Cult Thai energy drink Carabao lands in Australia to take on Red Bull

Emma Koehn
February 19, 2019
The Age
The New South Wales town of Gol Gol is about 7000 kilometres from Bangkok, but that’s where entrepreneur Jarrod Alderton discovered the Thai beverage that would become his latest business venture.
“I really didn’t realise things would quite get to the stage it’s at now,” the head of Carabao Australia says.
A mad sports fanatic, Alderton was watching a Chelsea Football Club match one evening when he noticed the team’s training jerseys mentioned a brand he didn’t recognise.
“It started with that. I looked up what ‘Carabao’ was in the middle of the night. I found out it was an energy drink. The next day, I contacted their head office.”
The importer was about to take on Australia’s crowded energy drinks market with a cult favourite drink that had been launched by a musician some call the ‘Bruce Springsteen of Thailand’, Aed Carabao.
Carabao Dang holds a 25 per cent market share of energy drinks in Thailand and recently moved to a new production site where it makes 1.5 billion units of the drink each year.
The company has had an eventful couple of years, losing 40 per cent of its share price over six months in 2017 and 2018, according to Bloomberg.
When Alderton contacted the Bangkok head office offering to head up an Australian expansion, the Thai company was quite surprised to hear from him.
Meanwhile, he had no idea about the iconic brand he was about to get involved with.
“I had to learn that definitely along the way. You realise quite quickly how important they [Carabao] are, how famous they are,” he says.
The local pitch
Alderton invested close to half a million dollars to buy the licence to distribute the drink to Australia and New Zealand.
He then began the process of pitching the drink to distributors across the country. The end goal is to broker deals with Coles and Woolworths. Less than one year in Carabao Australia has made its way into more than 1000 retail stores across six brands, including a range of petrol station chains and South Australian supermarket chain On The Run.
Since importing his first order in the middle of 2018, turnover has hit the $600,000 mark.
He acknowledges that the energy drink sector is “one of the hardest to get involved with” when it comes to distribution.
Alderton believes there’s room for another player, especially since Carabao’s product prides itself on having a lower sugar content than its competitors.
Euromonitor predicts Australian energy drink sales will tick over to the $1 billion a year mark for the first time in 2019.
The market is dominated by three key players, led by Red Bull Australia which has held more than one third of the market since 2014. The brands V and Mother also hold more than 20 per cent each, according to Euromonitor.
It’s a challenging time to try to break into Australia’s largest retailers with a drink product, says retail expert and co-director of Retail Oasis, Pippa Kulmar.
“You don’t want to go too big, too quick,” she says.
Securing wide distribution is all about proving your sales and marketing capacity to supermarket brands.
“The beauty of drinks is that it’s 100 per cent the brand. If you create the brand, you get the customer,” Kulmar says.
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