We know many people are excited about going to the pub, but there’s also some who still require reassurance that it is safe to return to the pub. This is fully understandable, and a key focus for us during the last couple of weeks has therefore been to help our customers provide a safe and welcoming experienced for consumers to enjoy a refreshing beer with added piece of mind.

Love My Local help pubs serve a safe and welcoming reopening weekend

You’ll remember in April when we launched Love My Local, we promised more. So since then, we’ve further developed the Love My Local platform to help pubs reopen and continue to trade safely and successfully, with features including:

• Online food and drink menus for pubs and venues
• Table service so contact is minimised 
• Online payments from pub-goers to avoid contact
• Booking capabilities for people to plan their trip to their favourite pub

We believe this platform will help give a better chance to provide a safe and welcoming drinking experience for consumers. At the same time, we also wanted to capture this cultural moment of pubs reopening.

Following the launch of Love My Local and the enhanced features, we’ve today launched a new campaign that captures the anticipation of our first pint with friends and also champions UK pubs. More about that here.

Your local needs you!

As you can probably sense we’re looking forward to bringing people back into pubs this weekend. However, we still cannot stress enough the importance of behaving responsibly.

This means that when some pubs do reopen across England today – a day some media are already calling somewhat unhelpfully, ‘Super Saturday’ – we need pub-goers to be supportive of their local and help ensure that the reopening of hospitality is a success and enjoyable experience for everyone.

Let’s therefore all respect the new measures, keep our distance (even after a long-awaited pint), remain respectful of staff as they get to grips with serving under these new measures, be respectful of our drinking behaviour and of each other.

We have no doubt that if we all work together, we can support the return of our cherished pubs safely. Cheers to that.

Bruce Ray,
Vice-president of corporate affairs, Carlsberg UK

Bruce joined Carlsberg UK having spent 18 years at Bacardi Brown-Forman Brands, where he held senior roles in sales, marketing and corporate affairs. Bruce is also responsible for our Government Relations & Public Affairs at Carlsberg globally. Bruce sits on a number of industry bodies, is on the Board of IARD, the International Alliance for Responsible Drinking, is chairman of the Future Beer Group of the British Beer & Pub Association and an Executive Committee member of the Brewers of Europe.