from milk chocolate to wine in a can

Famous for its chocolate milk, Cacolac, which is celebrating its 70th anniversary, intends to modernize and diversify. By offering, on its Bordeaux lands, wine in cans.

Milk, chocolate and sugar. Three ingredients and a simple recipe, but you had to think about it. What two families from the Bordeaux region did after the war. They embarked on the Cacolac adventure in 1954, after discovering the existence of a milk chocolate, marketed in the Netherlands.

Jean-Pierre Papin’s puppet as mascot

The product sells perfectly, particularly in bars and among young people doing their military service. In the 90s, Cacolac was a star product, thanks to the consumption of it by Jean-Pierre Papin’s puppet in The horns of info.

But sales are already starting to decline. “The beginning of the 2000s was more complicated, analyzes Christian Maviel, CEO of Cacolac. We were overwhelmed by the competition. We have also made very large industrial investments, to the detriment of marketing and communication budgets. And unfortunately, we’re a bit forgotten.”

Wine in a can

Today, Cacolac has modernized its image but without fundamentally changing. “We dust off the decor but without touching the recipe”, explains Christian Maviel.

The new thing is that the brand now offers wine in cans. “As a pure Bordeaux resident, we couldn’t not do it,” advances the president of Cacolac. Which ensures that the quality of the beverage is not altered by contact with the aluminum of the can. A can that rhymes with freshness for the manager: white or rosé wine as a priority, but it is “also possible with red”, slices Christian Maviel.

The respect of environment

As for the original product, milk chocolate, the brand ensures that it respects ecology as much as possible. “The milk comes from an industrialist 120 kilometers away,” explains Christian Maviel. The price of milk necessarily has an impact on that of the final product. “But do we want to keep the sectors in activity, or only produce an industrial product? We opted for the first solution.”