The local unit of Coca-Cola Co. is discontinuing the production of its powdered juice drink Eight O’Clock, a brand that it inherited during a series of management changes in the late 2000s, as the company wants to stop using sachets by next year.
As a result, Gareth McGeown, president and CEO of Coca-Cola Bottlers Philippines Inc., said it will shut down its manufacturing plant in Imus, which employs about 109 people. The company will turn the plant into a distribution center.
“We have made a bold decision to completely exit from our sachet business by 2022. Our reason for these is that we have in a long, long time faced significant challenges in plastics recovery in straws and sachets. Rest assured the exit hasn’t been an easy decision for many reasons but we believe as a business it is the right thing to make,” McGeown said during the company’s “World Without Waste” briefing.
The Coca-Cola Imus plant in Cavite was inaugurated in 1995, at a time when the company’s Navotas plant produced powdered juice drinks. In 2007, the powdered juice business was consolidated and transferred to Imus.
At the moment, two manufacturing lines produce Eight O’Clock, a brand that has been lagging behind its rivals in recent years.
The bottler inherited the Eight O’Clock brand, which was acquired by San Miguel Corp. in 2000 from Sugarland Multi-Foods Corp., which then accounted for about 60 percent of the local powdered juice drink market.
San Miguel bottled and distributed Coca-Cola in the Philippines from the 1920s until 2007, when Atlanta-based The Coca-Cola Co. acquired the conglomerate’s entire stake in the bottling operations in the country.
McGeown said the company will have to retrain the 109 people that will be affected by the shutdown of the manufacturing plant and assign them somewhere else, such as its plants in Sta. Rosa and in Canlubang, both in Laguna.
“We have a commitment not to leave anyone behind in our pursuit of sustainability. We have a redeployment plan in place for all of our associates assigned to new sites. We are confident that this decision is the right step as we move to 2030 [and] a world without waste,” he said.
“We have lots of opportunities to move people and that’s what we have been doing. And the journey will be long for the next 12 months. No one will be left behind, no one will be left without a job and our Imus facility will transition from manufacturing center into a distribution center of that part of Cavite.”
Antonio del Rosario, Coca-Cola Philippines president and vice president for franchise operations for Coca-Cola ASEAN and South Pacific-East Region, said the Eight O’Clock brand was in the company’s portfolio for a long time but it has to go as it does not fit with the company’s waste program. “We really felt this was the right thing to do. We want to make sure that the package we put out in the market is recyclable. Sachets don’t fit in that space. It’s a bold decision from us that that involves sunsetting Eight O’Clock,” he said.
The company has pledged to use more recycled content in its line-up in the Philippines starting 2022 and beyond, as it expands the number of products that use 100 percent recycled PET in its packaging.
With these decisions, the company will be fast-tracking the achievement of its commitment to make 100 percent of its packaging recyclable by 2025.
At the moment, all the company’s bottles and cans are recyclable by design.