Campa Cola, the iconic soft drinks brand that dominated India’s beverage market between the 1970s and 1990s, is all set to make a comeback.
Coca-Cola’s exit from the Indian market in the 1970s made way for Pure Drinks Group, who was also the sole manufacturers and distributors of Coca-Cola to join hands with Campa Beverages to start Campa Cola who went onto to dominate the Indian soft drinks industry in the absence of the foreign competition.
While Coca-Cola was absent from the market, Parle had successfully risen through the 70s and 80s with brands like Thums Up, Gold Spot and Limca but when Coca-Cola re-entered the market in the 1990s, it acquired these famous brands from Parle. And soon all local cola brands crumbled after Coca-Cola and its rival PepsiCo come back in the market.
With the slogan ‘The Great Indian Taste’, Campa Cola was successful in attracting the nationalistic audience back then and aims to make it a national brand yet again, in order to compete with brands likes of Pepsi and Coca-Cola.
Campa Cola is available in 80 percent of the states across India with 13 franchises in Jammu & Kashmir, UP, Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan, Delhi, Uttaranchal, Himachal Pradesh, and Bihar. The brand now wants to enter the south and soon be available pan-India.
Jaywant Singh who is managing the brand operations of the brand is also the great-grandson of the founder Sardar Mohan Singh said, “We have a few franchising plants across India, catering to tier-2 and 3 cities, mainly in the north and northeast markets. We are now setting up a bottling unit in Silvassa with a capacity of 600 bottles per minute, which will cater to the western markets. We have a presence in Nepal and are looking at southern markets like Chennai. In a way, we are gradually moving to tier-1 cities as well. We are doing about 4 million cases across India.”
