Apparently, any beverage will do for Coca-Cola to help it reach its self-set target of doubling its business by 2020. In December, it launched its own brand of milk, which it claims could become so popular that it will “rain money” for the company.

SABMiller’s monopoly in Colombia is coming under attack. In November 2014 it was announced that Postobon, Colombia’s major soft drinks maker controlled by billionaire Carlos Ardila Lülle, will be joined by Chile’s biggest brewer CCU to start selling beer in Colombia.

Anheuser-Busch has recently completed a round of layoffs, U.S. media reported. But it would not say how many employees were affected, how many were in St. Louis, or give a date the layoffs occurred.

It must be a fun job being a business scout for AB-InBev. All you have to do is visit craft breweries and drink lots of beer in order to sweet-talk their owners into selling their brewery. Or so I imagine. The latest craft brewer to have succumbed to an offer by AB-InBev is the 10 Barrel Brewing Company, located in Bend, Oregon.

Voters in both San Francisco and the neighbouring university town Berkeley went to the polls on 4 November 2014 to decide whether they wanted a tax on their Cokes, Pepsis and other sugary soft drinks. San Francisco’s proposition would have added USD 0.02 per ounce on sugar drinks such as sodas, energy drinks, iced tea and juices, while Berkeley’s scheme asked for a USD 0.01 levy or USD 0.20 per can.

How much of an impact will Mexico’s controversial “junk food” tax have on the sale of Coke this year? Initially, Coca-Cola FEMSA expected sales volumes in Mexico to drop between five and seven percent this year as a result of the food tax which levies 1 Peso (USD 0.08) per litre tax on soda. The tax was introduced in January this year.

Kentucky seems to be the latest in a string of states where AB-InBev has sought to grow into distribution through buying up willing distributors. In August this year, AB-InBev applied for a distributor's license in the city of Owensboro, Kentucky. The licence request came out of a deal to acquire Budweiser of Owensboro, a distribution company owned by Tennessee-based Hand Family Companies.

Doing the beer shelf shuffle

With double-digit sales gains and an expanding consumer base, craft beers are popping up everywhere. Supermarkets, big-box chains and convenience stores are giving more shelf space and attention to the category. But how much more space can craft beer get? Behind the scenes there is already a tug-of-war between the Big Brewers defending their territory and the small brewers trying to shoulder in.

On October 13, 2014, Symrise opened an extraction facility for vanilla and is thus taking another important step in sustainable vanilla production in Madagascar. The investment at the Benavony site amounted to approximately EUR 3 million. With the plant, every step in the processing of vanilla can now be performed locally on the East African island for the first time.

It was not quite as brief as a twitter tweet but it must have been one of the shortest of press releases imaginable: all it said was that SABMiller, the second largest brewer in the world, and Grupo Petropolis, the second largest brewer in Brazil, on 1 October 2014 announced an agreement to jointly explore the distribution of select SABMiller brands in the Brazilian market in the coming years.