E-Malt.com News article: Ghana: SABMiller launching cassava based beer Eagle

Multinational brewers have been doing a roaring trade in Africa lately, but with normal lagers too expensive for many consumers there is now an increasing focus on products for the mass market, The Financial Times reported on March, 14.

SABMiller has already rolled out its lower-cost cassava beer in Mozambique (called Impala). Now it’s launching a cassava based beer in Ghana, to be brewed by its local subsidiary, Accra Brewery, and called Eagle.

While much is made of Africa’s growing middle class, the mass market also presents a big opportunity and SABMiller has been looking at ways of formalizing the drinking sector in Africa, given that it represents the bulk of alcohol consumed in most African countries.

As beyondbrics reported last year, the company has been rapidly expanding the availability of its sorghum based Chibuku beer, which is produced from sorghum and costs around half the price of a conventional beer.

In 2011 it launched the world’s first commercially produced cassava beer in Mozambique, and the company says the new product in Ghana will sell at 70 per cent of the price of mainstream lager.

SABMiller Africa managing director Mark Bowman said: “Part of our strategy across Africa is to make high quality beer which is affordable for low-income consumers while simultaneously creating opportunities for smallholder farmers in our markets.”

“Smallholder cassava farmers have a guaranteed market for their crop, which is then used to make consistently high quality, affordable beer for consumers; and the government realises increased revenues as people trade up into formal, taxable alcohol consumption.”

Cassava is widely grown across many parts of Africa, but is generally associated with small farmer agriculture, making it hard to integrate with large-scale commercial production operations. The company claims there is a 40 per cent surplus of the crop in Ghana, and using mobile processing units it hopes to link 1,500 Ghanaian smallholders to its supply chain.

15 March, 2013