ColaLife rides Coke’s distribution to deliver essential medicine to remote villages

  • 28 Mar 2013

Simon Berry is piggybacking on Coca-Cola's distribution system to bring life-saving medicine to the places that need it most.

You can buy a Coke pretty much anywhere on Earth. Thanks to a vast network of local suppliers, Coca-Cola has almost completely solved distribution, getting its product into every nook and cranny where commerce reaches. There are places in the world where it's easier to get a Coke than clean water. In the 1980s, Berry was an aid worker in Zambia, and when he looked at Coke's success, he saw an opportunity. "Child mortality was very high and the second-biggest killer was diarrhoea, which is simple to prevent," he says. The standard treatment is oral rehydration solution, or ORS, which is essentially salt, sugar and water. "I had the idea of transporting ORS through the Coca-Cola system."

Unfortunately, the idea didn't get off the ground. "We had no telephone, let alone the Internet, so it was hard to share the idea," he says. "Five years ago I thought I'd have another go. It was much easier to do that through Facebook."

In April 2008, he began a campaign on Facebook. A groundswell of support gave his project, dubbed ColaLife, the attention it needed to get noticed by the BBC and, through the British broadcaster, by Coca-Cola itself. ColaLife began collaborating with one of Coca-Cola's African bottler/distributors, and the beverage giant shared advice and information about how its distribution network operates.

Eventually, ColaLife registered as an independent UK charity in 2011 and began a pilot program in Zambia.

The result of their efforts so far is the AidPod, a wedge-shaped container that fits between the necks of bottles in a Coca-Cola crate. For the pilot program, they are using the AidPods to distribute an anti-diarrhoea kit, called "Kit Yamoyo" ("Kit of Life").

The AidPod's are a clever packaging solution, born of a very particular design problem. Because the vision was to physically piggyback on Coke's distribution system, they needed to work with the crates used to move the popular soda to retailers. Initial designs experimented with pouches on the side and tubes that could be slotted in place of a bottle. Neither option would have worked, as both would have meant less space for Coke. Then, genius struck. "My wife said, 'Why don't we make use of the unused space?'" says Berry.

Once the basic wedge shape was settled on, the kit went through nearly a dozen redesigns with packaging partner PI Global. Eventually it evolved into a package that could act as a measuring cup and a storage container for made-up ORS liquid. In future versions, they are exploring modifying the package so it can continue life as a SODIS water disinfectant. Other key design goals were to make the product easy to understand and use properly (both over- and under-concentrated ORS are bad for recovering victims of diarrhoea) and to make the package as a whole an appealing product. "From a design point of view, we were focusing very tightly on the actual packaging, which, when you think about it, is the wrong way 'round," says Berry. 'Normally you think about what you want to distribute and then what you want to put it in."

So far, Berry says that despite all efforts to ensure the packaging plays nice with Coca-Cola crates, none of the kit-selling retailers they know have made use of the Coke compatibility. "Not a single retailer has put a kit in a crate," he says. "Lots of them don't sell Coke either."

So is all this talk of linking up with Coke wasted effort? Not at all, says Berry. ColaLife benefits greatly from access to Coke's network of wholesalers and the principles that Coke uses to get its product into remote areas. "In practical terms, we are piggybacking on Coca-Cola's infrastructure," says Berry, "but it turns out we're not piggybacking on the crates."

While Coke's packaging and advertising gets the bulk of attention, there is a second design problem that they've solved -- the design of the system to get bottles of Coke everywhere. "Actually, they oversee the most amazing distribution system," says Berry. "They don't do the last mile into the village. They create a product and market like hell. That creates a demand in remote communities and then they price the products where profit can be made to fulfil that demand by independent distributors."

Coke works by setting up exclusive contracts with wholesalers who will serve a particular area. Those wholesalers in turn sell the bottles to distributors who bring them to retailers, who sell them to locals. "In the last mile, that's a guy on a bicycle or an ox cart or a small truck," says Berry. "So we are emulating that."

Though the wholesalers have an exclusive right to sell Coke, it's not the only product they stock. By working with them, ColaLife gains a connection to locally trusted businesses. "They know about inventory control, security, how to store products properly, and retailers in the district know where they are," says Berry. "We've created a desirable anti-diarrhoea kit. We've priced it and we're marketing it at a level where these retailers who deal in other products can make money out of taking it to their villages and selling it."

For the ColaLife operational trial in Zambia, everybody on the ground (wholesalers, distributors and retailers) is making a profit. Recommended retail for the kit is 5,000 kwacha (about $1

[66p]). Retailers make 35 percent profit, while wholesalers make 20 percent profit. At the moment, ColaLife is subsidising the kits at about a dollar each, but that's because they're doing small runs.

Berry says they are talking to the Clinton Health Access Initiative, a nonprofit he says is expert at lowering prices. "The consensus is that by the end of the trial we will know how to get the cost down to a low enough level that there will be no subsidy in the system at all," says Berry. "We need to get it down to zero subsidy. If it's zero subsidy, it becomes totally sustainable and doesn't have to involve the public sector at all."

The goal, says Berry, is to generate reliable evidence of what does and doesn't work with this model of distribution. If it works, it will demonstrate that, for simple medicines, already functional commercial systems can be used to pull life-saving products on to store shelves rather than relying on central distribution systems to push them there.

Berry says the hope that a successful trial will lead to an organisation with global scale taking on the task. "The WHO, the Clinton Health Initiative, PLAN, PATH, all these NGOs together with national ministries of health. We want them to take up what we learned," says Berry. "Success for us would be all those players realising for the first time that remote rural retailers would be legitimate avenues for distribution."

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