Mary Ellen King

Lorain Administration

One look at her resume and it’s abundantly clear that 24-year Heidelberg Associate Mary Ellen King is a whiz with numbers. From starting as an administrator entering in sales orders to over a decade in the pricing department to her current job in purchasing, Mary Ellen has found herself constantly surrounded by numbers. And she wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I love working with numbers,” she said. “I’m the type of person who has to have her checkbook balanced down to the penny. My kids think I’m nuts!”

While balancing your checkbook may have gone out of vogue these days, this same attention to detail is critical in the complicated world of beer purchasing. Heidelberg’s purchasing department operates on a companywide level, meaning even though Mary Ellen works out of our Lorain office, she’s placing and tracking beer orders for some of Heidelberg’s bigger brewer partners for all nine facilities. That’s a lot of balls to keep in the air and a lot of numbers that need to be checked and double-checked.

And there’s more to the purchasing department than just placing orders for product. Mary Ellen starts her day by looking to see what shipments the warehouses received from the previous day and checking what was physically received against the invoice that we were billed for. Next, she checks the inventory in each of our facilities before she makes any purchasing decisions. Like most companies, Heidelberg tries to be efficient with inventory in our warehouses while also being able to fill all of our retail partners’ needs. It’s a delicate balancing act that calls for equal parts patience and foresight, an act that Mary Ellen has perfected.

When not in the office, Mary Ellen enjoys driving around the back roads of the Lake Erie shore with her husband in their Ford Mustang with the top down (weather permitting, of course).