PepsiCo and Muller Enter US Dairy Market With European-style Yogurt
Muller Quaker Dairy, the US joint venture between PepsiCo and Theo Muller Group, is entering the growing US dairy market with innovative premium yogurt products. These products – Muller Corner, Muller Greek Corner and Muller FrutUp – mark the first entry by either PepsiCo or Muller into US dairy aisles.
Together, PepsiCo and Muller will complement each other’s strengths and are expected to drive growth for both companies. PepsiCo brings scale as the largest food and beverage business in the US and has unmatched innovation-driven research and development programs, a robust go-to-market system, and superior marketing and brand recognition across its portfolio of 22 billion-dollar brands. Muller has decades of category leading innovation and dairy expertise, having grown to become Germany’s largest privately held dairy business, and one of Europe’s most well-known yogurt producers.
Muller Quaker Dairy aims to satisfy the increasing demand for value-added dairy products in the US, where variety and innovation within the category lags behind other regions, especially Europe. US consumption of yogurt and other value-added dairy products is generally less than half that of Europe.
The joint venture is building a new, state-of-the-art yogurt manufacturing plant in Batavia, New York. Once completed in 2013, it will be one of the largest yogurt plants in the US, and is expected to create more than 180 new jobs in upstate New York.
Worldwide, the dairy category is expected to grow more than any other through 2016, exceeding the growth of the next two food and beverage categories combined. This growth is driven by the progressively increasing consumer demand for packaged milk, yogurt and other value-added dairy products, and for other products containing dairy protein, probiotics, and calcium.
PepsiCo already holds a strong position in the global dairy products business. The company acquired Wimm-Bill-Dann, Russia’s largest dairy company, in 2011 and has been part of a successful joint venture with Almarai, Saudi Arabia’s largest dairy company, since 2009. PepsiCo has a previously stated goal of growing its global nutrition portfolio to $30 billion in revenue by 2020.
