Nicole Carrier co-founded Throwback Brewery in Northampton, New Hampshire with a farm-to-table model focused on sustainability. During COVID, they shifted entirely to takeout and used PPP loans to keep staff employed while the SBA covered six months of property payments. The brewery hasn't returned to pre-pandemic capacity levels but stayed open throughout.
Questions this video answers
Northampton, New Hampshire.
Nicole Carrier — co-founder of Throwback Brewery.
Annette (last name not provided).
About 10 years before the interview (Nicole says "We got started about 10 years ago").
They went from about 5% takeout to a 100% takeout model.
Chapters
My name is Nicole Carrier. I am co founder of Throwback Brewery in Northampton, New Hampshire. So my role at Throwback from the beginning was sort of the idea of it. I was the one of us who was like, hey, what do you think about brewing beer for people? Throwback. We got started about 10 years ago. My co founder, Annette and I used to be home brewers. Annette was looking for another career and a passion, and we decided to team up with, using her engineering skills, my business skills, and start a business founded on sourcing locally and sustainability. And we ended up with Throwback Brewery. It's really neat. People can sit here in the beer garden and like, watch our farmers picking the tomatoes that are then going to go on the capri salad made with a pesto from the basil on our farm. So it's truly farm to table. When we originally were looking at buying the farm and transitioning from a really small brewery into a larger brewery and a restaurant, we knew we needed a loan and some financial help. And we ended up working with Enterprise bank, who recommended that we partner as well with sba. And like, very lucky that we did so because this property took a lot to renovate and we definitely needed the capital. So the SBA has helped us out tremendously. But step number one was really the very first step we took in moving to a restaurant and renovating was the SBA loan. When Covid hit, it was pretty dramatic for us and for all other restaurants. For, for us particularly, we went from a business that maybe did 5% takeout to all of a sudden we had to close our doors and move to 100% takeout model. We had to figure out online ordering. When we were also a full counter service model with no servers, we had no reservations, first come, first serve. So when things started to first open up again, we had to completely transform our way of doing business. And it was really the paycheck protection program that helped us keep our really dedicated, committed team fully on staff throughout the entire pandemic. The SBA was successful in helping us during COVID immediately with just taking over those loan payments, our property loan payments for the first six months, and just a huge relief for us immediately. One of the things that we're looking at is with the EIDL loan that we received, is getting the maximum loan and then helping us expand our space here. Because one of the things that we have yet to get back to 2019 levels, in terms of how tightly our tables were spaced and the number of people that we felt comfortable fitting in the restaurant, we are very fortunate in that we had the space and we had the support of the SBA that really helped us in a critical time to make it through. And here we are today, still kicking.
