In Latin America, the 2-liter bottle is the most popular beverage container. In some countries, the 2-liter bottle makes up 50% or more of the entire carbonated beverage market segment. It's so popular that for many of Latin America’s smaller vendors the 2-liter bottle represents 4 of every 5 sales of carbonated beverages. To capitalize on this popularity, in some markets bottlers have used handles made of plastic or paper that have been applied manually to create multipacks for special promotions.

The incremental sales generated when using this promotional multipack demonstrate that the bottlers, vendors and consumers would benefit if multipacks were an integral part of the store shelf sets. The packaging concept of multipackaging 2-liter bottles would satisfy the needs of the bottlers to increase their market share, maintain reasonable margins, and offer a value and convenience to the consumer.

And, from the perspective of the franchise company, a 2-liter multipack represents a high sales volume of concentrate, as well as offering an excellent opportunity to increase market share.

ITW Hi-Cone, a world leader of beverage packaging found this idea to be intriguing … but wanted proof. To evaluate the opportunity of 2-liter beverages in multipacks, Hi-Cone and Coca-Cola Panama joined to collect information of more than 400 consumers during a recent 30-day market test. The goal was to find out if a 2-liter multipack would generate the volume sales needed to justify the development of a commercial multipackaging system for 2-liter bottles.

In Panama, the average sales volume of 2-liter containers is 1.8; so, the key question was: Would consumers value the convenience of having an easy method of carrying more than one 2-liter container without the need of discounting due to multiple packaging?

93% of the participants mentioned specific advantages that they believed the 2-liter multipacks offered; less than 1/2 of the participants mentioned any disadvantages.

During the market test, there was a 35% increase in the sale of 2-liter multipacks, which represents a volume increase of more than 50%.

The results are very convincing. Convincing enough that the new 2-liter multipackaging machine will be available for the Latin American market by this fall. 2-liter multipackaging represents an excellent opportunity to stimulate market growth in these challenging economic times. We believe that it is a promising opportunity; an opportunity in which all win: the bottlers, the vendors and the consumers.