Coca-Cola’s incubation team to add fizz to new products

The basic idea behind the incubation model is to test out multiple product concepts every year so that we can build a pipeline of successful products that can be scaled up in future. The process of developing a concept to launching it commercially takes 2-3 years. But as consumers are evolving, a lot of new and niche categories are emerging in the beverages segment. So we felt we need to have a different model which is swift and agile to tap into such opportunities and time is of essence.

So, we have created an incubation model which is very agile for the marketplace and designed to turn around products within weeks, instead of years, with the help of a small team which reports directly to me. This will give us the ability to understand the evolving needs of our consumers.

It also ensures that our main product development model does not get distracted. For instance, if there is a product in the market which is just starting and is worth ₹20 crore of business, we cannot have our main product development model to concentrate on small business opportunities.

The second part of the model is that every product that we incubate does not have to go through our bottling systems.

We have developed an agile methodology internally to create a pretty decent national footprint with the help of some of our top customers. We are targeting to have 30-35 per cent of our pan India distribution for such incubated products. This kind of distribution can also give us a fair understanding about whether the product is working or not.

We have already launched the first two products through the incubation model – Aquarius Glucocharge and Minute Maid Vitingo. So this year we may have 7-8 products in the pipeline. On an annual basis, we could look at launching a maximum of ten products through the incubation model.

Aquarius Glucocharge is a big bet for us. We believe our chances of success with this product are very good because we believe we have a very good offering which Indian consumers understand. It is an easy marketing proposition.

We are committed to making Aquarius Glucocharge a mass distributed brand in the next eight months.

Minute Maid Vitingo is a product with a purpose for us. This product has been formulated to address micronutrients deficiency and malnutrition in India. We are very committed and proud to take it to the country. We will need to work hard to grow awareness and educate consumers about this product. While we will go pan-India with both these products, for Minute Maid Vitingo, we will focus on targeted communication for semi-urban and rural regions.

We still have a lot of work to do with the new variants that we have launched for Thums Up and Maaza and in terms of scaling up distribution of Rimzim nationally. Our focus is going to be on scaling up distribution and communication campaigns for these products. I believe we still have a lot of room to introduce more Minute Maid variants which we will look at launching in the next 6-8 months.

This will further accelerate the growth of Minute Maid, which is the fastest growing non-mango juice brand. We will also launch the frozen fruit product called Minute Maid Perfect Fruit later this year.

We are very bullish on Aquarius and believe that enhanced hydration is a huge opportunity. We will look at launching more products that will be targeted at specific needs in hydration. We are already seeing a lot of success with Glacéau Smartwater. We have done experiments in the dairy segment and we have learnt a lot. By the end of 2018, we will launch a product in this segment using the incubator model approach.

In the fourth quarter of 2017, we had seen double digit revenue growth and a strong single digit volume growth. In Q1 of this year it has further improved.

We had double digit volume and double digit revenue growth in the first quarter of this year. We are seeing good response in the rural regions too. I believe we will see strong robust growth in the country.

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