The Cuban government has taken advantage of the Havana International Fair (Fihav) to announce the upcoming arrival in the national market of Parranda, a new brand of beer made on the island, with an alcohol level of 4.8% and bottled in plastic.
Parranda, whose name is intended to evoke “the tradition of the popular festivities that are celebrated in the Cuban municipality of Remedios” in Villa Clara, had a pavilion at the Fihav. The factory, whose construction should end in January, is in the Mariel Special Development Zone (ZDEM) and will come into operation in the second quarter of 2023.
Félix Omar Rodríguez Pérez, logistics specialist at Cervecería Cubana SA, explained to the official media cubadebate that his company associated, through the state-owned Cuba Ron, with the Dutch company Swinkels Family Brewers, also known as Brewery Bavaria. “We hope to start marketing the beer in April or May.”
“We hope to start marketing the beer in April or May”
The preparation of Parranda, which had already been announced in August 2021, without the name being known at the time, will be borne by both companies, under a mixed capital regime. The manufacturers characterize the drink as a clear beer, bottled in polyethylene terephthalate (PET) containers, that is, plastic containers of 500 and 1,500 milliliters of capacity.
The project, he said, has a manufacturing plan of one million hectoliters per year. “We have top quality technology from the product itself, to the fermentation and filter tanks, as well as equipment with high quality standards,” she added.
The technician wants Parranda to have a wholesale distribution. “We will work from a distribution center where we can be selling from pallets to containers of the product,” he said.
The raw material for the manufacture of bottles will have to be imported, he specified, and at a later stage, with “the modern technologies available to the factory”, they will be molded with a hot air blower according to the planned design.
The specialist assured that the company has a “recycling policy”, since each container is expected to have a QR code to return it to a Raw Materials Center. “For each container of beer that is delivered, 0.10 cents will be given” in freely convertible currency (MLC) to the customer.
Parranda triumphed at Fihav, according to its directors, with “many business opportunities” both among foreign investors and with Cuban MSMEs, eager to revive the beer trade in Cuba, where it is almost impossible to find local brands like Cristal and Buccaneermanufactured on the island by the Belgian multinational Anheuser-Busch InBev, and where imported ones such as Bavaria, Hollandia and Heineken continue to be imported – and sold at prohibitive prices.
“I think that instead of having more brands of beer and other food, what there should be is more quantity, so that the people have the possibility of buying at prices that can be paid”
Parranda’s announcement in cubadebate provoked a multitude of negative comments about the appearance of a new beer in the current context of food crisis and shortages. The criticism reached foreign investors, who were accused of looking for markets like the Cuban one for being “safe, within the borders and without the slightest competition.”
“I think that instead of having more brands of beer and other food, what there should be is more quantity, so that the people have the possibility of buying at prices that can be paid,” lamented one user, who added suspiciously that ” only one detail was missing: the price”.
The amount of 0.10 cents for each bottle returned for recycling was also problematic, since several users saw it as an attempt to mislead the simplest population with the figure. “They should have said 0.010” MLC, explained another commentator, so that it is not thought that for every ten bottles returned the Government will pay 1 MLC.
Some expressed their concern that Parranda is destined only for hard currency stores, and then resold at high prices, and others stated that first “we should think about the production of meat and food, not beer.”
Dissatisfied with the new product and its plastic packaging, another user, more emphatic, pointed out: “Don’t invent more and give us back Cristal and Bucanero. They replace everything with a degenerate version of the original.”
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