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Sunday, February 23, 2025

Carib building brands in Africa, Bahamas

by

Andrea Perez-Sobers
128 days ago
20241018
Carib Brewery’s sector chief marketing officer, Erik Uddenberg, second from left, celebrates with Carib Brewery’s managing director, David Welch; managing director of international and business development, Adrian Sabga, general counsel and head of external affairs, Sean Griffith; sector head of Carib Brewery, Peter Hall, sector supply chain director, Akash Ragbir with Carib Girls, Laticia Alexander, left, and Diamond Dwarika during the welcome reception for Carib Brewery’s biennial distributor conference at the Hyatt Regency, Port-of-Spain, on Wednesday.

Carib Brewery’s sector chief marketing officer, Erik Uddenberg, second from left, celebrates with Carib Brewery’s managing director, David Welch; managing director of international and business development, Adrian Sabga, general counsel and head of external affairs, Sean Griffith; sector head of Carib Brewery, Peter Hall, sector supply chain director, Akash Ragbir with Carib Girls, Laticia Alexander, left, and Diamond Dwarika during the welcome reception for Carib Brewery’s biennial distributor conference at the Hyatt Regency, Port-of-Spain, on Wednesday.

ANISTO ALVES

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.


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