SABMiller's Exit From Molson Coors Partnership Provides Opportunity for Improved Canadian On-Premise Beer Position

NEWTON, MA--(Marketwire - Mar 4, 2013) - "SABMiller is putting its own team on the ice now," says Chuck Ellis of SABMiller's prospects now that the company has dissolved its Canadian partnership with Molson Coors. Ellis is President of Restaurant Sciences LLC (Newton, MA), which tracks on-premise food and beverage sales in the U.S. and Canada. "Our Q4 2012 sample of more $30MM in beer sales for Canadian restaurants and bars looked at brand distribution. We were surprised by the depth of brand diversity in spite of AB-Inbev and Molson Coors' control of a combined 80 percent market share."

The chart below shows the Top-25 brands for Q4 of 2012:

"Of the Top-25 on-premise beers in Canada, only Budweiser has a double-digit market share," said Ellis. "The Canadian market is an intensely competitive landscape with twenty-five brands having on-premise share-of-sales of 1 percent or greater." While Molson Coors has 39 percent of Top-25 on-premise sales by dollar (compared to 40 percent for AB Inbev), SABMiller's Miller Genuine Draft makes up only 7.7 percent of the total. Here's a look at what MGD had to compete with for attention as part of the Molson Coors portfolio:

"If SABMiller can combine good consumer marketing with a new distribution portfolio, they can improve on the position they had with Molson Coors," said Ellis. "AB Inbev and Molson Coors have built beautiful brand portfolios in Canada. But with 9 of the Top 25 brands coming from outside these two Goliaths, there is an opening to coalesce a strong third beer distributor there. The on-premise channel has long been the brewer's platform for consumer trial and adoption, and will fuel overall growth."

About Restaurant Sciences
Restaurant Sciences is the premier provider of syndicated data and insights on food and beverage consumption in restaurants, bars, nightclubs and other foodservice establishments. The company delivers market share, market basket, competitive analysis, pricing, promotional, trend, segmentation and custom analytics to food and beverage manufacturers and distributors, as well as the broader industry they serve. Restaurant Sciences transforms over $1 Billion per month in guest check-level sales information into detailed data and insights across all segments of the foodservice landscape in the United States and Canada. Insights are delivered online through their business intelligence tool or through custom analytics. Visit www.restaurantsciences.com.