Lau­ra Dowrich-Phillips

Pep­si­Co is now the of­fi­cial dis­trib­u­tor and bot­tler for Ocean Spray in the Caribbean and Latin Amer­i­ca. This al­liance is the ex­ten­sion of a 2006 agree­ment be­tween the two com­pa­nies, which saw Pep­si­Co tak­ing over the dis­tri­b­u­tion and bot­tling as­pects of a wide port­fo­lio of Ocean Spray's busi­ness across the Unit­ed States.

The ex­ten­sion of that al­liance to our ter­ri­to­ry will see Pep­si­Co Trinidad tak­ing over the Ocean Spray dis­tri­b­u­tion from Had­co.

The 20-year busi­ness deal was cel­e­brat­ed last month at Ocean Spray's head­quar­ters in Lakeville, Mass­a­chu­setts. The event al­so cul­mi­nat­ed the launch and/or re­launch of Ocean Spray over the last nine months in Colom­bia, Pe­ru, Guatemala, Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic and T&T, as well as in many oth­er Caribbean is­lands.

Jour­nal­ists from T&T, Ja­maica, Pe­ru, Guatemala and Colom­bia were in­vit­ed to par­tic­i­pate in the cel­e­bra­tions along­side rep­re­sen­ta­tives from Ocean Spray and Cab­Corp, bot­tlers for Pep­si­co.

The week­end-long event in­clud­ed tours of Ocean Spray's op­er­a­tions, a vis­it to the com­pa­ny's largest cran­ber­ry bog in Ware­ham, and par­tic­i­pa­tion in a pop­u­lar an­nu­al Cran­ber­ry Fes­ti­val.

At the wel­com­ing ses­sion, Kei­th Benoit, vice-pres­i­dent of Ocean Spray's glob­al part­ners and de­vel­op­ing mar­kets, told the group that Ocean Spray is a co-op­er­a­tive owned by more than 600 cran­ber­ry-grow­er fam­i­lies since 1930.

"The com­pa­ny is owned by the grow­ers who are al­so on our board of di­rec­tors, and our job is to sell the fruit for them - whether it be our drinks, sauces and dried cran­ber­ry prod­ucts," he said.

With sales ex­ceed­ing US$2 bil­lion, Ocean Spray is North Amer­i­ca's lead­ing pro­duc­er of canned and bot­tled juices and juice drinks, and has been the best-sell­ing brand name in the canned and bot­tled juice cat­e­go­ry since 1981.

Ocean Spray is sold in more than 50 coun­tries and its cran­ber­ries can be found in 800-plus prod­ucts world­wide.

Faced with in­creased com­pe­ti­tion from oth­er brands, the com­pa­ny formed an al­liance with Pep­si­Co to cap­ture un­tapped mar­kets. The al­liance has proven so suc­cess­ful with tremen­dous growth for Ocean Spray that it just made sense to ex­pand it to Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean, said En­rique Corti­nas, di­rec­tor strate­gic al­liance for Pep­si­co Latin Amer­i­ca.

"Cran­ber­ries and su­per foods, in gen­er­al, are a thriv­ing, grow­ing cat­e­go­ry with a lot of play­ers com­ing in. Ocean Spray, in some way, shape or form, has had pres­ence in these cat­e­gories, but lacked a lo­cal part­ner that could re­al­ly take them to the next lev­el," he ex­plained.

He said for Pep­si­Co, the al­liance was part of his com­pa­ny's strat­e­gy to sat­is­fy con­sumers' tastes for health­i­er prod­ucts.

"Pep­si, for 20 years, has been in a trans­for­ma­tion jour­ney go­ing from a fizzy-cen­tric com­pa­ny, with brands such as Pep­si and Sier­ra Mist, to ac­qui­si­tions, part­ner­ships and al­liances with brands like Ocean Spray, the ac­qui­si­tion of Gatorade and Trop­i­cana, ex­pand­ing our port­fo­lio and di­ver­si­fy­ing our bev­er­age op­tions.

"Fif­teen years ago, a quar­ter of Pep­si­Co sales were prod­ucts out­side of the seg­ment. To­day, more than 50 per cent of our sales come from non-car­bon­at­ed bev­er­ages. For the re­gion, Cran­ber­ry is a grow­ing, thriv­ing flavour in that seg­ment and we are just there to cap­ture some strong growth in juice. We have ex­ist­ing po­si­tions in juice; we have a 100 per cent co­conut wa­ter in Brazil, Trop­i­cana across many mar­kets in Latin Amer­i­ca as well as through our bot­tling part­ners."

The re­gion­al al­liance be­tween the two ma­jor bev­er­age com­pa­nies would see them col­lab­o­rat­ing on the de­vel­op­ment of new cran­ber­ry and blue­ber­ry bev­er­ages across the re­gion.

So far, the al­liance has pro­duced five for­mu­las, one of which is Flavour Splash cran­ber­ry wa­ter, which was launched in Ja­maica in Sep­tem­ber. Cran­ber­ry clas­sic, cran­ber­ry light and cran­ber­ry grape juices were ex­pect­ed to roll out in Cen­tral Amer­i­ca last month.

Ja­maica and T&T are the largest mar­kets for Ocean Spray in the Caribbean, while Mex­i­co is the largest in Latin Amer­i­ca.