While the Carib Brew­ery has large­ly been rid­ing pos­i­tive winds in­to in­ter­na­tion­al mar­kets in the past two years, the com­pa­ny has be­gun to ex­pe­ri­ence some chop­py wa­ters.

In re­cent months, the brand has seen var­i­ous in­ter­na­tion­al events which have led to sev­er­al sup­ply chain is­sues.

As a re­sult Carib’s Dis­trib­u­tor’s con­fer­ence, which was held at the Hy­att Re­gency last week, proved time­ly.

“This is a con­fer­ence that we do every two years, and it gives us an op­por­tu­ni­ty to bring down all of our in­ter­na­tion­al part­ners to Trinidad. It’s es­sen­tial­ly an event where we all get to­geth­er, we col­lab­o­rate, we share best prac­tices. We get to meet and greet some of our in­ter­na­tion­al part­ners, and it es­sen­tial­ly gives us a fo­rum to not on­ly share and col­lab­o­rate but to thank our dis­trib­u­tors for build­ing our brands in each and every­one of their re­spec­tive mar­kets world­wide,” said Adri­an Sab­ga, Carib Brew­ery’s man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of in­ter­na­tion­al and busi­ness de­vel­op­ment, at the wel­come cock­tail re­cep­tion for the event last Wednes­day.

In the past two years Carib has an­nounced ex­pan­sions across the Caribbean, USA, Cana­da, the Unit­ed King­dom and Greece while al­so dis­clos­ing plans to en­ter the African and In­dia mar­kets.

Sag­ba al­so hailed the re­cent roll­out of Stag in the Ba­hamas mar­ket.

How­ev­er, de­spite this progress Sab­ga ad­mit­ted that the dis­trib­u­tors were al­so com­ing to share in­for­ma­tion about chal­lenges be­ing faced.

He said, “There are mul­ti­ple chal­lenges in each of these re­spec­tive mar­kets that they op­er­ate in. Whether it be com­pet­i­tive, whether it be fi­nan­cial, whether it be eco­nom­ic chal­lenges. What we do, es­sen­tial­ly, is we work with each of them in the re­spec­tive mar­kets with ded­i­cat­ed re­sources to en­sure that we giv­ing them the right brands at the right price, with the right qual­i­ty, so that we can en­sure that our brands con­tin­ue to grow in their re­spec­tive mar­kets as well.”

Man­ag­ing di­rec­tor for lo­cal op­er­a­tions at Carib Brew­ery, David Welch, ad­mit­ted that af­ter see­ing a re­cov­ery post-COVID-19, the brew­ery’s sup­ply chain had tak­en a hit in re­cent months due to sev­er­al fac­tors— most no­tably the drought in the Pana­ma Canal, which saw ship­ping tran­sit drop sig­nif­i­cant­ly.

“Let’s say, the last four or five months of this year, things have be­come com­pli­cat­ed again with the Pana­ma Canal, (the) Ukraine, war, the Mid­dle East. All of those things are im­pact­ing the sup­ply chain. We would have seen a short-term strike in the US on their ports. That did start to cre­ate some pan­ic in the mar­ket. So we’ve seen freight costs go up. We’ve seen tight­en­ing in the ship­ping lines. But hope­ful­ly, we’ll be able to over­come that, cer­tain­ly by the end of this year and then start next year fresh again,” said Welch.

He said while this would tie in­to some chal­lenges with for­eign ex­change, Carib’s ex­port mar­ket had played a role in off­set­ting some of that dif­fi­cul­ty.

“For­eign ex­change is al­ways an is­sue. That’s prob­a­bly the first call that every man­ag­ing di­rec­tor makes on morn­ings when they get to work. What’s our sta­tus with for­eign ex­change? Luck­i­ly, again, this is an­oth­er rea­son why, strate­gi­cal­ly, this con­fer­ence is so im­por­tant for us. From our ex­ports, we do earn a fair amount of for­eign ex­change, so we’re not in a sit­u­a­tion where we are ful­ly bal­anced with for­eign ex­change to our needs. But cer­tain­ly, every dol­lar that we make in ex­port is a dol­lar less than we need to find through the lo­cal bank­ing sys­tem. So we put a lot of em­pha­sis on that as well,” said Welch.

This point was backed by Sab­ga, who added that Carib’s for­eign ex­change gen­er­a­tion did help with get­ting ac­cess to and stock­ing up on re­quired raw ma­te­ri­als.

“Whilst Trinidad is our largest brew­ery, we’re able to source prod­ucts from our oth­er two re­gion­al brew­eries, St Kitts and Grena­da, as well as our US brew­ery in Cape Canaver­al in Flori­da. So while one of our brew­eries may run in­to a sup­ply con­straint, we could buffer oth­er stock from our oth­er brew­eries as well. And in hav­ing such a ro­bust sup­ply chain here, we’re able to stock up on a lot of our raw ma­te­ri­als. Just to en­sure that kind of un­ex­pect­ed sup­ply chain ob­struc­tions don’t shut down our busi­ness for any ex­tend­ed pe­ri­od of time,” said Sag­ba.

Welch said, how­ev­er, the event gave the Carib team a great chance to trou­bleshoot, as most of the chal­lenges were not be­ing held in iso­la­tion.

“It’s not just us in­form­ing our dis­trib­u­tors. A lot of times, it’s our dis­trib­u­tors shar­ing in­for­ma­tion with each oth­er so we can ben­e­fit. They ben­e­fit. But cer­tain­ly we have a lot of sim­i­lar chal­lenges,” he said, “Fun­ny enough, along the lines of cli­mate change, it’s not just Trinidad that’s deal­ing with flood­ing at dif­fer­ent times of the year.”

He said the event would be cru­cial to build­ing strate­gies to ad­dress these con­cerns.

“These are all dif­fer­ent mar­ket­ing strate­gies that we will dis­cuss. But again, I make the point that a lot of times they will in­form us as well. Be­cause what works in Bar­ba­dos, maybe we could tweak and use in Trinidad. Just as what works in Ja­maica and what works in Guyana, can work else­where in the Caribbean. So it’s re­al­ly a con­fer­ence de­signed to share in­for­ma­tion so that we could build strate­gies from there,” he said.

How­ev­er, Carib’s sec­tor head for bev­er­ages, Pe­ter Hall re­mained buoyed by the brand’s growth.

“We’re now sur­pass­ing the lev­el of the busi­ness be­fore COVID and the growth is con­tin­u­ing, so we’re very pleased with our progress. We’re see­ing dou­ble-dig­it growth, so that’s pret­ty sol­id for a bev­er­age busi­ness, with most of the growth be­ing dri­ven from our in­ter­na­tion­al mar­kets,’ said Hall, “Trinidad is do­ing rea­son­ably well, but it’s the oth­er coun­tries that are re­al­ly grow­ing even faster. We’re get­ting growth from three dif­fer­ent places. We’re grow­ing very strong­ly in the OECS. In places like St Vin­cent, An­tigua, Do­mini­ca, we’re grow­ing ex­treme­ly fast. Guyana has be­come a very suc­cess­ful and fast grow­ing mar­ket for us.

“And al­so we’re brew­ing Carib un­der li­cense fur­ther afield from the Caribbean, so in places like Cana­da and soon to be in In­dia, we’re al­so get­ting good growth,” said Hall.

The con­fer­ence end­ed on Fri­day.