With around 40 brands already sitting on UK shelves, it’s not easy for new entrants to make their mark in the £100 million coconut water category. But recent launch Buko believes it has what it takes to capture the consumer’s attention.
Being certified organic and from sustainable farms in the Philippines means that the brand can already offer strong health and environment credentials, but it’s Buko’s relationship with an organisation called Cuipo that it hopes will make it stand out from the crowd.
Cuipo works with conscientious brands around the world to help persevere rainforests, by taking a small donation from each product sale and using it to buy real forest – having already bought and preserved 88 million square metres since their inception in 2010. Buko coconut water is the first UK brand to work with Cuipo and on every drink pack consumers will find a unique code, which represents ‘their’ square meter of rainforest. They can take this code and enter it on the Buko website to find out where the metre of rainforest they’ve saved is and thus interact directly with project.
Buko brand manager and owner Aled Morris says the new style of interactive giving should resonate for today’s consumer. He comments: “Things have moved on from the early Noughties and we didn’t feel that simply being organic and making a donation was enough for today’s demanding consumer. The ‘one meter at a time’ campaign gives us a unique platform with which to engage our consumers and gives us a genuine USP that will quickly build brand loyalty; all without adding a premium price tag to the product.”
