December 1, 2006

Coke and Caribou Coffee to launch Ready to Drink Coffees in 2007

Coke announced a deal with Caribou Coffee in order to make new iced coffee drinks or the US market. The deal is expected to yield new drinks by next summer. If that's true, they had better already be working on some formulations, because in terms of launching products, 6 months is not a lot of time to get a new product out the door.

Coke makes a good deal of money in Japan on its coffee products. They typically find new formulations and push them to the public with the force of their distribution systems into vending machines that are all over the place. We'll see how they do in the US. Apparently the ready to drink coffee market has expanded 17% in the last four years in terms of volume and up 24% in terms of dollar sales.