Showing posts with label Coca Cola. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Coca Cola. Show all posts

Monday, May 2, 2011

Share Investor's Letter to BioVittoria

Just a note to the owners of BioVittoria, the New Zealand natural-sweetener company that was forced to abort an attempt at listing on the NZX in 2009 due to a lack of market support.

Although I have heard of your company, your attempt to raise funds passed me by because I wasn't really informed that this was happening. Brokers in the past have emailed and called me about every other dog company under the sun - not that there have been many attempted listings since 2009 or since anytime really - but yours sadly must have gone into the spam box or the broker could see how good your company was and wanted to do his own deal.

BioVittoria folks, appears to be at the cutting edge of the "alternative" sweetener market occupied by Aspartame, otherwise known as Nutrasweet , Sucralose and a few others. These alternative sweeteners are in thousands of food products, most know that the major soda makers have these products in their brands like Coca Cola Zero, Pepsi Max etc and they are also in Wrigley products like Extra chewing gum but most of us probably dont know that alot of our everyday consumer products contain a sugar substitute.

In some of these products though, notably the soda drinks, the consumer can tell that what they are eating or drinking doesn't taste like sugar at all and in fact maybe harmful to ones health if used long-term. This is where BioVittoria comes in, not only is their product Fruit-Sweetness™ it a "Natural Sweetener" the makers claim it doesn't have any health side affects, it is calorie free and tastes great.

That and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has certified that its Fruit-Sweetness branded monk fruit concentrate is GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe). The kicker is that a 12% portion of BioVittoria has just been sold to food ingredients company Tate & Lyle and T &L now has a 5 year agreement to dsitribute Fruit-Sweetness™.

Now this is going to allow BioVittoria to compete in the US$50-billion ($62.5b) a year global sweetener market.

"This agreement opens doors to some of the world's largest food and beverage companies, giving a significant boost to our expansion into international markets.'' BioVittoria CEO David Thorrold

Now I don't know about you but I would want to invest in any company that has such a significant product that appears to have no comparative competition (yet) in a fast growing market worth 50 billion bucks, especially at the very beginning.

So please take note David Thorrold and your fellow directors I am very interested in investing in your company should you want the try the NZX again and I am sure lots of my readers would be as well.

Lord knows we need some good companies to enter the NZX IPO market before it disappears completely - only half joking.


Related Links

BioVittoria.com Monkfruit.org

New Zealand, Asia Pacific
Phone: 64 7 857 0521
info@biovittoria.com
srl@biovittoria.com

China
Phone: 86 773 355 0105
garth@biovittoria.com

USA
Phone: 1 847 226 3467
paul_paslaski@biovittoria.com


Recommended Fishpond Reading

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c Share Investor 2011

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Cadbury could learn a thing or two from 1980's Coca Cola experiment

When you mess around with an iconic product that your customers just love to obsession just because you think you can save money by changing its appearance, packaging and well and truly tried and tested formula you risk losing that iconic status and your reputation that took generations to build and your customers.

Cadbury PLC [CBRY.LSE] have done just that by changing packaging sizes of their family block chocolates while keeping them the same size of the old by using different packaging and the most brain dead thing of all changing the taste of their very successful essential ingredient that has made them the brand to go to when you think of chocolate, the ingredient in all their products, chocolate itself!

Forget for a moment that I am a pure obsessional when it comes to chocolate, my body is part blood, water, Crunchie Bar, Dairy Milk, Moro Bar and a list as long as your arm in Cadbury products but just consider what Cadbury have done.

The product that has made them the leader in chocolate for generations has had its successful formula changed,they have substituted the very essence of chocolate, palm oil for animal fat, supposedly to save money.

That is like taking the sugar out of Coca Cola and still calling it Coke!

Business 101, you don't change a successful product that your customers would die for just to save money. Trust me, they will pay more for it.

Executives at Cadbury head office are perhaps too young to remember another iconic product that was tampered with in the mid 1980s, the aforementioned Coca Cola from the Coca Cola Company [KO.NYSE].

The formula for that iconic drink was sweetened to taste more like Pepsi and launched on customers as "New Coke" and was an instant failure. Customers protested, Coke didn't listen,



they said the new product was better and consumers just needed to get used to it but Coke management didn't figure on how obsessive their customers were (duh!) and they simply stopped buying the new Coke. Two months latter Coca Cola relented and re-launched old Coke as "Coca Cola Classic" and the two products existed side by side on the supermarket shelf for a number of years. It is no longer sold in the United States.

This should be a lesson for Cadbury who must have execs in the marketing department of their Schweppes division that know about this famous marketing blunder, they sell their own iconic lemonade and other drinks products - the Coke story from the 1980s is taught in business schools around the globe about what not to do when in business.

"Those that don't learn from the lessons of the past are doomed to make the same mistakes".

Cadbury should learn from their mistake, it is already costing them in lost sales and is going to cost them dearly in the long-term if they don't rectify their decision to make a change.

I am a life long consumer of their former delicious products and I will no longer be buying them.

They just don't taste the same.

Its Whittakers for me!

See the new Whittaker's TV Advertising comparing Cadbury to Whittakers.





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Cadbury's Purple Reign: The Story Behind Chocolate's Best-Loved Brand
Cadbury's Purple Reign: The Story Behind Chocolate's Best-Loved Brand by John Bradley
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c Share Investor 2009