(Advertorial) With their surprising taste, natural ingredients and eye for sustainability, fritz-kola‘s alternative colas and lemonades are making a difference. The indie brand has as many as 13 flavours on offer – only in glass!
A pioneer
The days when you only found big soft drink brands in restaurants or supermarkets are behind us. The rise of smaller brands has steadily increased in recent years. One of the pioneers in this segment is German indie brand fritz-kola.
The wild idea of founders Mirco and Lorenz, bosom friends who met in the youth movement? Not yet another mass-market product, but a cola that is not too sweet and contains a good amount of caffeine to stay awake longer during nights out. With just a few euros and an old Volkswagen van, they scoured their favourite cafes, bars, restaurants and festivals in Hamburg, Germany, in 2003 to send the first fritz kola into the world.
Intense taste experience
Twenty years later, fritz-kola is available in 27 countries and the range has expanded to 13 different products in four categories including lemonades and spritzers, sometimes with special flavours such as anjola or rhubarb.
Their latest addition proves that fritz-kola also puts maximum effort into the taste experience: the fritz-kola super zero. No sugar, but an extra intense taste experience. To fully convince the taste buds without sugar, the powerful cola flavour played an even more important role in their product development. Just like the original cola. This sets them apart from ordinary soft drink brands. And like all other fritz variants: completely vegan. Since 2019, fritz kola has increased the organic share of purchased plant-based raw materials (excluding sugar) from 59% to 73% by 2023.
Sustainable choices
What all products have in common: they are only available in reusable glass bottles, vegan and based on natural flavours. Under the motto ‘Trink aus Glas’, fritz-kola aims to bring about systemic change in the beverage industry. The brand hopes to encourage everyone to consciously make sustainable choices and thus prevent (plastic) waste. After all, the beverage industry is one of the biggest plastic polluters.
The fritz-kola bottles can be refilled up to 50 times and are 100% recyclable with no loss of quality. Moreover, the brand has joined forces with other European campaigners to form the New European Reuse Alliance (New ERA) to move away from a throwaway society towards a circular future.
The sustainable ambitions by 2025:
-consume 20% less water, heating and electricity per bottle produced
-90% of ingredients must be certified organic (currently, excluding sugar, this is 67%)
-100% sustainable transport for products
-95% of advertising material is sustainable.
‘Our values around sustainability, among other things, are not there to convince consumers, but because as a brand we consider it natural and our responsibility to consider this at every step of our journey’ – Florian Weins, Managing Director fritz-kola
In on-trade and supermarket
More and more consumers are on board with the special story of fritz-kola. Research shows that 22% of Belgians prefer on-trade outlets offering soft drinks from smaller brands to those from larger companies. Among those younger than 34, this figure rises to 30%. The reason for this preference? 44% of Belgians say they find these alternative brands more surprising in taste. Among young people, 55% indicate this. But the use of organic and/or natural ingredients also plays a role for just over a third (35%).
42% of Belgians surveyed think supermarkets should expand their soft drink ranges to include alternative, smaller brands such as fritz cola. Among young people, more than half agree (53%). At fritz-kola, they think it is important for supermarkets to offer customers a sustainable and naturally flavoured range that meets those needs.
International expansion
Starting next year, fritz-kola will also have products bottled outside Germany for the first time: a collaboration with bottler Konings Juices and Drinks in Borgloon should pave the way for further international expansion. Its central location near the border triangle will allow the company to further strengthen its presence in Belgium and the Netherlands while significantly reducing its carbon footprint through shorter transport routes.
German customers will also benefit from the new bottling plant: ‘It offers our customers in West Germany shorter pick-up routes and thus less CO2 emissions. A customer from Cologne, for example, will save around 200 kg of CO2 per round trip,’ says managing director Florian Weins.
The bottling plant in Borgloon lays the foundation for further international expansion, the company says. Future steps to expand the network in Europe are already planned. Today, fritz-kola has a network of five bottling plants in Germany (Bamberg, Eilenburg, Güstrow, Sersheim and Wagenfeld) and a logistics centre in Unterschleißheim.
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