What's piquing the attention of BeverageDaily readers? From new breweries to notable acquisitions, here's a round-up of our most-read articles from October.
The coffee space is heating up. Nestlé announced earlier this month that it will acquire the Seattle's Best Coffee brand from Starbucks
Seattle’s Best Coffee – which generally offers a lower price point that Starbucks – will help Nestlé further develop its coffee ambitions in North America.
Seattle's Best Coffee's ‘approachable’ line of whole bean, roast and ground packaged coffee, and K-Cup pods are available in a variety of roasts and flavor profiles across both foodservice and grocery channels.
The brand will join Nestlé’s coffee portfolio which already includes Starbucks packaged coffees (distributed by the duo’s Global Coffee Alliance); Nescafé, Nespresso and Blue Bottle Coffee (acquired in 2017).
Greenpeace USA is calling for companies to create a complete industry shift and focus on reuse and refill models over plastic recycling: going as far as to claim that plastic recycling is a ‘dead end street’.
Beverage giants champion the circular model of recycling plastic bottles and reusing recycled content in new bottles as a way to reduce plastic waste and use of virgin plastic. Recycling has long been the ‘right’ thing to do – so why has the environmental advocate now turned its back on recycling?
It says plastic recycling fails because it is ‘difficult to collect, virtually impossible to sort for recycling, environmentally harmful to reprocess, often made of and contaminated by toxic materials, and not economical to recycle’.
We asked some of the biggest beverage giants what they made of the claims in the report and the models they see as being the most sustainable.
Heineken Vietnam has unveiled its largest brewery in Ba Ria Vung Tau: which has become the region’s largest after multiple expansions over the last five years.
Covering an area of 40 hectares in My Xuan A Industrial Zone, Phu My – Ba Ria Vung Tau, the brewery was acquired by Heineken in 2017 and increased its capacity 36 times over in the last five years. It now boasts an annual capacity of 11 million hectoliters.
To a large extent, the Vung Tau brewery has automated operations in the beer making process from raw material delivery, brewing, filtration to delivery for packing: ‘making it the most productive Heineken brewery in the world’. The brewery also boasts the latest technology to improve sustainability.
Constellation Brands is divesting a portion of its mainstream and premium wine portfolio - including Cooper & Thief, Crafters Union, The Dreaming Tree, Monkey Bay, 7 Moons, and Charles Smith Wines - to The Wine Group.
Constellation Brands divested the majority of its popular and mainstream wine and spirits portfolio in 2021, highlighting its strategy to focus predominantly in premium fine wine and craft spirits. (E. & J. Gallo Winery gained wines principally priced at $11 retail and below for $810m in February 2021).
Now, the additional divesture to California’s The Wine Group (the value of which has not been disclosed) leaves Constellation Brands with ‘a more focused set of leading, powerful brands aligned with consumer preferences’, spanning mainstream, premium, fine wine and craft spirits segments.
After the dominance of hard seltzer, it’s now time for RTD cocktails and long drinks to shine: offering more pizzazz than hard seltzers or beer and yet with accessibility and convenience in the can.
“Consumers in the US have grown accustomed to the convenience and variety offered by RTDs, which has increasingly led to people trading up to spirit-based cocktails. This reflects the overall spirits premiumization trend in the US and the popularity of bar-made cocktails,” says Brandy Rand, Chief Strategy Officer at IWSR Drinks Market Analysis. “As a result, hard seltzer volume is now projected to decrease after hitting all-time highs, which will lead to more moderate growth levels across the total RTD category.”
Cocktails and long drinks (defined by IWSR as drinks that reflect well-known cocktails or spirit and mixer drinks such as a mojito or G&T) - are forecasted to spur the most growth in RTDs globally, with volumes expected to overtake hard seltzers in 2025. In fact, cocktails/long drinks are expected to command about 26% of the total RTD category by 2026, compared to 20% for hard seltzers.
