Rise and shine
Day 1,13:10 hrs, Athens International Airport
The expensive bottle question
Day 1,16:17 hrs, Athenian Brewery S.A.
THE WORLD OF HEINEKEN
They say that Athens airport is notoriously difficult to manage, one of the
most chaotic hubs in Europe. Yet looking across the streaming lines of
people, it looks more organised than that, more ordered.
"They did a lot of work during the Olympics," Marnie Kontovraki,
communications manager at Athenian Brewery S.A. tells me. "Athens has
come a long way."
Kontovraki is a natural when it comes to boosting beer in Greece, her
enthusiasm ever present. Through a series of workshops and educational
presentations, she's slowly helping to show Greek hospitality professionals
and consumers the benefits of beer.
"I love communicating to people about this stuff; if they just know how
to serve our beer well then it all works, the consumers see how good beer
can be." She's the perfect hostess for our visit to the island but, truth be
told, she worries me when she tells me what time the boat leaves.
"You'll have to be up at 3 AM; the boat leaves at 4 AM for Mykonos."
"4 AM?" I repeat, hoping that I heard her wrong the first time.
"We deliver twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays. We'll catch the
Thursday morning ferry. In the meantime, I'll introduce you to some of
the supply chain guys," she tells me.
Hey, I thought we were going to the beach; supply chain guys don't exactly
enter that picture. But Kontovraki convinces me that talking to them is
worthwhile; without the supply chain being so efficiently organised, there'll
be no beer waiting for us.
We make our way to Athenian Brewery S.A, a successful operating company
of Heineken that supplies the Greek market with beer and mineral water.
"Heineken sells well, but Amstel is our big brand. It's considered a local
beer," Kontovraki tells me. Upon entering the brewery, trucks are being
loaded with red and green crates, at which Kontovraki smiles.
"Yes, you guessed it, those are the crates that are going down to the
harbour for tonight's shipment. We'll catch up to them later," she informs me.
We enter a room and I meet Jos Oliemans, Supply Chain Manager, and
Rigas C. Koutroumanos, Central Distribution Manager, at Athenian Brewery
S.A. Oliemans is boisterous, sociable and quick to laugh, not what I
expected a supply chain person to be like. In fact, he looks at supply chain
charts as a general would battle plans, telling Koutroumanos how they'll get
product through if ever a problem occurs.
Oliemans explains: "There are a lot of challenges. First of all, you have
to know that here in Greece we have the highest seasonality. Our summer
consumption is almost 10 times greater than in winter. In Holland, where
I'm from, the seasonality is far less. That means that now—June, July and
August—are absolutely our peak period as the tourists and Greek
vacationers go to the islands and beaches. The beer we can produce, but
it's the distribution to such a fragmented market (53 islands, thousands of
smaller wholesalers) that is the complexity. We have 300 trucks, every day,
rolling product to the wholesalers and outlets; that's a lot. And then you
have ferries, and then local transport that's part of it, all taking different
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times to deliver. Sometimes, the trucks have to wait overnight, waiting for
ferries. There are strikes, bad weather. What's more, normal traffic has
priority over the ferries. We have one island that we even have to deliver to
by donkey," Oliemans says with a grin.
