Pepsi will no longer sell their drink in a glass bottle Thailand
Can't find a Pepsi bottle anywhere in Thailand? Well your not alone, since the beginning of November the favourite cola drink for many people has disappeared and replaced with a Thai Rip-off called EST. Now EST doesn't taste anything like Pepsi in fact I'm pretty sure they are missing a few ingredients and it doesn't bubble and fizz like a Pepsi does.
In true Thai style and Thai business practice the Thai bottler for Pepsi SermSuk divorced the cola giant and put out this fake Pepsi crap EST which no one likes even Thai's don't want to drink it. Problem for Pepsi is Serm Suk weren't just bottling the drink for them they were also distributing it as well. So now Pepsi has no one to bottle the drink and no one to ship it out in fact if you go to the PepsiThai.com website it's offline meanwhile their facebook page with other 1 million likes is still going, Thai's love this drink.
Does that mean Pepsi is out of action? Not in the slightest. They have decided to go it alone and do it all themselves. Leading the charge is Dr Surakiart who will now be chairman of Pepsi Co Thailand. Surakiart is probably the smartest business man in the entire country and is going to have Pepsi on the shelves very shortly but they have a massive challenge changing the minds of Thai people to their new production efforts.
Pepsi is just completing the construction of it's new Rayong plant a whopping 5.2 billion baht investment and also the largest Pepsi production facility in the world, eat that EST!
There are a lot of rumours going around that SermSuk company were getting greedy and asking for too much money for the bottling and distribution of Pepsi in Thailand and whether or not that is true they arn't going to come out and say that. And it probably is true but isn't it a little too co-incidental that the day after they stop making pepsi that put out this EST crap. Before you cry concpirorsy however, Pepsi actually owns 41% of Serm Suk who's business is so much more than Pepsi I wonder if Pepsi will slowly sell it's shares in Serm Suk, thoughts anyone?
Pepsi is teaming up with DHL to distribute it's drinks which i'm sure makes sense to them but it's going to take them a long time to get that channel up and running. EST may end up sitting right next to Pepsi in the fridge at 7 eleven but my guess is Thai's will still be going for the Pepsi.
So this new bottling facility they have built in Rayong only makes cans and plastic bottles and will NOT produce glass bottles which they claim are on the decline. But hang on the only time I drink Pepsi is when I'm at KFC or at a night club. Can you imagine them bringing out your mixers in plastic bottles? And what about mom and pop stores? They used to be able to collect them bottles and return them for cash actually some where so anal about it if I bought a bottle and wanted to take it with me they wouldn't let me, they'd be like we own the bottle you only buy the drink! WTF I bought it it's mine! Whatever. Even if it works out that they make more money buying a plastic bottle they'll still want the glass bottles because Thai's like collecting 1000's of bottles so they can change them for 100 baht. Ridiculous.
So while Pepsi is absent right now waiting for their production facility to complete and their new distribution channels figured out their biggest hurdle in my mind is going to be changing the minds of Thai people to switch from glass bottles to aluminium cans. But right now I don't see any club that will even think about putting a plastic bottle mixer on peoples tables.
I guess collecting bottles for the sake of recycling makes sense wether they are glass or plastic. A lot of people are living off collecting PET bottles in Asia.
A lot of people in America too.
I am not the biggest soft drinker and usually just use soda to mix my drinks but one of the things I loved about Thailand was soft drink out of glass. It tastes heaps better but as usual it is all about the profit and there goes one miniscule little aspect of The Big Smile I like.
I started buying Coke Zero after I could not buy Pepsi Light / Pepsi Max , but since the floods even Coke Zero has also been hard to find in the large bottles ,
I never tried the EST crap, I guess it goes back to the 70s when my brother was in the EST “cult” in the USA, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhard_Seminars_Training
it only gets stranger when it comes to Thais and business…… Ohh and have you been to Carls Jr yet in BKK 🙂
I wish I could find mt dew in thailand.
Yeah i miss that too!
Villa Market in Bangkok has it. They also have Mountain Dew Red if you are into that sorta thing.
Probably old stock
Do they have regular mountain dew?
Kasem Store in Chiang Mai has Mt Dew, but it costs more than 40 baht per can.
This article looks like Pepsi propaganda imho.
The other side of the story is that multinational Pepsi tried to buy the local Thai bottler with an aggressive unwanted bid.
The result of their unwanted advances is that Est now outsells Coke and Pepsi combined.
Thai’s prefer EST … which is why it has 50% market share.
Thai’s do not prefer EST they prefer pepsi.
Anyone care to link a trustable source to support your claim or we are just supposed to take side based on wether or not we like your icon?
I doubt there is a published study, any Thai i’ve asked says they prefer Pepsi to EST and I’ve asked hundreds.
Found a few actually:
http://www.businessinsider.com/pepsi-thailand-and-est-2013-3
http://www.bangkokpost.com/learning/learning-from-news/338932/soft-drinks-coke-rises-pepsi-falls
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/business/companies/130311/thailand-cola-conflict-est-vs-pepsi-global-economy-emerging-markets
It’s quite recent and EST in indicated to be second behind Coke (so the claim that “EST now outsells Coke and Pepsi combined” seems unsupported) and Pepsi is in the gutter.
One thing tho is that Chris’ claim is that “Thai prefer Pepsi to EST” which might be true (and as you noted there’s likely no study about that), but John’s claim was an economic one so whether or not they prefer Pepsi to EST is irrelevant because since they cannot find Pepsi anymore they switched to Coke or EST.
My 2cts 🙂