The president of SABMiller and Molson Coors’ joint venture in the US, MillerCoors, has warned that brewers need to do more to stem a consumer shift in the country from beer into wine and spirits.
Beer remains easily the most popular alcoholic beverage in the US, but it has been losing new and existing consumers to wine and spirits producers for several years.
MillerCoors’ president and chief commercial officer, Tom Long, has said he believes brewers face a battle to keep consumers in beer as the economic downturn continues to affect spending. “Substitutes in wine and spirits is something that the beer industry has to pay more attention to,” he told analysts in London yesterday (30 November).
“I do believe that beer has done a better job overall than those two in driving value,” he said, but added: “The value equation across substitutes is something we have to look at very carefully.”
Beer sales in the US have declined more quickly since the onset of the global recession. Most recently, MillerCoors reported volume sales down by 3% in the third quarter of 2010 versus the same period of 2009. Volumes for the period were almost 4% down on the same period of 2008. The group’s rival, Anheuser-Busch InBev, recently reported beer volumes in North America down by 1.5% for the third quarter of 2010.
Available data suggests that spirits have maintained a greater appeal than beer to US consumers. Nielsen said this week that spirits volumes were up by 3.5% in the four weeks to 13 November. Volume sales in control states, meanwhile, were up by 3% year-on-year at the end of September on a rolling three-month trend, according to analyst group Sanford Bernstein.
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By GlobalDataBrewers argue that spirits momentum has been driven by promotions, while they have increased prices on beer. Since the start of 2009, the beer category’s value has risen and both spirits and wine have suffered value declines, MillerCoors’s figures show.
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