With beer sales in pubs at their lowest level since the Great Depression and reports of 36 pubs closing their doors every week amid the worst trading conditions in living memory, Mark Hunter, the boss of Britain’s second-biggest brewer, could be forgiven for wanting to throw in the bar towel.

Yet while the chief executive of Coors Brewers, which owns Carling Lager, admits that the company is making a profit of just a penny on every pint it brews, he is far from despondent about the industry’s prospects. Instead, he is putting time and money behind trying to ensure that Coors has a beer for every type of consumer and occasion.

In particular, he is focusing on female customers, who account for 14 per cent of UK beer sales, compared with 25 per cent in North America, the home of Molson Coors, the group’s parent. Mr Hunter has set up Project Eve, a team of five women, to look at ways of tapping into the market.

“Since 1980 the volume of beer consumed in the UK has fallen by about 20 per cent, with the on-trade \ down by 40 per cent,” he says. “Yet that’s at a time when wine has been growing and spirits have come back into growth, both of which are fundamentally orientated at more of a female user base. It seemed obvious there is an opportunity to make beer a bigger part of the consideration set for females who drink alcohol.”

Mr Hunter says that if the company wanted to dispel the image of beer drinking as a male bastion, it had to address the issues of taste and calories. It recently launched Kasteel Cru Rosé, a fruity-tasting lager brewed in Alsace that is designed to be drunk with food, and will shortly be launching a 99-calorie bottled version of Carling.

“We’re trying to get women to just stop and consider beer,” he says. “If you research women and ask them how many calories they think there are in a pint of beer, the majority will be north of 500 calories, when the truth is 180-220 on average.

“The perception among women is that they don’t like beer, because it’s too bitter and it’s got far too many calories. The industry needs to deal with that, but historically has been woeful at doing so, and we feel there’s an opportunity to step into that space.”

He concedes that one of the main challenges is that of taste. “The issue for women is that beer tastes bitter. We need to develop beers that taste different. Physiologically, there are differences between male and female tongues and that leads them to react to beers in different ways. There’s already enormous diversity and choice in the beer category, but we need to stretch the boundaries.”

That process will not only involve female consumers, however. As part of its strategy of building a broad portfolio of brands to cater for all drinking occasions, Coors is also introducing new brands aimed at male drinkers. It has started testing Blue Moon, one of its parent company’s US brands, and this year it will launch Worthington’s Red Shield, a slightly less bitter, less alcoholic version of its famous bottled-conditioned White Shield ale.

However, Mr Hunter insists that he is not ignoring Carling, which accounts for about 75 per cent of Coors’ sales, claiming that the positioning of Britain’s biggest alcohol brand can evolve. He says that the group will increasingly emphasise the beer’s “integrity and provenance” and is working with hop farmers to source 100 per cent of its raw materials from the UK within two to three years.

But does the provenance of mass-produced lagers have as much resonance with drinkers as for real ales? Mr Hunter says: “I’m not sure what you mean by mass produced. It’s an unfortunate term. The implication is one of bad quality versus good quality.

“We work with lots of regional brewers and they come and benchmark against our quality standards. Many of them tell us they are desperate to try to get to the quality standards we have in our brewing process because of the inconsistency they have in theirs.”

Mr Hunter points to Walkers crisps as an example of a big consumer brand that has made a virtue of its focus on using British raw materials. “It’s about putting product quality on a pedestal. We have exacting standards and believe that’s a story that should be told. We have an ambition with a brand like Carling to be able to talk about every single ingredient being 100 per cent British. We are now very close to being able to do that.”

Carling is the biggest of Coors’s 20 brands, accounting for 5.5 million of the 31 million barrels of beer made in Britain annually. It is also the reason why Coors is able to claim 22 per cent of the UK beer market, narrowly ahead of the newly merged Anheuser-Busch InBev, but four percentage points behind Heineken, the new owner of Scottish & Newcastle (S&N).

However, Mr Hunter is under no illusions about the challenges ahead and he predicts that by the end of this year off-trade sales will for the first time overtake the on-trade. He says that the shift to drinking at home is linked to “a whole variety of things”, including changing consumer behaviour, the decline of heavy industry, the smoking ban and the growing price differential between pubs and supermarkets.

“Our sense is that over the next five to ten years a bottom tier of pubs \ become unsustainable. Up to 25 per cent of pubs could end up closing because they’re either in locations or they have an infrastructure that doesn’t allow them to evolve properly. The good news is that the pubs that have a clear hospitality proposition will flourish.”

The bad news is that there are also too many brewers and Mr Hunter believes that, were it not for the Government’s strict competition policy, consolidation of the big four players would be inevitable.

His response to excess brewing capacity in the three Coors breweries has been to sign a deal with S&N to brew some of its brands under contract, while overseeing a £40 million cost-cutting programme. “As a brewer, we make just about a penny a pint,” he says. “Our profitability has been flat-lining for the last three years. Although it’s not a great place to be, we feel that, given what’s been thrown at us in terms of the market going south and input cost inflation, then we’ve been holding our own.”

In his youth, Mr Hunter, 45, hoped to become a professional footballer, playing for the St Mirren boys team. The Carling Cup sponsorship means he sometimes runs into the man who ended his footballing aspirations. “I was at St Mirren when \ Alex Ferguson was the manager. He was a fantastic motivator, but he did tell me I probably wasn’t good enough to make it in football. When I see him I remind him of that and he says he’s pleased I ended up in a reasonable job.”

It is clear that, despite the torrid environment, Mr Hunter has no regrets that he ended up in brewing.

CV

Education Honours degree in business administration and marketing, University of Strathclyde

Career Six years in sales at Hallmark Cards and Bulmers, the drinks group. In 1989 he joined Bass Brewers as a trade marketing manager in Scotland, being promoted to senior brand manager then brand director. In 1996 he moved south to run the group's Carling brand in Burton upon Trent, joining the Bass Brewers board as marketing director the following year and staying with the Carling business after its £1.2 billion sale to Coors, now Molson Coors, at the end of 2001. In 2005 he moved to Canada as chief commercial officer, handling sales and marketing for the Molson brand, before returning to the UK in 2007 as chief executive of Coors Brewers

Personal life Lives in Ashbourne, Derbyshire, and has a flat in Glasgow. He is married with two teenage children and enjoys football, golf and tennis

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