Gerald Heineken's Success Story

Founder of Heineken

Nowadays Heineken is one of the world’s largest beer producers. It owns more than 110 breweries and employs over 55 thousand people worldwide. Brands, such as Murphy’s, Tiger Beer and Zagorka, are also ownership of the company. Heineken’s history begins in the middle of the 19th century in Amsterdam, city with a big historical and cultural significance. It is a story about a guy, named Gerald Heineken, who is the original Founder of the company. In 1864 he decided to start his own business in the beer industry and wrote a letter to his mother about a brewery, known as De Hooiberg (Haystack), he was planning to buy. Convinced that it would be a great deal, she bought it for him when he was only 22. To this time Haystack was one of the Amsterdam’s largest breweries, which in fact had been established almost 300 years before. From the whole beginning Gerald was paying special attention to the beer’s quality, which was awarded with the firm’s unbelievable success. A couple of years after the founding of the company, it was already exporting beer to Spain, Germany, France, Italy, and even the Far East.

After Gerald Heineken died in 1893, his inheritors continued the family business and turned the company into the world’s third largest beer producer. Today Heineken is exporting in more than 170 countries worldwide and claims that the original Heineken recipe has not changed since the beer was first produced in the Gerald’s brewery.