Recently, the Coca-Cola Company appointed Alfred Olajide as a vice president and managing director for its operations in Nigeria. This followed a reorganisation of the Company’s global leadership structure. In this interview with BusinessDay’s Daniel Obi, partnership manager, and Endurance Okafor, the new Coca-Cola Managing Director who brings several years of experience to his new role, shares views on how Coca-Cola responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic contribution of the company to Nigeria and more. Excerpts:
How has Coca-Cola been responding to the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic ramifications?
If we cast our minds back to the last few months, we’ve seen a lot of disruptions from COVID-19. Not just for Coca-Cola, but for the entire industry across the world, it’s indeed been a very challenging time. But the purpose of our company is to refresh the world and make a difference.
Globally, you’ll see a lot of deliberate effort put into making sure that we support our communities as we all navigate this crisis.
Sometime in April last year, we paused our commercial advertisement and pivoted to risk-based engagement with consumers to encourage adherence to safety measures in order to keep from contracting the virus.
In Nigeria, you will also see that we’ve pivoted our efforts to support more of the communities. Through the philanthropic arm of the company, The Coca-Cola Foundation, a grant of N228 million was provided to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) to support the provision of medical supplies and personal protective equipment (PPEs) to both our communities and medical personnel on the frontlines.
To support small and medium-scale businesses within our value chain, the company provided additional funds of over N200 million to help them stabilize their businesses from the impact of the disruption. Essentially, every activity from the Coca-Cola System so far has been indicative of our purpose, which is to make a difference.
I must congratulate the System team, who, through collaboration and focus, ensured that our consumers still had access to their food and beverages, even during the difficult lockdown. I believe this past year has taught us more about how to live up to our purpose and we’ve continued to do that with the consumers we serve and with the communities we operate in.
Right from the very first bottle of our beverage that was produced in Nigeria 70 years ago until this day, it’s been a journey of sustainable partnership with the community and our consumers. The COVID experience is just one of many situations where we had to navigate the challenges. Like I always say, we acknowledge challenges in the environment, but we don’t give them as excuses.
We work with our bottling partner, Nigerian Bottling Company (NBC), and the wider stakeholder community, to find solutions to challenges and COVID-19 is no exception. This year marks our 70 years of being in Nigeria, and we have continued to make a significant investment in expanding the business while making sure that we do so in the right way, because doing business the right way is central to how the Coca-Cola System operates. Today we have footprints in more than 55 commercial territories across Nigeria alongside 8 production plants in different locations in the country.
In the last 30 years, we’ve employed more than 55,000 Nigerians while providing means of livelihood to millions of people who support our business, either upstream or downstream, whether as retailers or as wholesalers.
On the other hand lies our commitment to the communities; community empowerment is the core of our purpose and the growth strategy for the company globally. We see this reflected across our different platforms and in our flagship programmes which we continue to execute in the market.
The 5by20 initiative is a key example of our community empowerment efforts where we had a global mandate to empower 5 million women between 2010 and 2020. We surpassed this by empowering a total of 6 million women across the world.
Nigeria specifically contributed over 450,000 to that number, which again is a testament to the fact that Nigeria continues to be a key focus area for us as we grow our business and do it in a way that enriches the community.
Another focus area is the impact on Nigerian talent. We understand that we need to grow the business as we’ve continued to do but we are also focused on growing the Nigerian talent at the same time. I’m an example of this commitment.
Diversity and Inclusion are at the heart of all we do at The Coca-Cola Company. It is reflected in our culture, values and even in our team. This is why about 50% of our team is comprised of female talent and the company is fully committed to building a diverse workforce. Essentially, COVID is just one of many challenges along the way. We continue to stay true to our purpose by growing the business, growing the economy and at the same time ensuring that we enrich the lives of our people, the women, the youth and the society at large.
How are you presently responding to competition, considering changes in the last 20 years and increase in the different types of beverages in the market?
Everything we do puts our consumers at the centre of our strategies. Working closely with our bottling partners, what we strive to do is to connect more with our consumers. We do this by listening to understand the kind of beverages they want; their lifestyles and we learning from that to give them the loved beverages that make their everyday moments more enjoyable.
We collaborate effectively to make sure we leverage what we call the system advantage, this simply entails working closely with our bottling partners, to ensure that we focus on distributing and executing our products in the market in such a way that our consumers have access to their loved beverages, where they want it, how they want it and in what condition they enjoy. This continues to be what we do today from a growth standpoint. Nigeria is easily or can easily be one of the most industrialised countries in the world. Of course, like every developing country, we do have our fair share of challenges. But the opportunities are humongous.
We have more than 170 million consumers in this country who continue to enjoy our beverages, we have a very young and beautiful population, and essentially 75% of Nigeria’s population are below 35 years of age. If you look at that, it just gives you a view of what the headroom could be.
Therefore, all our strategies are tailored to make sure we give our consumers their loved brands, to provide them with the right array of beverages that hits home for them, which includes the carbonated soft drinks that people know as well as other non-carbonated soft drinks like Eva water, juices, 5 Alive, and many more. This is what we strive to achieve, and we believe that the best is yet to come.
Coca-Cola in 2016, acquired CHI Company, what does this mean for Coca-Cola today?
The CHI acquisition is just a demonstration of The Coca-Cola Company’s objective to be a top beverage solution. We have a wide array of beverages even beyond the traditional sparkling products that we have and this acquisition allowed the company to play in much more beverage segments than it used to have. This is in line with our desire to make sure that for every moment in the life of the consumer, we can provide them with the loved brands that enrich those moments.
This acquisition has helped bring this vision to life and I’m happy that the company has gone in this direction.
How big are you on sustainability considering waste like bottles, plastics, packs, have implications for the environment if not handled properly?
Part of our sustainability agenda as a company rests on four Ws, which is water, waste, women, and wellbeing. If you look at our sustainability journey in Nigeria, we started a long time ago. In 2005, Coca-Cola and our bottling partner, Nigerian Bottling Company, in partnership with a local investor known as Alkem, set up a large-scale recycling facility where PET bottles are recycled into fibre.
Just further down the line in 2012, Coca-Cola Nigeria drove an industry alliance known as Food and Beverage Recycling Alliance (FBRA) which is designed to be a producer extended responsibility outfit for the food and beverage industry.
Today, we are proud that FBRA has grown from a four-founding member alliance to about 17 sector players in the food and beverage industry. The idea is that through this alliance, we can change the way our post-consumer packaging waste is being collected and recycled. This is a journey we started, we know that there is a lot to be done and we are doing everything to make sure that we help address the problem around packaging waste management in Nigeria.
We recently learnt that Coca-Cola Nigeria as well as some other industry players increased the price of some of the very popular beverage drinks in the market. What are you doing to avoid transferring costs to the end-users?
I indicated earlier that challenges are meant to be embraced just as we do so we don’t see them as excuses. The Coca-Cola system advantage enables us to be able to work with our bottling partners to make sure they have the most efficient distribution systems to allow us to get our products to the consumers in a more efficient way, accommodating the headwinds that come from business operations.
Based on that, our bottling partners are very close to the market. We work very closely with the customers and there is a lot of optimization work around how we distribute our products. How we execute this allows us to face these headwinds as they come.
Essentially, we take the business challenges as they come, and we navigate as quick and as efficiently as possible. Of course, the focus is on how we continue to remove costs from our operations that allow us to absorb these developments as they come along.
With COVID-19 and the new normal of working from home, people became more aware of eating healthy and are considering the level of sugar intake- one of the major contents of Coca-Cola drinks. How are you responding to consumers’ consciousness of sugar consumption?
We continue to look at the recipes for our products to make sure that we evolve our beverages that consumers love, in line with their changing preferences and lifestyles. We have consumers who still like their sugar and we are aware that some consumers want fewer sweet versions, less flavoured versions of their favourite beverages and that’s why we continue to introduce a wide array of choices for our consumers.
For example, we now have Coca-Cola original taste with less sugar. We also acknowledge that our consumers like our core brands, but some of them do not like it with sugar so if you look into our portfolio, we’ve been driving a lot of innovation around even the core brands.
Today we have Coke Zero, Fanta Zero and Sprite Zero. Again, all is in acknowledgement of the fact that our consumers’ tastes evolve.
Sugar is a big concern, particularly from a health and safety perspective, because we believe that the sugar discussion is about how much you’re taking versus how many calories you’ve burned. For the very active consumers, they would want their sugar, but for the consumers that are health conscious and trying to dial down their sugar intake because of their lifestyle, we have beverage offerings for them as well. It’s more about providing diversity to suit the lifestyles of consumers, and that is what we continue to do.
Beyond the sparkling beverages, we do have a wider range of non-sparkling beverages to refresh our consumers. In front of me here is a bottle of Eva water, this is a Coca-Cola product, we also have juices and sports drinks, so our products go beyond the traditional sparkling.
We have evolved to be a total beverage company, which means that for every moment in the day of the consumer, we provide access to the right beverages and that is what we’ll continue to do.
In almost seven decades of doing business in Nigeria, what are some of the key challenges you’ve faced operating and doing business in this market?
Honestly, apart from the ones that I probably highlighted earlier on, we have our fair share of infrastructure development gaps, some projected volatility in the macros. But like I said, challenges are not excuses.
At the same time, where there are challenges, there are many more reasons to believe that there are opportunities. I’ve mentioned earlier on that we have one of the most beautiful populations, a country of 206 million people, Nigeria is the most populous black nation on the continent, in fact, in the world, and that just projects a lot of opportunities.
So rather than amplifying what the challenges are, the question is, to what extent are we listening to our consumers? To what extent are we offering the beverage solutions that address their needs in the moment?
To what extent are we doing this efficiently to make sure that we also add value to our retailers and wholesalers in that process? And overarching, to what extent are we doing business to drive inclusive growth for ourselves, our system, and the communities that we operate in, and the nation.
Those are the big focus areas for us.
We have just delivered our ten-year commitment under our 5by20 women empowerment initiative and the Replenish Africa initiative, which impacted more than 95,000 communities all over.
We also have another initiative called the Safe Birth Initiative, through which we are collaborating with a technical partner and the government, to provide access to medical equipment that allows us to minimize maternal and neonatal mortalities.
Every developing country has challenges, rather let’s focus on the opportunities for growth. Investing in the country through our activities is therefore crucial.
What is the motivation behind your CSR projects and are there other projects aside from the ones you already mentioned?
Once again, I’ll refer to the purpose of the company- ‘refresh the world and make a difference’. Our environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals are embedded in how we operate as a business—they are part of our very foundation.
These sustainability strategies are focused on Women, Water, Packaging, Climate, and Wellbeing.
A lot of research has shown that when women are empowered, it has an escalating impact on the community because women form the bedrock of the home and are growth accelerators in the society. That is one of the reasons why we’ve continued to focus on the partnership with women within our communities.
The same goes for waste. We know packaging waste is a global issue, we have a responsibility to partner with our communities to solve this, which is why the company has an ambitious target of helping to recycle one bottle or one can for every one the company sells by 2030.
These are strategic projects that are targeted at developing the economy, developing the environment while growing our business, but at the same time helping to address the topical issues that are crippling the world as a whole.
You are the first Nigerian CEO of Coca-Cola Nigeria after the global restructuring of the business. What should Nigeria and Africa at large expect from you?
I feel privileged to be in this role and I want to say thank you to the previous MDs, they’ve done a phenomenal job in building the business into what it is today.
I believe that I have very big shoes to fill. That said, I think my experience working for the company across other regions in similar markets, has prepared me to understand how the business landscape could be a significant opportunity for us in Nigeria.
As you said, I’m Nigerian, I’m local, I believe I understand my people, I understand the market and I am very optimistic and confident that the best is yet to come. I look forward to working in partnership with my team, and our bottling partner, Nigerian Bottling Company, to win.
I’m also very passionate about youth empowerment and I think that I can also be an icon of optimism for the next generation. I am looking forward to the great things coming out of this as the youths look at this opportunity as a possible way of getting empowered into the future. In a nutshell, I’m super excited, and I’m looking forward to making history.
What are some of your projections for Coca-Cola?
I believe our consumers can always look forward to us enriching their moments. We have a vibrant consumer base, and I believe that there are opportunities to learn more, to hear them more and for us to continue to tailor our beverage solutions, to give them what they require at the different phases of their lives.
That has been the history and legacy of the business in Nigeria, and our consumers should not expect anything less than the promise of quality, personalization and the optimism that our beverages inspire.
