An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers@guardian.co.tt

The Carib Brew­ery is host­ing a dis­trib­u­tor's con­fer­ence fea­tur­ing 33 dis­trib­u­tors from 31 coun­tries that aims to strength­en part­ner­ships with dis­trib­u­tors and nav­i­gate chal­lenges.

The con­fer­ence, which is held every two years, ends to­day.

On Wednes­day an in­tro­duc­to­ry cock­tail event was held for par­tic­i­pants.

Man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of in­ter­na­tion­al and busi­ness de­vel­op­ment at Carib Brew­ery, Adri­an Sab­ga, told Guardian Me­dia in an in­ter­view that the fo­rum al­lows var­i­ous mem­bers of the Carib team to share per­spec­tives to im­prove the brand's reach of op­er­a­tions.

He not­ed the brand is in the process of ex­plor­ing its reach to Africa.

“We’ve just shipped two con­tain­ers off to Liberia in West Africa. We are in con­ver­sa­tion now with Ghana, based on our trade mis­sion over there. So, Africa is al­ready up and run­ning. The on­ly is­sue with Africa is the dis­tance and how far it takes and by the time the beer gets there, it is go­ing to be aged. So, we are look­ing at po­ten­tial­ly some lo­cal man­u­fac­tur­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties but that’s a year away if at best.

"So right now, we are start­ing to see the mar­ket, see the op­por­tu­ni­ty, see what the con­sumer de­mand is like in that mar­ket with brand Carib to be­gin with,” Sab­ga said.

He said he is al­so pleased with the progress the com­pa­ny has made in the Ba­hamas fol­low­ing the ac­qui­si­tion of a stake in the Ba­hami­an Brew­ery com­pa­ny.

“They just start­ed to lo­cal­ly man­u­fac­ture Stag for the Ba­hami­an mar­ket. That launched last month. And that's part and par­cel of why we in­vest­ed in that brew­ery, to be­gin with, and it's some­thing that we're go­ing to con­tin­ue to grow, util­is­ing brands like Carib and oth­er brands to help de­vel­op that busi­ness in the Ba­hamas."

Sab­ga not­ed how­ev­er that Carib's cur­rent fo­cus is on build­ing the brand's pres­ence in these mar­kets.

“The in­ter­na­tion­al mar­ket is more so about build­ing our brands in these ex­port mar­kets. And we be­lieve that if we in­vest be­hind our brands in the be­gin­ning, we in­vest be­hind the peo­ple, in­vest be­hind the qual­i­ty, in­vest be­hind the ca­pa­bil­i­ty, in­vest be­hind growth and prof­itabil­i­ty will come in the fu­ture,” Sab­ga added.

Al­so speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia was the man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of Carib Brew­ery, David Welch, who in­di­cat­ed that the con­fer­ence is time­ly as ex­ter­nal fac­tors such as the Pana­ma Canal drought and the US port work­ers' strike have af­fect­ed the sup­ply chain.

How­ev­er, he hailed the im­pact of the state-of-the-art bot­tling line called Line 7, which came on stream in May at a cost of $200 mil­lion.

Welch said this has been a big boost to op­er­a­tions.

“That has giv­en us a huge op­por­tu­ni­ty in terms of sup­ply­ing the lo­cal mar­ket, al­most ex­clu­sive­ly from Line 7, which has freed up our oth­er pro­duc­tion line to fo­cus more on ex­ports. So that in­vest­ment cer­tain­ly has been very good for the do­mes­tic mar­ket. But again, es­pe­cial­ly for the ex­port mar­kets. Al­though that line does not sup­ply ex­ports di­rect­ly, it freed up ca­pac­i­ty to sup­ply all the ex­ports through our oth­er lines,” Welch dis­closed.