install barriers are now defunct, Ngo said.Today, Sixstream is back to almost exclusively making signs out of acrylic, with the remaining barrier work involving maintenance or other followup work. The company never took on more production than its contracts specified, said Paul Heel, vice-president of quality at The Wing Group, Mustang’s parent company