Hungary is one of Heineken’s innovation centres

Joris Huijsmans, general manager of Heineken Hungary reckons that they proved that a traditional category such as beer can also be innovative in many ways. Ten years ago beer was a stable and from a development perspective boring category, but this changed by now: many unknown but cheap, often imported brands appeared on store shelves, pushing established brands into a spiral of price discounts and promotions. Mr Huijsmans believes that the beer category has to be built on the concepts of enjoyment, experience and excitement – just like they do it with Soproni, Hungary’s favourite beer. This year HEINEKEN started indicating nutritional value on their products in Hungary too, showing consumers that beer is a refreshment that contains fewer calories than carbonated soft drinks. HEINEKEN’s experience is that Hungarians love beer but they also like sweet taste. This is the reason why Soproni’s brewing masters created the low-alcohol Soproni Radler series – products made with real fruit juice. Soproni Szűz contains no alcohol, just like the new bittersweet Soproni Maxx, which is brewed with special malt. The company also produces alcohol-free Soproni Radlers. Many people say that the best beer is draught beer: the company developed New Soproni Fresh Draught for them, draught beer put in bottles, which are wrapped in paper and delivered to dedicated Tesco stores’ refrigerators, cooled throughout the transportation process. HEINEKEN employees regularly come to visit from abroad, because they want to learn from Hungarian colleagues who are considered real innovators in the Heineken team. Heineken is Europe’s No. 1 beer in terms of volume sales. Many different types of packaging guarantee that everyone can find the Heineken product that suits their needs the best, from the 0.5-litre bottles or cans to 24-can cartons to 400ml and 300ml bottles. What is more, it is easy to place in the basket even the 4x400ml, 6x25cl and 12x25cl bottle multipacks or the 6x330ml can multipacks. HEINEKEN Hungária Breweries Zrt. pays special attention the communities where their breweries are located. Since 2008 the company has been sponsoring important NGO initiatives in Sopron and Martfű, while this year it helped the universities of Sopron, Debrecen and Miskolc from its revenue from the Volt, Campus and EFOTT festivals. In cooperation with the Hungarian Interchurch Aid, the programme called Refreshing Help form Soproni helped young job seekers to find work with HUF 100 million. Joris Huijsmans told that Heineken Hungary is both creative and dedicated to progress, trying to make things better for society as well. As leaders in innovation in the HEINEKEN Group, they will surprise both partners and consumers with many new things in 2015.