16 Nov 2024 NOMU Pink Milk is a local innovation all SA children are happy to support
It might just be Pink Milk, but buying it is a vote for South Africa…. provocative commentary from SA trend and marketing guru, Jonathan Cherry…
Nestlé was taken by surprise last year when it had to field a bevy of hate mail from irate customers (that it never knew it had) when the company announced unexpectedly that it would be discontinuing to sell the Nesquik range of products in South Africa.
It is apparently still available at Pick n Pay, but the recipe has also been changed on that one, which many have reported as now being ‘clumpy and slimy‘.
Spotting this obvious ‘gap in the market’, local food manufacturer and integrated consumer brand, NOMU to then decided develop its own version of the popular strawberry-flavoured milk drink.
Now NOMU Pink Milk is not something that’s going to get venture capitalists stabbing each other in the neck to get a piece of, but given our recent focus on the acute need for successful local manufacturing, innovation and brand building, it’s one of those small wins for a local producer that we should all go out of our way to support.
Rather than sending your ZARs back to Switzerland (right?), drinking NOMU Pink Milk will make a small difference to ordinary South Africans working hard in a facility in Cape Town.
Buying Pink Milk could be helping to put a kid through school, or enabling someone with dreams of up-skilling themselves towards a better qualification actually get there. Your purchase of a tin of NOMU Pink Milk may be paying for the dedicated taxi to get people home safely at night after a hard day of work.
Last year Nestlé’s CEO, Ulf Mark Schneider (the guy who effectively rubber stamped the decision to pull Nesquik from South African supermarket shelves because ‘it wasn’t making the company enough money’), took home a salary of $13.2-million (which is close to R250-million for the year, or R21-million per month).
What this means is that Ulf Mark Schneider doesn’t really need anymore help; he’s full up. Keep that in mind whenever you choose to buy any one of the other products that they still deem we are worthy enough to have access to.
Every rand staying in South Africa, because we choose to buy South African-made goods, is a rand that is not going into the enormous back pocket of some already rich guy who seriously doesn’t need it.
Source: CherryFlava.com