Leo Van Munching Jr. of Darien, who recently passed away, pushed his family’s already successful beer-importing company into national prominence from the 1970s to the 1990s, with marketing and ads that responded to new challenges and opportunities, according to Tuesday’s New York Times.
He died at home on Sunday, at the age of 89 from heart failure, the Times reported in an obituary that added several details about his career.
By the mid-1970s, he was running day-to-day operations of Van Munching and Company, which his father, Leo van Munching Sr. (who preferred a lower-case “v” in his name), had founded in 1946 as the sole importer of Heineken products.
The company maintained its dominance as the importer of the largest foreign beer in the country through successful advertising and marketing campaigns, including radio ads starting in the 1970s that would end with the familiar “Imported by Van Munching and Company, New York, New York.”
Television ads were introduced in the ’70s, focusing on the brand’s distinctive green bottle and the tag line, “America’s No. 1-selling imported beer.” With younger beer drinkers gravitating toward trendy new beers, the company later switched to a new advertising tack, with the tag line, “When you’re done kidding around, Heineken.”
In 1979, Advertising Age reported that 41 percent of all imported beer sales in the country were from Heineken, which had been the biggest import brand for most of the decade. Van Munching officially took over from his father in 1980.
At Van Munching’s urging, Heineken created Amstel Light specifically for sale in the U.S. According to the Advertising Age website:
“In the early 1980s, Heineken introduced Amstel Light, positioned as a premium imported light beer targeted to women, with the slogan, ’95 calories never tasted so good.’ Amstel Light was a curious introduction for Heineken, as there was no call for light beer in the brewer’s home market. The wisdom of the introduction soon became clear, however, as Amstel Light quickly rose to the No. 1 position among light beers in the U.S.”
The Times obituary reported: “Mr. Van Munching sold his company to Heineken in the early 1990s (he ran it for them until 1993), and when he left, it was still the leading American import. By 1997, however, Heineken had yielded the top spot to Corona Extra. As of 2015, it had yet to reclaim it.”
In 1992, Van Munching donated $5 million to the University of Maryland to build a new home for the Robert Smith School of Business. The school moved into Van Munching Hall (or “VMH”) in 1993. In 1999 Van Munching donated $6 million more for renovations (with donations from elsewhere, the building has since been expanded). The gift to the university was one of a series of donations Van Munching made to charities over the years.
The senior van Munching, who died in 1990, had originally immigrated with his family from the Netherlands to the U.S. in 1933 with 50 cases of beer to get his start in importing. When World War II interrupted Dutch exports, he worked for the Dutch government in exile to help that country’s sailors in the U.S. Van Munching and Company was founded after the war.
____________
See also: Leo Van Munching Jr., 89, Beer Importer, Philanthropist