In Mexico, Beer Sales Are Latest Battlefield Against Country's Giant Monopolies Tim Johnson - McClatchy
go to original September 10, 2013

One of the founders of the Bocanegra craft beer label in Mexico, Sergio Gutierrez, displays his product at a specialty store in Monterrey, Mexico. (Tim Johnson/MCT)

MONTERREY, Mexico — Pablo Flores has big dreams for his tiny craft brewery, which produces smooth golden and brown ales in bottles with dandy labels. “We’d like to be all across the republic, in every state,” Flores says.

But for now, his brewery, Cerveceria Albur, has a more mundane challenge – getting a spot on the menus of restaurants and a place on supermarket shelves in Monterrey, northern Mexico’s industrial hub.

Dozens of small craft brewers are popping up in Mexican cities with flashy bottles and catchy names like Atomica, Border Psycho and Primus. Together, however, they have less than 1 percent – 0.64 percent to be precise – of the market. That’s because two behemoths control 98 percent of the beer consumed in Mexico, employing tactics that lock out most newcomers.

As Mexico tries to bust open some of the monopolies and concentrated economic power that stifle its economy, attention has focused on the conglomerates that control television and fixed-line and cellular telephones. Yet beer is another area that has been sharply restricted for decades. The market only now is opening slightly, serving as a litmus test for whether anti-monopoly regulators under President Enrique Pena Nieto will act more aggressively. So far, signs are mixed.

Read the rest at The State

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!