Independence? Lagunitas’ full integration into the Heineken system
Don’t trust promises of “nothing changes”. In September 2018, Heineken-owned craft brewer Lagunitas not only announced a major round of redundancies affecting over 100 employees, it also will soon be brewing Heineken-owned Newcastle Brown Ale at its Petaluma and Chicago facilities, US media report.
The UK brand has been moved around a bit within the Heineken empire. At the end of 2017 production of Newcastle Brown Ale was permanently moved from the John Smith’s brewery in the UK to Heineken’s brewery in Zoeterwoude, The Netherlands, in order to improve service levels and allow for faster transportation to the United States.
The recent decision means that it will no longer be imported but brewed domestically. Let’s hope that Heineken will have learnt a lesson from AB-InBev, which ran into consumer criticism and a class-action lawsuit when it started brewing the German beer brand Beck’s in the US in 2012, in order to cut costs but “forgot” to tell customers that their beloved brand was no longer a genuine import. In the end AB-InBev was forced to settle for about USD 20 million.
According to labels seen by MillerCoors, Newcastle makes no effort to obscure the fact that it is brewed domestically. The labels say “Brewed and bottled (and seen a man about a dog at Lagunitas) in Petaluma, CA. & Chicago, IL.” It remains to be seen which price point Heineken will chose.
Heineken’s latest corporate tactics underline that when an American craft brewer sells to a Big Brewer, things absolutely do not stay the same.
As Heineken turns Lagunitas into one of its global brands, more changes are underfoot. Lagunitas’ plans to build a brewery in the UK for the European market, which were announced in 2017, appear to have been shelved, not least because of the vagaries of Brexit and Heineken’s own multi-million dollar investment in London’s craft brewer Beavertown in June 2018.
Instead Heineken is conducting a feasibility study whether Lagunitas’ beers can be brewed at another company-owned brewery, including the Brand Bierbrouwerij in The Netherlands.
