Almarai – the Gulf’s largest dairy company – and Pepsi will funnel the investment in a new site near Cairo through the International Company for Agro-Industrial Products (Beyti).
Beyti is a subsidiary of International Dairy & Juice, a JV established in 2009 that is 52% owned by Almarai with PepsiCo holding the balance of the shares.
The move will also see the JV expanding other facilities and setting up a large new dairy farm.
Coke bought around half of Aujan Industries’ beverage business in December 2011 for $980m, and the latter said in late February 2014 that it plans to open a $100m juice plant in Egypt in 2016/17.
Euromonitor International expects juice CAGR of 9% from 2013-18 in Egypt due to off-premise sales, with improved volumes resulting from expected launches by big brands.
These include Lamar by Talaat Mostafa and Tropicana by Beyti, the research group says in a May 2014 report, while Danone hopes it can penetrate the Egyptian juice market during the forecast period.
Current Egyptian juice volume sales totaled 214m liters in 2013 in the off trade and 6.9m liters in the on trade, and Euromonitor predicts figures of 326.2m and 7.1m respectively by 2018, in data sent to BeverageDaily.com.
The concomitant value of the market was $263.9m and $20.2m in 2013, but the research outfit expects sales to hit $372.9m and $20.1m in 2018.