Founders Brewing releases beer locator app

Founders Brewing Company released a new iPhone and Android compatible app that allows fans of the brewery to discover where they can find Founders beers for sale near them, right on their mobile devices. It also allows users to read thorough descriptions of popular brews including alcohol content and score on RateBeer.com. The app is available for free and can be downloaded through the Apple App Store or Google Play.

The app, designed by local digital design firm Fusionary, utilizes a database system that is fed by distributors and retailers to keep selling locations up to date. Founders and Fusionary have been working together to turn complex data into a functional and beautiful application since May of last year.

“We started using [the database locator] on our website and we had more and more distributors contributing data,” says Sarah Aldrich, communications manager at Founders. “As more started to contribute data, we [realized] this was a really great tool.”

“When are you usually thinking ‘Huh, where can I find a beer?’ It’s not when you’re home, looking at our website,” says Aldrich. “It’s when you’re somewhere you’re not used to being or at a friends house. It’s when you have your phone with you.”

“The tool is really useful on the sales side,” says Aldrich. Having distributors contribute to the database only strengthens Founders’ connections to pubs across the country. “It’s a nice way to say, ‘We’re trying to help people find you and you should continue to carry our beers because then people will find you.’”

Including descriptions of popular Founders brews on the app helps update the old style of product sell sheets and helps to make that information more accessible to customers.

“It’s cool to have been able to [create] this. There are not a lot of breweries with apps out there,” says Aldrich. “We’re really excited about it and we hope people find it to be a useful tool. It’s something I imagined myself wanting to use. We say our beer is brewed for us so if we can think of tools it’d be beneficial to have, and we can give those to people, let’s do it.”