Southern Company teams up with Atlanta’s Old Fourth Distillery to produce hand sanitizer

America has struggled to keep up with an adequate supply of things like hand sanitizer since the outbreak of COVID-19 began, and that’s spurring some creative solutions, and equally creative partnerships, like the union of an electric company and a local distillery in Georgia.

The Southern Company and Atlanta’s Old Fourth Distillery want to shore up flagging hand sanitizer supplies to meet the ongoing demand for cleanliness. Old Fourth is no longer producing the liquor it has been since 2014. Instead, since the outbreak started, it began to make hand sanitizer for its local neighborhood. Hearing of this, Southern Company got in on the action, with shipments of Old Fourth’s sanitizer soon to flow from the Georgia Power Material Distribution Center to locations throughout Southern Company’s service area. Additional hand sanitizer is being produced for the Georgia Emergency Management Agency.

The distillery has set up what is, essentially, an entirely new business.

“About three weeks ago, we were just a little distillery making vodka, gin, and bourbon, and living a pretty relaxed lifestyle,” Craig Moore, owner of Old Fourth Distillery, said. “Now, not so much. We saw the work they were doing (in Washington) and figured we could use our high-proof alcohol and buy a little bit of aloe and get it into our community.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have consistently stressed that hand sanitizer is a second-best alternative to soap and water. With hand cleanliness, such an important part of warding spread of the disease, hand sanitizer that contains at least 60 percent alcohol is considered an essential product these days by many.

“Old Fourth Distillery is doing the community a wonderful service, and we are glad to support them,” Jeff Franklin, Southern Company senior vice president of Supply Chain Management, said. “This partnership is an example of how we’re all thinking differently to do our part to keep our communities healthy – physically and economically.”