Bottles, the traditional containers for beer still dominate Czech beer market, but canned beer production has increased four-fold in the past 20 years.
According to data presented to Czech news agency ?TK by the Czech Beer and Malt Association (CBMA), in 1994 canned beer output reached 200,000 hectolitres in the Czech Republic, but this figure climbed to more than one million hectolitres by 2013. This represents a 20 per cent share of total production.
However, more than two-thirds of domestic beer sales are made up by beer in glass bottles, according to CBMA. The reason behind the four-fold increase in the canned beer production is due to growing exports, CBMA head Vladimir Balach told ?TK.
While they first appeared in the US and Europe in the 1930s, Czech breweries only started using cans in the 1990. It was not before 2010, however, that canned beer became popular in this post-Communist country.
According to brewery Staropramen spokesman Pavel Barvík, a new generation of beer drinkers who enjoy cans has grown up. According to Barvík, bottles of beer have too long a tradition for Czechs to be replaced by cans easily.
One reason for the growing popularity of beer in cans is because Czech consumers no longer consider it to be expensive or luxurious. Two decades ago, beer in cans cost almost twice as much as it did in bottles.
The Czech Republic has the highest beer consumption per capita in the world.
© 2015 European Supermarket Magazine – your source for the latest retail news. Article written by László Juhász.
