Quadrant Amroq Beverages, Pepsi's bottler on the Romanian market will start producing the Lipton Ice Tea soft drink following a partnership recently concluded with consumer goods giant Unilever.
"Quadrant Amroq Beverages (QAB) has invested more than $500,000 in productive capacities and in modernising the distribution network in order to produce Lipton," Mihai Matyas, QAB general manager said.
The Lipton Ice Tea brand has been a constant presence on the Romanian market since 1999 and used to be imported from Poland until three weeks ago. "The partnership with QAB is intended to boost sales of Lipton in Romania, considering the product was not in such high demand until now, because it was imported," Martina Kastler, Unilever South Central Europe CEO, said.
"We want Lipton to become the market leader, even though the ice tea segment is rather insignificant," Kastler added. Matyas specified the total sales of "cold teas" amounted to three million litres last year, that is some 0.3% of the soft drinks market. Which means this is a several million dollar market.
According to Martina Kastler, the direct competitors for Lipton are Rauch (Germany) and Pfanner (Austria), which sell Rauch Ice Tea and Pfanner Ice Tea.
Why did Unilever choose to have the Lipton tea locally produced? "We wanted it to be a local brand, or, in other words, an international brand tailored to the domestic market. We've done the same in many other countries, where we found partners outmatching Unilever in terms of productive capacities," Kastler said. The Lipton Tea is made of water, sugar, citric acid, tea extract (0.14%), acidity corrector (trisodium citrate) and lemon or peach flavour.
The Unilever official added the Anglo-Dutch group had not considered the option to buy its own productive facility, but contacted a number of domestic bottlers instead.
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