Artisan breweries gain strength with regionalized operations in Brazil

In the last ten years, the number of artisan breweries has grown 292% in Brazil, reaching a total of 1,000 players in operation. Faced with the scenario of fierce competition, entrepreneurs bet on the performance in small cities to maintain pace of sales. "The vast majority of these thousand businesses are concentrated in the south and southeast regions of the country. The demands that arose in small inland towns made it possible for smaller breweries to gain strength in a regional way, "said Carlo Lapolli, president of the Brazilian Association of Artisan Breweries (Abracerva). According to a survey carried out by the entity, last year 210 new factories were born, representing an increase of 30% over the previous year. However, for Lapolli, the pace of growth of these businesses lost breath after the economic crisis. "The struggle of small craft breweries has been precisely to establish a competitive price in relation to large industries. With this, these businesses find more space in the inner cities, where the appreciation of local products is still strong ", complemented the leader. One of the examples of agent acting in this direction is the brewery Alles Blau, which was founded in the city of Blumenau, in Santa Catarina. "We have identified some bottlenecks in some regions of the country in terms of supply. We are planning to open factories in the northeast, specifically in Paraíba or Pernambuco to facilitate the logistics and supply of future units in these locations, "argued the brewery director, Davi Zimmermann. According to the executive, the percentage of participation of the artisanal beer segment currently represents only 1.5% within the total market. "Our challenge is to democratize the consumption of this product category from the big centers to smaller cities," he said, noting that the business launched Microfranchise models to act at different points of sale. According to the executive, the turnover of the business in 2018 was R $6 million and, for this year, it should "duplicate" through new openings. Mergers with the objective of strengthening the regional performance of the artisan beers, the companies Leuven and Schornstein announced yesterday (01) merger between operations. The result of the Union will be the creation of the Brazilian Artisan Beer Company (CBCA). "The idea is to reverse the current logic of microbreweries with large productive capacity concentrated in one place and to assemble a capilarized structure, with medium-sized factories scattered throughout Brazil and optimized distribution," said the president of Leuven , Gustavo Barreira. He says that the portfolio of the new business is being "architected" and predicts the construction of a factory in Bahia. For the executive director of Schornstein, Adilson Altrão, other aspects that should be revised relate to the tax burden applied to the artisan breweries. "The economic power of these corporations is very large and, ironically, the tax issue becomes decisive for our segment," he argued, noting that many breweries still work in illegality, which undermines competition in Sector. Finally, the entrepreneur stated that 2018 revenues turned into R $20 million. For this year, the expectation is to achieve revenue of R $ R $23 million with Schornstein.