CONGLOMERATE San Miguel Corp. (SMC) will grow its beer business by building between five and six breweries and start to manufacture Spam luncheon meat locally, which it will export in the region and sell to Philippine consumers.
Ramon S. Ang, San Miguel president and COO, said it has the partnership with US firm Hormel Foods and has the license to manufacture some of its products, including Spam, which is popular among Filipinos overseas.
Ang said the company will start to manufacture the canned processed meat in a new plant, which has a capacity to produce 500 tons a day or about 150,000 tons per year.
The produce of the plant will be exported in the region, and also be sold locally, Ang said.
“This license to manufacture Spam has been with Pure Foods for 20 years. We just failed to take care of it, just now,” Ang said. Pure Foods is the food unit of the conglomerate.
Ang said the said plan is part of the bigger project of expanding its food and beverage plants. He said the company is establishing six new feedmills with a capacity of 1 million tons per year,
These are in Mariveles in Bataan, Mabini in Batangas, Cagayan de Oro in the Phividec area, San Ildefonso in Bulacan, Mandaue in Cebu province and Iloilo.
Meanwhile, San Miguel is also establishing five to six breweries as part of its expansion.
These are in the La Union, Pangasinan, area; Sta. Rosa, which is currently a bottling plant but creating a full-sized brewery; Quezon-Bicol area; Cagayan de Oro and Zamboanga.
“We will be able to bring down logistics cost with these new breweries,” he said. Its cost includes bringing the product to all parts of the country, as well as getting most of the returnable bottles from the consumers back to its bottling plants.
Ang said that these new breweries will add some 20 percent in additional revenues, but warned the company is coming from a “low profit, low volume” as a result of the new taxes slapped on alcoholic products.
Each of these plants will have a capacity of 2 million hectoliters a year.
San Miguel is merging all of its food and beverage, beer breweries and liquor units in one big company.