Estonian drinks push
both Coca-Cola and A. Le Coq making new soft drink launches and
Saku signing a co-operative agreement enabling it to access the
lucrative Finnish beer market.
Estonia's largest juice drinks maker, Finnish-owned A. Le Coq, says that having conquered the domestic market, it now wants to increase its presence in the other two Baltic states - Lithuania and Latvia. The company started to sell its brands on the two markets in the middle of March and says that it is making a concerted effort to push sales this month with the help of a big marketing campaign.
The juices will be sold under the Aura brand name, which has proved to be a market leader in Estonia since its launch three years ago. The company is aiming to carve out between and 8 to 10 per cent of the Latvian market by the end of this year.
Coca-Cola HBC Eesti, which is currently the biggest soft drinks company in Estonia, has announced the launch of Cappy, a vitamin enriched pure fruit drink. The product comes in various flavours, including orange, grape and mixed fruit and it packaged in both glass bottles and paper cartons.
The company says that the product will at first be imported from other Coca-Cola plants in Europe, initially Poland. It says that if demand takes off then production will begin in Estonia. Currently Cappy is a leading brand in a number of Central and Eastern European countries, including Hungary and Poland.
Meanwhile, Estonian brewer Saku has announced that it has formed a co-operative agreement with Finnish brewer Sinebrychoff in effort to increase its footprint in the lucrative Finnish beer market.
Saku is hoping that the venture will allow it to sell at least 2 million litres of beer within its first year of entering the market there. The beer will be sold in 0.3 litre and 0.5 litre cans specially produced for the Finnish market.
Given that the largest producer of beer in Finland, Carlsberg, currently produces around 6 million litres of beer annually, Saku admits that its aims are ambitious, but the company points out that Finns are already familiar with the brand and that currently the company sells around 500,000 litres a year in the country.
Saku, which is controlled by the BBH group, says that it has no further plans to launch its beers in other markets in the near future.
