Cielito Querido Café reaches supermarkets. Grupo Herdez, the company that acquired the brand in December 2019, has plans to bring it to the shelves and refrigerators of online chains, in a strategy similar to the one it applied with Nutrisa.
Claudia Reyes, head of Marketing and Product for Grupo Herdez’s Frozen and Retail division, explains that she has plans to explore the brand with some products that replicate the characteristic flavors and Mexican concepts of the products sold in coffee shops, which consider ready-to-drink beverages.
“Cielito is a brand much loved by Mexicans and we can take this culture of Mexico to different categories (ice cream, drinks, food). We are not going to go out in all of them, but initially we are going to make big bets that reflect these concepts that we want and that obviously satisfy the needs of our consumers and where we have found other spaces that we can cover together with the values of the brand ”, he says.
The arrival of Cielito Querido to retail is the gateway to the regions of the country where it does not have a presence with physical stores, such as the north and southeast of the country, which would help Herdez to position the brand through its distribution channels national.
The company has already tried this opportunity and launched a Horchata flavored ice cream that has been marketed since April in the stores of the Sam’s Club chain. This drink is one of the ten most iconic in Cielito, such as chamoyadas, café de olla, chocolate with chili or corn bread.
“What we are looking for is, through innovation, to attract new consumers. Innovation has been growing in the percentage of sales and if we want it to represent 20% in the following years ”, Reyes points out.
The company does not detail how much the sales of Cielito Querido Café, which had a turnover of 420 million pesos in 2019, when Herdez acquired it. The group has increased its investments for all its companies in the last four years. In 2017, it was 13.1 million pesos, a figure that grew 180%, to 36.8 million pesos in 2020, according to company data. At the end of last year, these resources represented 0.15% of the company’s total consolidated sales.
Reyes knows where Cielito Querido wants to position. The board of directors was the one who spearheaded the transformation of Nutrisa, after Herdez acquired it in 2013, which also led the company to market yogurt ice cream in supermarkets in family presentations. That year, Nutrisa boosted the group’s sales by 9.8%, to 12,321 million pesos.
The frozen division, in which the company integrates the Cielito Querido Café ice cream brand, received a hit due to COVID-19, and in the first quarter it registered a decrease of 14.9% to 613 million pesos, according to the data of the company’s financial report.
Grow dear dear
The pandemic allowed Herdez to meet Cielito Querido and his consumers. During 2020, the year of integration, the strategy to grow and consolidate the brand was outlined, in addition to maintaining communication with consumers, despite the closure of the units due to the pandemic.
“We were not in the offices and we still had a successful integration. And part of that, or part of the acquisition of the brand, is the potential it has for our territories with more coffee shops and with the entire retail portfolio that we have among the other brands we have, ”says Reyes.
The plan considers opening four stores to close 2021 with approximately 80 units, and from 2021 to increase to 10 per year. When Grupo Herdez bought Cielito Querido Café, the chain had 78 outlets.
The coffee shop market in Mexico had a market value of 695 million dollars in 2020. The consulting firm Statista details that that year, Cielito Querido’s share was 3.7%, below Starbucks, which has 51.9%. Café Punta del Cielo and Italian Coffee, with shares of 11% and 10%, respectively.
Herdez sees an opportunity to grow in the market with the cafeteria model, to which it seeks to attract new consumers with seasonal food and beverages, and this scheme gives them an opportunity to attract more visitors to the hybrid schemes to work, since from their stores they have internet access, which allows them to work during their stay.
For now, the Cielito Querido Café stores are fully operational, although consumers have not yet returned to 100%, because the office workers have not recovered their capacity and their workers are an important part of the traffic of 25% of the branches. However, Herdez permanently closed some units before the pandemic, as established in the plan that was created when the cafeteria was purchased. “In this time that we were between closing and opening, it helped us to make all this approach to the strategy for the next ten years and gave us time to review and refine it,” says Reyes.
