Lamplighter Brewing Company has officially transitioned to an employee-owned trust, the brewery announced Friday.
The Cambridge-based company, which has locations in The Port and Cambridge Crossing as well as an in-house coffee shop called Pepita at its Broadway location, wrote on Instagram that the changes had been approved by the state’s Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission and the city’s Licensing Commission. Owners and founders Cayla Marvil and AC Jones announced in September that they are stepping back from day-to-day business after a decade, but will still sit on the five-person Trust Stewardship Committee that will run the trust to benefit employees.
In an email to employees in September, Marvil shared the plan for the ownership transition and said that one of the goals for the trust was to create a profit-sharing pool in March 2027 for employees who have worked at Lamplighter at least six months and who work at least eight hours a week.
“This structure keeps Lamplighter and Pepita locally rooted while giving employees a voice in governance and the opportunity to participate in future profit sharing,” Friday’s post read.
In an email, the company’s new CEO Canaan Khoury said that the details of the profit-sharing were still being worked out. “We want to make sure we establish something meaningful for employees while also protecting the long-term financial health of the business,” he wrote.
Workers at Lamplighter voted in a close election in March to unionize and are in the process of negotiating their first contract. After the plan to transition ownership was announced, representatives of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1445 issued a statement opposing the timeline of the trust’s launch before a bargaining agreement was signed, saying it amounted to a “clear and blatant violation of the National Labor Relations Act.”
Afterward, Lamplighter’s founders said they disagreed. Khoury wrote that negotiations are still ongoing. Representatives of UFCW Local 1445 and Lamplighter’s founders did not respond to a request for comment.
Lamplighter joins other breweries that have made employees part of major ownership shifts. In 2014, Harpoon Brewery, based in Seaport in Boston, launched an employee stock ownership plan, allowing full-time staff to hold 48% of company stock. And in 2018, Democracy Brewing in Downtown Crossing incorporated as a worker-owned business after launching a direct public offering to raise money to open.
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