Convenience Stores Honor Veterans

story first appeared on csnews.com

Sunday marks Veterans Day and convenience store retailers across the country are finding ways to honor those men and women who served our country. Many party story owners have decorated their Walk-in Coolers to honor the event.

Altoona, Pa.-based Sheetz Convenience Restaurants will serve all military veterans a free hot dog lunch on Monday, Nov. 12, to commemorate Veterans Day. Veterans will be served from 11 a.m. until 2 p.m. at all 430 Sheetz locations throughout Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina.

Binghamton, N.Y.-based Mirabito Convenience Stores is showing its support by offering free coffee, any size, to members of the armed services throughout the weekend. Industry sources also report that many party store Beer Cave displays are being dressed up for the promotion. The Mirabito Family of Cos. includes Mirabito Energy Products, Mirabito, Quickway and Convenience Express Stores, Old Road Truck Repair and the Rewards Plus customer loyalty program. Its stores are located in Upstate New York.

Manley's Mighty Marts is also giving away free New England coffee (or hot beverage) to all veterans and military personnel on Veterans Day, Nov. 11. Also based in Binghamton, N.Y., the family-owned company operates 23 convenience stores in New York State.

In addition, Westlake, Ohio-based TravelCenters of America (TA) is offering complimentary meals to truck drivers who are veterans of the U.S. armed services on Sunday at more than 170 participating TA and Petro Stopping Center restaurants, as CSNews Online previously reported. Some convenience store chains are creating custom Beverage Coolers for the promotion. On Nov. 11, any driver who is a veteran and holds a commercial driver's license can receive a free meal of their choice, up to a $15 value, by showing proof of service prior to ordering their meal at Iron Skillet, Country Pride and other full-service restaurants within TA and Petro Stopping Centers.

Brewers reap Rewards despite less Drinking

Reuters

 

Anheuser-Busch InBev NV and smaller rival Molson Coors Brewing Co reaped higher third-quarter profits from the U.S. beer market they dominate, even as consumers drank less beer.

Price increases, cost savings and sales of premium brands were the key in North America for AB InBev, the world's largest brewer, and MillerCoors, the combined U.S. operations of world No. 2 brewer SABMiller Plc and No. 6 Molson Coors.

AB InBev -- maker of Budweiser, Stella Artois and Beck's with almost half the U.S. beer market -- said overall core profit rose 9.1 percent, slightly short of expectations, with a 9.6 percent improvement in North America and a 6.4 percent drop in Europe.

Molson, whose brands include Coors Light, Blue Moon and Molson Canadian, reported third-quarter earnings higher than market expectations, driven by profit improvements in its key markets of Canada, the United States and Britain.

AB InBev shares fell 3.2 percent in Brussels, while Molson shares rose 4.3 percent in New York.

AB InBev sold 4.1 percent more beer globally in the July-September period than a year earlier, driven by a 12 percent surge in key market Brazil, but suffered declining volumes in North America and Europe.

Molson, which lacks large businesses in emerging markets, saw overall volume decline 4 percent in the quarter.

"You're not going to get growth in developed markets," said Morningstar analyst Philip Gorham. "These major brewers that want to grow their top line have to be in emerging markets ... Emerging markets are driving growth in almost every consumer staples industry."

Gorham said that a key driver for Molson's surprising profit performance was cost cuts related to the 2008 formation of MillerCoors, which is expected to achieve $750 million of cost savings by the end of 2012. The total stood at $564 million by the end of September.

AB InBev, formed in November 2008 from InBev's takeover of Anheuser-Busch, has set a target of $2.25 billion of cost savings by the end of 2011.

Chief Financial Officer Felipe Dutra said AB InBev is likely to exceed its $500 million target for this year but has no plans to raise the overall target.

U.S. REMAINS TOUGH

U.S. consumers broadly embraced lower-priced beers during the recession, but have recently been trading up, executives from both companies said on Wednesday.

Dutra said AB InBev's top-end beers were even winning over some wine and spirits drinkers, although stubbornly high unemployment had led to lower overall volumes.

In the key 21-27 age group, the jobless rate, at 18 percent, was almost double the U.S. national average, something the company was watching closely, Dutra said.

"The overhang on our category continues to be unemployment of our key beer drinker," said MillerCoors Chief Executive Leo Kiely. "That's got to turn around before we see the whole category become more buoyant."

Still Kiely said he is encouraged by sales trends of the company's "premium light" beers, such as Coors Light and Miller Light.

Earlier this year, Molson bought a stake in a joint venture with a Chinese brewer and entered Vietnam and Russia.

Chief Executive Peter Swinburn said Molson is learning from these moves and should now be able to make new forays at a faster clip.

"We're in a position, both from a knowledge base and a financial base, that we can now accelerate to a much greater extent our market entries," Swinburn said in an interview.

"But are we going to spend $4 billion or $5 billion on buying a business in India? Absolutely not, because we don't have that expertise yet and I think it would be too risky a use of shareholder money."

Molson raised its 2010 free cash flow target to $900 million from $760 million, due to timing issues.

It also said that during the first month of the current fourth quarter, sales to retailers rose at a low-single-digit rate in Canada and slightly in the United States. Sales fell at a mid-single-digit rate in Britain.

AB InBev sounded an upbeat note on the months ahead, with core profit growth set to be "materially" better than in the third quarter because it spent heavily at the end of last year on U.S. product launches, a cost it would not be repeating.

No Glass Ceiling for Best Job in Whole World

The Wall Street Journal

Turns Out Women Can Often Beat Men as Beer Tasters

MILWAUKEE—Rhonda Dannenberg, a suburban mother of three, stuck her nose in six glasses of beer at the MillerCoors brewery here and swished a bit of each in her mouth. Then she delivered the kind of frank verdict that's shaking up the mens-club world of beer tasting.

"I got a strong bruised fruit," Ms. Dannenberg, 36 years old, said of one of the Miller Lite batches, drawing a few nods from the three other women and two men at the table. "Slight cardboard taste. Oxidized. Unacceptable."

At many companies, the assembled panelists would have been men, typically brew masters and other technical types. And it makes sense. To judge from TV commercials, men like beer better than women do and sometimes even seem to like beer more than they like women.

But the British company SABMiller PLC decided several years ago to reach deeper into its employee pool to find adept tasters, inviting marketers, secretaries and others to try their hand. The company concluded that women were drinking men under the table.

"We have found that females often are more sensitive about the levels of flavor in beer," says Barry Axcell, SABMiller's chief brewer. Women trained as tasters outshine their male counterparts, he says.

If practice makes perfect, men should have the clear edge in beer tasting, since they account for 72.8% of the world's beer sales, according to market-research firm Datamonitor Group. But SABMiller, which makes Pilsner Urquell, Peroni and Grolsch in addition to Miller and Coors brands, says its empirical evidence shows that females are the superior sex when it comes to detecting such undesirable chemicals as 3-methyl-2-butene-1-thiol, which makes beer "skunky."

Finding the very best tasters is crucial to the beer industry. Tasting panels ensure that the beer spilling out of the tanks each day conforms with the specific characteristics for each brand—such as the mild fruit flavor in Coors Light or the dry finish of Peroni. Tasters also help brewers decide how long their beers will stay fresh on store shelves, and what new products to introduce.

Today, 30% of SABMiller's 1,000 advanced-level tasters are female, Mr. Axcell says. The number of women tasters has roughly quadrupled in 10 years.

Ms. Dannenberg studied microbiology in college and worked at a cheese factory before landing a job here as a pilot brewer testing new styles. She's known for her colorful descriptions of beer flavors, like "fish tank." "We don't want that," she says.

"Sometimes guys will see red or brown and women will see shades in it," says Jason Pratt, 30, a yeast and fermentation scientist who serves on the panel with Ms. Dannenberg.

Last year, Mr. Pratt took home the Golden Nose, the trophy that goes each year to the top MillerCoors taster in Milwaukee. He says he has sought out female tasters as tutors, listening closely to the advice of such women as Sue Thompson, who runs the tasting panels for MillerCoors, which is co-owned by SABMiller and U.S.-Canadian Molson Coors Brewing Co.

"There's more of a camaraderie than a competition," he explains. "Let's be honest. We are getting paid to drink beer."

Still, he says, he would like the men to make a better showing in SABMiller's annual taster-of-the-year competition, in which its 2,000 panelists in blind tastings around the world identify beer types, aromas and the intensity of specific chemicals. Joanna Wasilewska, a 33-year-old former secretary at its brewery in Bialystok, Poland, has won both events held so far.

There are downsides to the job. "It's hard to be a social drinker sometimes," says Laura Dopkins, 28, a MillerCoors panelist, who has a master's degree in food science and used to taste cereal bars for Kellogg Co. "Other people don't find it fun to drink around you" when you refer to beer as "metallic."

Other brewers are reluctant to say whether women make better tasters. Carlsberg A/S, the Danish brewer, says a test of its tasting panelists this year showed its women outperforming the men. This "surprised us," says David Burgess, group quality director. Nonetheless, he says, "our view is there is no difference between men and women."

At the North American division of Belgium's Anheuser-Busch InBev, data on its beer tasters show no significant difference between the sexes, says Pete Kraemer, vice president of supply and a beer-tasting panelist himself.

Some male beer drinkers doubt that women are better, too. "It doesn't seem credible," said Carlos Lopez, 22, while sipping a glass of Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy one recent afternoon at Stocks and Blondes, a Chicago bar.

A female friend, Ashley Siapno, begged to differ. "I think we have a better sense of what tastes better in all aspects," she said. "Food, clothes, beer."

Only about one of every five people—male or female—who try out for tasting at breweries ascend to the level of corporate panelist, says Bill Simpson of Cara Technology Ltd. in the U.K., who consults companies on training and evaluating beer tasters. People with natural ability must go through at least several months of training and be able to recognize numerous flavors to qualify as an expert panelist, he adds.

Still, scientists say women may have a physiological edge. Research shows they have a better sense of smell, a critical part of identifying flavors in beer, says Marcia Pelchat, a scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a research institute in Philadelphia.

Ms. Wasilewska, the Polish beer taster, was working as a secretary and assistant to the board of the Bialystok brewery several years ago when she decided to attend a screening to see whether she might have an aptitude for tasting. The company soon realized she had an unusual knack for identifying extremely low levels of troublesome chemicals.

Now Ms. Wasilewska runs tasting panels as a sensory evaluation coordinator. She says she doesn't know why she is so good at beer-tasting but thinks it may have something to do with her long love affair with perfumes. "As a young girl, I tried to learn every single perfume by heart," she says. "I never dreamed that I might use my skills."

Drinking on the Job Comes to a Head at Carlsberg

The Wall Street Journal

Head Office Tries to Cut Down Drinking Time at Work. Employees get Pissed.

 

 

HOJE-TAASTRUP, Denmark—Michael Christiansen, a truck driver turned union representative, is fighting hard to preserve one of the last, best perks of the beer industry: the right to drink on the job.

Mr. Christiansen's union brethren are wort boilers, bottlers, packers and drivers at Carlsberg A/S, Denmark's largest brewer. For a century, they've had the right to cool off during a hard day's work with a crisp lager.

But on April 1, the refrigerators were idled and daily beer spoils were capped at three pint-sized plastic cups from a dining hall during lunch hour.

"This is a right workers have had for 100 years," Mr. Christiansen says. "Carlsberg has taken it away without any negotiating at all."

This week, Mr. Christiansen led a strike of 260 Carlsberg employees at a distribution center in this Copenhagen suburb. On Wednesday, 500 workers at Carlsberg's Fredericia brewery in southern Denmark joined in. On Friday afternoon, Mr. Christiansen sent his men back to work temporarily after management agreed to renegotiate workers' right to free beer in coming weeks.

Mr. Christiansen, a tall man with a salt-and-pepper goatee, argues the right to tip a cold one at work is as sacred as other rights enjoyed by Copenhagen-based Carlsberg workers, such as a year's sick leave at full pay, an average annual salary of $59,000 and two free crates of beer monthly.

At 2 p.m. here Friday, about 100 workers congregated in a parking lot full of empty beer crates and forklifts and agreed to temporarily end their strike.

"We need to keep our beer," said employee Juseif Izaivi, 32 years old. "I need a beer when I take a cigarette break."

Drunkenness isn't a problem, workers argued. "There is sometimes some whistling and maybe some singing, but that's not connected to the drinking," said Martin Juralowicz, a 31-year-old forklift operator.

Workday drinking used to be commonplace at breweries around the world. But the practice has faded amid concerns about workplace accidents, productivity losses and drunken driving. Carlsberg is one of the few big breweries where it's still condoned.

But the brewer's management frets that tippling on the job is a risky anachronism, especially for those operating heavy equipment. Although the alcohol-related accident rate is "close to zero," according to Carlsberg spokesman Jens Bekke, there are other issues at stake. Research shows drinking can make productivity go flat. "You can't have all these discussions about corporate social responsibility and allow this," Mr. Bekke says.

Even under the new rules, drivers of Carlsberg's 600 beer trucks, vans and cars can still drink up to three bottles of brew daily. But now company vehicles come equipped with an Alcolock, a device drivers must blow into before turning on the ignition. If the device detects excessive alcohol, the vehicle won't start.

Mr. Christiansen says the Alcolocks are fine, so long as the company doesn't take away the suds. "A driver usually has one beer on his lunch break, another after his shift and maybe he gives the third one away," says the 40-year-old, who quit driving a truck two years ago to be a union rep.

Carlsberg's new policy was sparked by a survey revealing that 93% of Danish companies have a zero-tolerance policy on alcohol. "We don't want to be left behind," says Anne-Marie Skov, a Carlsberg vice president.

Given its 60% market share here, Carlsberg is likely to influence rivals. Workers enjoy beer rights at all the country's 120 breweries, says Per Sten Nielsen of the Danish Brewers Association. "If Carlsberg is able to follow through with this, others are bound to follow."

In Belgium, monks at the six monasteries that still brew beers are allowed to drink their product at lunch. "It is usually a light version of the beer they sell," says Joris Pattyn, co-author of the book, "100 Belgian Beers to Try Before You Die."

At Belgium-based Anheuser Busch-InBev, the world's largest brewer by sales, brewery workers in Belgium once were allowed to serve themselves from on-site refrigerators. The influx of foreign investors and worried insurance companies halted that.

Since 2005, the global headquarters in Leuven has offered only non-alcoholic beverages in the canteen and refrigerators, a spokeswoman says. However, workers at distribution centers can still drink beer during the workday.

Beer manufacturers in Germany and the U.K. generally are dry. Fuller, Smith & Turner PLC, which makes the cask ale London Pride, once had a free tap at its West London brewery that served pints to employees.

When the tap was turned off a few decades ago, disappointed workers marked the spot with a wreath, a spokeswoman says.

In the U.S., drinking on the job was common before Prohibition, but gradually has disappeared since the law was repealed in 1933, says Maureen Ogle, a beer historian and author in Ames, Iowa.

Jim Koch, founder of Boston Beer Co., the maker of Samuel Adams Boston Lager, says his father and his co-workers used to guzzle beer during the workday at Ohio breweries in the 1940s.

"You would just fill your bucket and you'd drink," says Mr. Koch. Brewing "used to be much more physical, and it tended to be hot" inside breweries.

Breweries are now filled with fast-moving bottling lines and other equipment. "You just can't drink and operate machinery," Mr. Koch says. Boston Beer doesn't permit brewery workers to drink, though at the corporate office, workers can pour brew from a tap or grab a bottle from a cooler.

Miller Brewing ended the practice of allowing brewery workers to drink on breaks in 1986, says a spokesman for MillerCoors LLC, the joint venture formed when Miller Brewing and Coors Brewing combined in 2008.

In 1994, Coors Brewing banned beer-drinking during breaks and the lunch hour after an employee who had been drinking at its Golden, Colo., brewery drove drunk and was killed in a crash.

On Friday at Carlsberg's breweries, offices and plants, the rectangular green refrigerators in most hallways were devoid of alcohol, offering only water, milk and Coca-Cola products. The only beer to be found was in the lunch room, inside a square white box topped by a tap, near a stack of plastic cups.

"If you drink three of those at lunch, that will affect your job performance," Mr. Juralowicz said. "It's better to space out your beers, one for each of the three breaks."

Burger King to Become First Fast-Food Chain to Serve Beer

NPR

Now having it your way at Burger King will also include the chance to grab a brewski ... at least at one Miami Beach location.

The fast-food chain said Friday it's about to open a restaurant that will serve beer along with burgers and fries. It's the chain's first U.S. location with alcohol.

At the Whopper Bar South Beach, guests can pair a Whopper sandwich with Anheuser-Busch (yes, the "King of Beers" will be available at Burger King) and MillerCoors brews.

You want fries with that? A Whopper/beer/fries combo will run $7.99.

The restaurant will offer outdoor dining, a walk-up window and delivery service.

It's scheduled to open in mid-February.

Morningstar analyst R.J. Hottovy says adding beer at selected locations around the world is part of Miami-based Burger King's effort to reinvent itself as a fast-food restaurant with a sit-down feel.

Hottovy said making the new image resonate could be a challenge in some locations.

Steward of Family Beer Brand Reinvented Product as a Craft Brew to Take On Competition

As local breweries across the country were shutting their taps, Bill Leinenkugel reimagined his family's century-old brand as the latest thing in beer fashion: a craft brew.

Seeking to compete against national brands whose marketing and distribution budgets dwarfed his own, he diversified the northern Wisconsin favorite into a half-dozen specialty brews. When the decades-long trend of brewing-industry mergers came at last to Chippewa Falls in 1988, he agreed to an acquisition of the brewery by Miller Brewing Co. But his family still ran the business, and the company prospered while establishing a national identity apart from its owner.

"It became a model for how a large brewer would handle a small brewer that it took under its wing," says Paul Gatza, director of the Brewers Association in Boulder, Colo.

Founded in 1867 by Mr. Leinenkugel's great-grandfather, the brewery in the early days was meant to serve Chippewa Falls's large population of lumberjacks. Prohibition slashed the number of America's small breweries, but Leinenkugel's survived by bottling soda water and a not-so-popular near-beer called Leino.

When Bill Leinenkugel joined the family business as a salesman in the early 1950s, there were about 350 brewers left in the country. By 1980, that number had dropped to just 40.

After Milwaukee powerhouse Joseph Schlitz Brewing Co. introduced its budget Old Milwaukee brand in the early 1960s, Mr. Leinenkugel took marketing classes and positioned his beer as a classier, and more expensive, alternative.

"We were much higher than Old Milwaukee but lower than Schlitz and for a while we sold less beer but we made more money," he told Beer Business Daily in an interview in August.

Mr. Leinenkugel began courting college students in Madison with gimmicks such as logo T-shirts, then an uncommon strategy. He established the "Leinie Lodge," a tasting room at the brewery meant to attract tourists. He even dressed up his bottles with aluminum foil over the cap.

"The bartenders hated it because it got in the way," he said in the Beer Business Daily interview. "They cost a penny apiece and I got a dollar a case more for Leinenkugel's Limited" -- his early Oktoberfest-style brew.

Sales began to take off as Bill Leinenkugel secured a Chicago distributor and began producing light, bock and other specialty brews. After the company's sale to Miller, the Chicago Tribune asked: "Can a pure and innocent specialty beer from a small town in Wisconsin survive under ownership of the nation's second-largest brewer, a monolith that probably spills more each year than the little guy produces?"

The answer turned out to be yes. Miller, which is now part of global company SABMiller PLC, left Leinenkugel's pretty much on its own, as management passed to Mr. Leinenkugel's sons. The brewery remained in Chippewa Falls, although it is no longer the town's largest employer. With Miller's increased marketing and distribution muscle, bottles of Leinenkugel can now be found across the country. Production increased to 465,000 barrels in 2007 from 61,000 barrels in 1987.

Where ads once touted the water from "Big Eddy Springs," the focus now is more on the outdoor lifestyle of Wisconsin's North Woods. Leinenkugel's draft taps feature a model canoe.

While marching in the Chippewa Springs Memorial Day Parade, Mr. Leinenkugel fell ill and was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He eschewed treatment and continued sipping his product until days before his death in Chippewa Falls on Sept. 22 at age 87. He liked to say his two favorite brews were Leinenkugel's and free beer.

By: Stephen Miller

The Wall Street Journal; September 30, 2008