THE Bralima brewery in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), is an island of modernity in a city where chaos is the norm. Inside a building near the docks where barges begin the journey up the Congo river, conveyor belts rattle as thousands of glass bottles are washed and filled with amber liquid. A generator hums to power the new brewing machinery, creating enough booze to fill 28,000 crates every two days.
Yet the real achievement of Bralima, which is owned by Heineken, a Dutch brewer, is not making the beer. It is what happens when it leaves the factory. Congo is one of the worst-connected, most dysfunctional countries on Earth. Four times the size of France, it has almost no all-weather roads. In large parts of eastern DRC, the state is a fiction and rebels control the roads. Yet there is scarcely a village where it is impossible to get a beer.
Bralima was founded in 1923. Its main competitors, Bracongo and Brasimba, both owned by Castel, a secretive French...Continue reading
from Business and finance https://www.economist.com/news/business/21740779-brewers-are-rare-colonial-era-holdouts-notorious-trouble-spot-how-heineken-beer-survives?fsrc=rss
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