Heineken has said it will be cutting 6,000 jobs worldwide. In Hereford the company employs 300 staff, while in Ledbury the company has 100 workers at the mill.
Chair of Ledbury Town Council, Councillor Liz Harvey said the town was concerned.
“Ledbury lost over 100 local jobs a few years ago when the company reorganised its Herefordshire operations and concentrated its bottling lines at its Hereford factory, but the company made efforts to minimise actual job losses by relocating a number of the Ledbury employees to the Hereford plant as part of the reorganisation,” she said.
“Herefordshire is the home of cider and Heineken’s 2025 Cider Report ( Heineken report shows popularity of cider in pubs ) indicated that the market for the apple based drink was growing faster than any other alcohol category in the market.
Bulmers owner Heineken to axe up to 6,000 jobs
Do you remember the old days at Bulmers?
Nostalgia: life at Hereford’s Bulmers in the 1980s
“Whilst job losses anywhere in the business are worrying, I hope that the popular contribution that Herefordshire cider makes to the company’s drinks portfolio means that local jobs are not impacted by the company’s wider plans.”
Heineken also run a number of pubs including The Volunteer in Hereford via the Star company, as a result of its takeover of Scottish & Newcastle in a joint purchase with Carlsberg in 2008.
As of 2024, the company currently runs around 2,400 pubs in the UK.
A spokesman told the Hereford Times: “We have announced that Heineken is accelerating productivity at scale to unlock significant savings, reducing 5,000 to 6,000 roles over the next two years. At this stage, we can only share this as a global figure and cannot comment on potential local implications. ”
The company, which also makes Amstel and Birra Moretti, revealed the plans in the face of weaker demand for beer amid “challenging market conditions”.
Heineken said the cuts will impact up to seven per cent of its global workforce.
Heineken’s UK arm, which has headquarters in Edinburgh and other sites in London, Manchester, Tadcaster, along with Hereford, and Ledbury, and employs around 2,100 people.
What are your thoughts?
You can send a letter to the editor to have your say by clicking here.
Letters should not exceed 250 words and local issues take precedence.
It is understood that much of the cuts will include brewery closures and consolidation already taking place, as well as merging smaller markets and centralising back-office operations.
On Wednesday, Heineken said total revenues fell by 4.7% year-on-year to 34.3 billion euros (£29.8 billion) while operating profits slipped by 3.2% to 3.4 billion euros for the year (£2.97 billion).
Heineken reported that it was impacted by a decline across the beer market in Europe in the face of “consumer price sensitivity”.
Total drinks volumes fell by 3.4 per cent in Europe as a result, with a 4.1 per cent fall for beer.