HEINEKEN FROM THE AIR B A bird's-eye view of the organisation Siège social de la société Heineken, en plein centre d'Amsterdam. Amid green meadows, near Zoeterwoude, stands the brewery opened in 1975. Au milieu des vertes prairies, la brasserie, in- augurée en 1975, prés de Zoeterwoude. river deliberately left undisturbed so that the countryside might be preserved as far as possible in its original state It is Heineken's largest establishment in terms of plant area, but not its largest brewery. This you will find in the south. Before reaching it you fly above the small town of Zoetermeer, where a building site is waiting for Heineken. Soon the first pile for a new distillery will be driven into the soil. In two and a half years it will be ready for production. And then you come to Rotterdam, where an empty lot is all that is left of the old Heineken plant built there in 1873. But Heineken is still very much part of the scene in this bustling town, which has the largest harbour in the world. Two distilleries are in full operation there, making practically every kind of spirit and particularly the famous Dutch jenever. One distillery :s in the heart of the city. The other is as it were next door to Rotterdam in the town of Schiedam, where jenever has been distilled for hundreds of years. But back we go to Rotterdam, for there is much more of Heineken there. Next to a block of large sales offices is a building where the Head office of the Heineken company, in the very heart of Amsterdam. Flying is the best way to get an overall picture of Heineken in the Netherlands today; and, ideally, you would need a helicopter. But when it all began, more than a hundred years ago, a balloon ascent over Amsterdam would have been sufficient to give you a bird's-eye view; you would have been able to see, right in the centre of the city, a brewery known as The Haystack. And that's all there was of the company in 1864, the year when the founder, G. A. Heineken, then 22, made his start in the business by buying The Hays tack, which dated from 1592. Today a balloon would be quite inadequate. You would need a kind of spaceship and a giant pair of binoculars to see Heineken in its enti rety in the Netherlands - the thousands of signs carrying the company name in the streets of the towns and villages; the produc tion units scattered all over the country. But, being practical, you take off from Amsterdam in your helicopter and as you ho ver above the city your eye is caught by two breweries not more than a mile apart (No, The Haystack is not one of them; it has long since disappeared to make way for an hotel and a restaurant). The smaller of the two breweries is the first to have been built by Heineken; it was erected in 1868 when The Haystack be came too small to house the rapidly ex panding business. Heineken chose a spot far away from city-life and the stone building was surrounded by the green meadows for which Holland is so famous.. Today you can hardly recognize it among the thousands of roofs which have appeared around it in the last hundred years. The other brewery is Amstel, which was also built in the middle of green pastures and among black and white spotted cows, but here also housing has ousted nature. As they are located in Amsterdam it is no wonder that both units are situated alongside a canal, which in the past provided an indispensable means of transporting beer and its raw mate rials. Needless to say, trucks have now taken over. Flying over the dikes, the canals and the rivers in a southerly directio'n, you come to the very large Zoeterwoude brewery near the town of Leyden between Amsterdam and The Hague. Its site is so huge covering nearly 200 acres that you cannot miss it. But not all of the land has been used for building. Here nature's green is everywhere and a small river flows peacefully between the stone structures a humming of electronic equipment never stops night or day. Here is the company's computer centre, where most of the administration is handled. But the computers not only handle the bookkeeping, they also work out the best way to load the hundreds of trucks which are daily on the road; and they memorize the stocks to the last bottle, empty or full. The computers are like so many spiders absorbing all information concerning Heineken and storing it for future use, even adding or sub tracting the sale of one crate of drinks hand led by one of the many beverage wholesalers owned by Heineken throughout the country. It is not, however, a matter only of figures, sales and spirits in Rotterdam. In an old group of buildings you will find the firm of Reuchlin, wine merchants who for 150 years have spe cialized in quality wines from Europe and who joined Heineken a few years ago, adding a new tradition to the many the company cherishes. As we continue flying due east the city of Bois-le-Duc appears, featuring one of the most impressive cathedrals of the Nether lands; its spire can be seen from the roof of Heineken's largest brewery. One and a half billion glasses of beer, mostly for export, are produced there every year. It was inaugurated in 1958 by HRH the Prince of the Netherlands, and it has expanded continuously ever since. The last addition was a big office building opened in early 1976. Then we head north again and we see how the many waterways give way to sandy soil, for Holland is not everywhere the watery country foreigners believe it to be. And when we hover over the centre of Bunnik, a very small village dotted with mountains of crates, we discern Vrumona, Heineken factory which produces a variety of soft drinks and, under licence, Pepsi-Cola and Seven-Up Lorries mingle with tankers bringing in thousands of gallons of tomato juice from Naples or fruit juices from somewhere else on the Mediterranean. As we continue due north another village at tracts our attention. It is Hattem, where Messrs. Van Olffen are located, bottlers and suppliers of wine to supermarkets and similar outlets. Rivers of red and white wine flow from their stockrooms, together with other drinks such as eggnog. And then to our final destination, Leeuwar den, capital of the province of Friesland, the region famous for its cows. Here we find the distillery of the Bokma company, makers of numerous spirits, but specialists in the field of Dutch jenever, sold in square bottles, one of 6

Jaarverslagen en Personeelsbladen Heineken

Heineken Contact | 1977 | | pagina 8