RED STRIPE JAMAICA
BREWED IN JAMAICA Sustainable Business Magazine speaks to Ricardo Nuncio, Managing Director at Red Stripe Jamaica, about training young Jamaicans, supporting local agriculture, and improving the environmental footprint of brewing. Red Stripe is a Jamaican lager brewed by Desnoes & Geddes Limited (D&G). The company was founded a century ago, in 1918, when Eugene Peter Desnoes and Thomas Hargreaves Geddes combined their two Kingston-based businesses into a single entity. In 1927, D&G opened the Surrey Brewery in Kingston, and in 1928 they first brewed Red Stripe, which became a Jamaican institution. From 1993 to 2015, Diageo (previously Guinness Brewing Worldwide) owned a majority of Red Stripe’s shares and expanded the brand’s presence internationally, ultimately moving production to Pennsylvania in 2010, before the brewer was acquired by HEINEKEN, who returned production to 40 | SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS MAGAZINE
Jamaica and who now hold approximately 95% of the shares. Despite growing popularity worldwide, Red Stripe remains deeply embedded in Jamaican society, as a major employer and exporter. Today, Red Stripe is at the forefront of socially- and environmentally-sustainable brewing. ACQUISITION BY HEINEKEN HEINEKEN’s acquisition of Red Stripe was based on three key foundations. “The first foundation was the potential of the Jamaican market,” explains Ricardo Nuncio, Managing Director of Red Stripe Jamaica. “Even though Jamaica is a small country with fewer than three million people, and the per capita consumption of alcohol is
quite low when compared with other nations in the region, there is still a lot of potential to grow the domestic market. The second key factor is the iconic status of Red Stripe. HEINEKEN believes they can leverage this reputation into new areas worldwide. We are one of the ten international brands that HEINEKEN has decided to really explode and push across the world.” The third foundation is the local talent pool. “Jamaica’s homegrown talent is immense, but it is also largely untapped,” says Mr. Nuncio. “Our goal is to foster the education and training of Jamaicans, offer them jobs at Red Stripe, and then migrate them to other areas of the global group. So far we have exported three talents