Comment: Blood on the tracks?

Jeremy Blood, the new managing director of Heineken UK, told The Publican this week that he saw a big and important future for both the Heineken and Kronenbourg brands in the new business.

Pull the other one Jeremy. Can Heineken and Kronenbourg seriously co-exist in one portfolio? Scottish & Newcastle (S&N) built its recent success on a bedrock of selling a portfolio of four key brands to pubcos and the freetrade. But the key thing about the portfolio was that each major brand hit a different part of the market. You had a standard lager (Foster's), premium lager (Kronenbourg 1664), ale brand (John Smith's) and cider (Strongbow).

Now more than ever pubcos are portfolio buying and quite frankly, in many pubs, two premium lagers into one font just does not go. Several senior UK pubco bosses are openly criticising the new S&N/Heineken regime for not taking the chance to license Kronenbourg off to another brewer.

And this highlights the most significant point. They know better than anyone that after years of working to get Kronenbourg integrated into their estates it is now going to be dropped like a stone.

If you think I am being cynical then try to imagine the scene. A shareholder meeting in Amsterdam, where the chief executive of Heineken informs the assembled gathering that UK marketing budgets for the Dutch lager brand are to be slashed in favour of some French brand called Kronenbourg. It isn't going to happen! There is only one reason Heineken got involved in the UK bidding process for S&N and it wasn't to buy up and invest in its premium lager brands at the expense of Heineken.