Dolf van den Brink
Dolf van den Brink is a Dutch business executive who has served as chairman of the executive board and chief executive officer of Heineken N.V. since June 2020. He is the third person to hold the position in three decades at a company that has been controlled by the Heineken family for its entire history.
Heineken is the second-largest brewer in the world by volume after Anheuser-Busch InBev, operating in more than seventy countries with a portfolio of around three hundred brands, of which the Heineken lager itself is the only one distributed globally at scale. Van den Brink took charge at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, at a moment when bars and restaurants, which generate a disproportionate share of a brewer's profit, were closed across most of the company's markets.
Early life and education
Van den Brink was born in the Netherlands in the early 1970s. He studied at the University of Amsterdam, taking degrees in economics and in philosophy, an unusual combination that he has referred to in discussing his approach to management and which distinguishes him from the accountants and marketers who more commonly lead consumer goods companies.
Career
He joined Heineken in 1998 and has spent his entire career with the company, a pattern common among its senior executives and consistent with the company's practice of developing leaders internally and moving them between markets.
Democratic Republic of the Congo
The formative posting was in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where van den Brink served as general manager of Bralima, Heineken's Congolese subsidiary, from around 2005. Bralima had operated in the country since 1923 and had continued through decades of conflict, including periods in which its breweries were located in territory controlled by armed groups.
The experience is the one he has discussed most frequently. Running a large industrial business in a country with minimal infrastructure, unreliable electricity, a currency of uncertain value and an active conflict required improvisation of a kind entirely absent from the company's European operations, and van den Brink has described it as the period in which he learned most.
It also placed him in proximity to the most serious reputational difficulty in Heineken's recent history. Reporting and subsequent research, notably by the Dutch journalist Olivier van Beemen, examined the company's conduct in the Congo during the conflict years, including payments and arrangements with armed groups and the treatment of employees. Van den Brink has publicly engaged with the criticism, and Heineken subsequently acknowledged failings and made payments to former workers, including women who had been employed as beer promoters in eastern Congo and who described sexual exploitation associated with the role.
Heineken USA and Mexico
Van den Brink was appointed president and chief executive of Heineken USA in 2009. The American market is the most profitable beer market in the world and the one in which imported premium brands command the highest prices, making it strategically central to Heineken despite representing a modest share of its volume. He led the business through a period of intense competition from craft brewing and from Mexican imports, the latter being a category Heineken itself owned in much of the world but not in the United States, where the Corona and Modelo brands are distributed by Constellation Brands.
He subsequently ran Heineken's Mexican business, acquired with Fomento Económico Mexicano's beer operations in 2010, and then led the Asia Pacific region from Singapore, a period covering Heineken's 2018 acquisition of a substantial minority stake in China Resources Beer, the owner of Snow, the highest-volume beer brand in the world.
Chief executive
He became chief executive in June 2020, succeeding Jean-François van Boxmeer, who had led the company for fifteen years.
The pandemic
The immediate problem was that roughly half of Heineken's profit came from the on-trade, meaning bars, restaurants, hotels and stadiums, and that these were closed across most of its markets. Volumes fell sharply, and the company announced a reduction of around eight thousand positions in February 2021, the largest in its recent history.
EverGreen
The strategy published in February 2021, named EverGreen, set out four themes: growth in the premium segment, a substantial programme of cost reduction and productivity improvement intended to fund investment rather than to flatter margins, digital transformation of the company's relationship with the millions of small retailers and bars that sell its products, and a sustainability agenda covering emissions, water and responsible consumption.
Two elements have been commercially significant. The first is premiumisation: the growth of the Heineken brand itself, of Birra Moretti in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, and of regional premium brands, on the reasoning that consumers in most markets are drinking less beer but paying more for it.
The second is low and no alcohol. Heineken 0.0, launched in 2017 and pushed hard under van den Brink, is the leading non-alcoholic beer in a large number of markets and grew considerably faster than the alcoholic portfolio. The company has treated the category as an addition to the market rather than a substitution within it, on the evidence that a substantial proportion of non-alcoholic beer is consumed on occasions when the drinker would previously have had no beer at all.
Russia
Following the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Heineken announced that it would leave Russia, where it operated seven breweries and employed around eighteen hundred people. The exit took considerably longer than announced, drew criticism when it emerged that the company had continued to launch products in the market during the withdrawal period, and was completed in August 2023 with the sale of the business to the Arnest Group for a symbolic one euro, with Heineken guaranteeing employment for three years and recording a loss of about €300 million.
Van den Brink acknowledged publicly that the process had taken too long and that the company had made mistakes in it, a candour that was noted at the time by comparison with other multinationals in the same position.
Recent period
The years since have been characterised by a difficult trading environment: weak consumer spending in Europe, sharp cost inflation in energy, aluminium, glass and barley, difficulties in Vietnam following changes to drink-driving enforcement, and the broader question of what falling alcohol consumption among younger people means for a brewing company over a twenty-year horizon.
Approach
Van den Brink is regarded as unusually direct in public communication for the chief executive of a consumer goods company, acknowledging errors explicitly and discussing difficulties rather than reframing them. He has also been notably willing to engage with critics of the company's conduct in Africa, which is uncommon.
His stated view of the business is long-term to an extent that is easier to sustain at Heineken than elsewhere, because the family holding company controls a majority of the votes and is not obliged to respond to quarterly pressure, an ownership structure comparable in effect to that at several other European family-controlled companies.
Assessment
Van den Brink's tenure has coincided with the most difficult period for the brewing industry since the 1980s: a pandemic that closed the trade, inflation that raised costs faster than prices could follow, a war that forced the abandonment of a substantial market, and a structural decline in alcohol consumption among younger consumers in developed economies.
Against that, the company has grown its premium brands, established a leading position in a genuinely new category with Heineken 0.0, and maintained a presence in emerging markets, particularly in Africa and Asia, that is more extensive than any competitor's and that represents most of the industry's remaining volume growth.
The unresolved question is the one facing every brewer: whether a business built on a product that consumers in rich countries are steadily drinking less of can grow by selling a more expensive version of it to fewer people, and for how long. The answer Heineken has given, that the company should be understood as being in the business of social occasions rather than of alcohol, is coherent, and the non-alcoholic portfolio is the test of it.