Beck´s Ice to hit the market

With the launch of its clear beer mix “Beck´s Ice”, accompanied by a large-scale marketing offensive, Beck´s Brewery hopes to defend its leadership position in the beer mix segment – and make everybody forget its less than glamorous performance last year.

Germany´s beer market in 2007 declined 3.8 percent. Beer consumption dropped to 91.9 million hl, down from 101 million hl in 2001. The only segment to grow was the beer mix segment. For the third consecutive year it grew in the two-digits. In 2007 consumption of beer mixes was 4.1 million hl, up 18 percent over the previous year.

Beck´s Brewery of Bremen, which is owned by InBev, used to lead this segment with brands like “Beck´s Green Lemon” and “Beck´s Chilled Orange.” However, while the segment grew in 2007, Beck´s brands declined 5 percent, says INSIDE, a trade publication.

This just proves to show that the shelf life of Beck´s innovations has become shorter and shorter. There seems to be no repeating the surprise success of “Beck´s Gold”, a so-called “mild” beer, which was launched in 2002 and initiated a flurry of me-too mild beers. In 2007 “Beck´s Gold” still sold almost 600,000 hl, but was down 18 percent year-on-year.

Considering that Beck´s is now spending an estimated EUR 7 million or EUR 8 million on its “Beck´s Ice” launch, market observers estimate that Beck´s hopes to target sales in the order of 400,000 hl (like “Beck´s Green Lemon”) rather than the 124.000 hl achieved by “Beck´s Chilled Orange” and “Beck´s Level 7”, an energy drink.

“Beck´s Ice” looks a lot like “Miller Clear”, a clear beer that was launched in 1992 but would not fly and so was discontinued quickly. Readers who had a chance to taste “Miller Clear” probably wondered who would actually like to drink a transparent beverage with a beery head? To let you in on a secret, the way we reproduced “Miller Clear” for a TV production in Munich on the occasion of the trade fair drinktec-interbrau was to mix water with washing up liquid. Luckily “Miller Clear” came in a bottle with a screw cap, so we could pretend opening the bottle in front of the camera and pour its content into a glass. The head was great.

Anyway, “Beck´s Ice” is a beer mix with 2.5%t ABV and tastes like a shandy. It hit the market in May just in time for the summer season. Sold in six packs, it costs EUR 3.69 plus deposit. That´s an average price for beer mixes.

In 2007, InBev Germany reported, it sold 9 million hl (the same amount it sold in 2006) of beer, thus defending its number two position behind Germany´s Radeberger Group, a privately owned group of breweries.

InBev claims that internationally the sales volume of Beck´s went up 4.3 percent. Nationally, however, they declined 3.5 percent to 1.6 million hl.