If you are reading this, you probably don’t remember the last time you had soda in a glass bottle. And if you are still reading this, you probably don’t see yourself drinking from a glass bottle in the nearby future.
And that’s the story for many Soft drinks’ manufacturers in the country. It is a revolution that started with Riham Cola. When Riham came into the Ugandan market, it was branded too close to Coca Cola that a scuffle ensued between the Coca Cola (the market leader then), and Riham. It would result into the creation of Coke Mini.
“Coke Mini had been strategically positioned to kick Riham out of the market, but it didn’t happen. And if there’s any big regret on Coke’s side, it’s the failure to shift fully to PET at the time and not just see Coke Mini as a tactical product,” a market observer tells us.
With Riham fully sold onto the PET craze, it would go on to grow distribution far and wide. Watching quite closely was Pepsi aka Crown Beverages in Uganda. It immediately went full blast investing into PET lines. “Pepsi saw PET as a strategic shift. They read into the future and realized it was a matter of time before everyone moved to PET. And that explains why many years later, the market results would speak for themselves,” our market analyst narrates.
With Coke seeing PET as a tactical product and Pepsi viewing it as a strategic product, this made all the difference. Soon, the market would move on. You had retailers, depots and distributors shifting the bulk of their money to stocking up PET products. The young children too were on the PET craze.
“PET gave people this amazing freedom. People didn’t have to deal with empties anymore. You could walk into any supermarket and walk out with soda. Problem is, that soda was always a Pepsi brand, a Mirinda or something. And once a soda takes over the share of mouth, share of shelf, it takes long before you can edge it out,” the market analyst further comments.
With PET, manufacturers simply had to invest into plastic molding machines and then you have no limit to how far you can go. With the returnable glass bottle, you must manage the glass losses, the breakages at the factory, during transportation, you have all these forward and reverse logistics. You know with PET, it’s all about forward logistics. There’s no worrying about lifecycles, amortization, all those things. You simply keep churning out PET on PET.
Pepsi was heavily invested in PET and Coke was lagging on glass. But beyond that was the big pattern shift, there would never be a time of the glass bottle. Bring in things like Covid-19 and that took would make PET even more marketable. The consumer had shifted never to return to glass, for there was no point returning anyway. You go to KFC and you knew it was PET. You went to a restaurant and you knew you didn’t have to fill the same pressure to finish your PET bottle as you felt with the glass bottle. PET bottle meant freedom to the consumer. There’s just a lot to do with the PET bottle.
For now, the two soda manufacturers are in a race of who can build the biggest PET capability. The market demand can’t be satisfied. The problem is, it also means a break of the duopoly because PET makes market entry elastic. Anyone can easily enter the market unlike in the past with the glass bottle. What will become of the glass lines when the whole country eventually abandons the glass lines? It’s just a matter of time, but we are in the very end of this evolution, PET has finally beaten the glass bottle for Soda. Perhaps the beer industry should be on the watch out for the Can revolution… it could be closer.