Big moves in Canada’s beer biz

Pour yourself a cold one (or maybe not if you’re reading this at 9 am) and let us tell you about the latest major shake-up in Canada’s beer industry. 

What happened: Danish beer titan Carlsberg is buying Canadian brewery Waterloo Brewing for a cool, crisp, and hoppy $144 million in the largest deal ever for a Canadian brewery. 

  • Carlsberg will take ownership of Waterloo’s stable of suds, including the popular bargain beer Laker.

  • More importantly, the deal gives Carlsberg a bigger manufacturing footprint here in the Great White North as it looks to expand in the Canadian market. 

The acquisition is the second instance this year of an international beer heavyweight buying its way into the Canadian brewing space after Denmark-based Royal Unibrew bought Amsterdam Brewery for $44 million in July.  

Why it matters: Since Anheuser-Busch InBev acquired rival SABMiller in 2016, the global beer market has faced heavy consolidation—successful Canadian craft breweries that in the past might have turned into international sellers are now more likely to get scooped up by one of the few big players in the space.

  • That’s created a market with many small producers (95% of Canadian craft brewers earn less than $10 million in annual revenue) trying to eke out a business while a few global giants account for the lion’s share of sales.

Zoom out: Beer was once almost synonymous with Canada, but its popularity has declined recently. Consumption is down ~13% between 2015 and 2020 as consumers grow more health-conscious and seek out less hearty alcohol options, or even non-alcoholic ones.