{"id":1091,"date":"2013-10-29T06:50:46","date_gmt":"2013-10-29T11:50:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/?p=1091"},"modified":"2013-10-28T08:08:29","modified_gmt":"2013-10-28T13:08:29","slug":"the-future-aint-what-it-use-to-be","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/?p=1091","title":{"rendered":"The future ain’t what it use to be………"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"whitbread<\/a>One of the platforms I worked on at Glazer’s was to obtain the leading or second best-selling\u00a0beer of each country in the world.\u00a0 If I could not acquire said brand, then the goal was to look at other key brands, who owned the brand and what was its future.\u00a0\u00a0During this\u00a0time, one of the companies that fit this description was Royal Imports, with Mackeson Stout\u00a0and Whitbread from England.\u00a0 The brands were owned by InBev and sold under an agreement\u00a0with Royal Imports, headed up by George Henricksen, based in Cincinnati.\u00a0 With limited resources, no employees, and a small team of brokers, George managed to build Royal into a nice business, selling several hundred thousand cases a year.<\/p>\n

At one point, George and I explored the possibility\u00a0of Warsteiner and Royal doing a JV and consolidating.\u00a0 The process did not happen because the agreement that Royal had with InBev was time bound and InBev was adverse to an extension.\u00a0 In fact, when the agreement came to an end, Royal Imports was terminated, and George retired.\u00a0 InBev walked away from the all that volume and the work George did,\u00a0and competing brand(s) picked up InBev\u2019s left overs.<\/p>\n

Since then,\u00a0InBev, in addition to buying AB, has acquired numerous import brands including St. Pauli Girl, Presidente, Spaten, Franzikaner, and Bass which were once imported by companies other than InBev.\u00a0 InBev also took Beck\u2019s from Germany and began brewing it in St. Louis.\u00a0 They did the same thing with Bass.<\/p>\n

Because of this, AB distributors, encouraged by ABI, either traded or bought these InBev brands from their competing wholesalers if they did not already distribute the beers.\u00a0 Consolidation on a smaller scale.\u00a0 A number of good brands and a lot of money changed hands in these transactions.<\/p>\n

As of this summer, the\u00a0sales of these brands were considerably lower, just as InBev\u00a0did with\u00a0the sales of Mackeson\u00a0and Whitbread.\u00a0 SPI\u00a0was down -63,000 cs. or -22.6%, Presidente down -120,000 cs. or -51%, Bass down -65,000 cs. or -26%, Spaten\/Franzikaner down -30,000 cs. or -25% each.\u00a0 Beck’s, once the largest imported German beer, down -207,000 cs. or -16%, Beck’s light, -35,000 cs. or -30%.<\/p>\n

So the question that distributors should be asking is why should we spend our money or give up growing\u00a0brands\u00a0to acquire\u00a0products which ABI then simply allows to die?\u00a0 Perhaps once ABI gets all of these brands under their own distributor network they will ramp up marketing support.\u00a0 By not supporting these brands, since many are still in non-ABI houses, it makes\u00a0it much\u00a0easier for the ABI distributors to acquire the brands and at a cheaper price, too!<\/p>\n

Look at Beck\u2019s; even though they have lost 207,000 cases, by adding a line extension in Beck’s Sapphire, that brand is +435,545 cs. more than offsetting volume losses.\u00a0 Sampler packs in the future could contain all ABI’s German beers.\u00a0 Such a pack could contain Beck’s, Spaten, and St. Pauli or a combination of others.\u00a0 All that is needed is to have all the brands under one roof in each market.<\/p>\n

An ABI distributor these days must wonder if one should even invest in these brands.\u00a0 Which brings Yogi Berra’s famous quote to mind: “The future ain’t what it used to be!”<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the platforms I worked on at Glazer’s was to obtain the leading or second best-selling\u00a0beer of each country in the world.\u00a0 If I could not acquire said brand, then the goal was to look at other key brands, who owned the brand and what was its future.\u00a0\u00a0During this\u00a0time, one of the companies that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_s2mail":"yes","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2xRTi-hB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1091"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1091"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1091\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1318,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1091\/revisions\/1318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}