What have been the trends and developments in retail coolers and refrigerated cabinets for milk and dairy products?
Petros Diamantides: Beverage coolers (ice cold merchandisers) are an important tool for the beverage companies that create cold drink availability, and increase immediate consumption by reaching out to consumers across different trade channels.
More importantly, ICMs promote branding by creating a proprietary cool space beyond the often crowded retail shelf.
In recent years, we’ve witnessed the popularity growth of ICMs in the beer segment, with placements across different geographies and trade channels indoor as well as outdoor. ICMs in the beer segment are also developed with the concept of sub-zero cooling to create a new consumer experience by chilling down beer to sub-zero temperatures. Overall, ICMs have become an important marketing tool in this segment.
Similarly, dairy companies have started placing ICMs to promote yogurt- and milk-based beverages such as chocolate milk. We studied demand patterns and came up with different ICM solutions specific for this segment, since the characteristics and requirements of the dairy cooler differ from other beverage ICMs. Differentiation points include product temperature and technical specs, shelving, facings and so on.
We strongly believe that this segment will expand in the future and our innovation & development centres will focus on expanding and increasing the available solutions. In 2010, we’ve already doubled our sales to dairy companies, representing 2% of our sales.
With green issues high up on the agenda, what has Frigoglass done to make its products more environmentally friendly?
Diamantides: Frigoglass has recently launched the world’s first complete line of environmentally friendly coolers: the Ecocool range.
Key features include energy consumption reduction, and Ecocool models operate with 50% less power consumption than previous generation units. Additionally, refrigeration is HFC-free through the use of natural refrigerants that have a global warming potential of 1 up to 3 vs 1,300 of conventional units. They are also designed to be fully recyclable, and production methodology adopts HFC-free insulation agents.
Ecocool aims at contributing to the reduction of the carbon footprint of beverage companies, since coolers are often the largest component through their electricity consumption.
It’s important to mention that Ecocool has been designed and manufactured to facilitate transition to green coolers by addressing both the issue of sufficiently wide range and reduction of the cost premium. Focus has been placed on cost optimisation so that differentials are kept to a minimum for the largest part of the range. Commercial viability for our customers has been a key objective.
Ecocool is expected to be around 22% of our total 2010 European sales – an undoubted success given that this is actually the first full year of its launch.
Our main customers have declared that, by 2015, their entire cooler placements would be environmentally friendly. That makes it very encouraging for us to keep further developing eco-solutions for the ICM market and we have a very exciting pipeline.
How do products like yours help retailers increase sales in dairy, and what are the marketing opportunities?
Diamantides: There are two main ways in which beverage coolers would drive dairy company’s sales:
The opportunities are endless and we’re very committed in listening and responding to our dairy customer needs, and developing, in the future, even more effective solutions that will maximise the benefits and economics of ICM placement.
Petros Diamantides is MD of Frigoglass. He spoke to Geoff Platt, who is editor of Dairy Innovation magazine. Subscribe here.
The following video interview is from October 2009.
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