Home-Grown Soft Drink Brand Takes On 'Big Red'

- Jana Marais

Starting with five cows and one employee in 1980, Ken Clark has built two successful businesses employing more than 1 000 people. The one is Crickley Dairy, an institution in the Eastern Cape, and the second is Twizza, a carbonated soft drinks business with a distribution network spanning across South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, Namibia, Botswana and Mozambique.

How did the dairy business start?

My dad was a sheep and cattle farmer in the Dordrecht district, and had a small dairy. I took a liking to the dairy as a youngster. I went to the army, came back and worked for my dad for a short time. I’m very single-minded and we bumped heads a bit, so I eventually opted to go on my own.

So in 1980, I started with just five cows, and tried to start building a little herd. Within a couple of years, I was the biggest milk producer in the Dordrecht district, and started looking at selling milk into the Transkei. Somebody else was buying milk from me from time to time, and so that sparked an idea. That’s how Crickley started – in a very small, 80m2 rented building. At that point we were just trading in raw milk, to be honest.

We grew with time, adding fruit juices to our product offering and moving to bigger facilities, until we eventually took over the property in Queenstown where we are situated now.

How did Twizza start?

In 2002, I started looking into carbonated soft drinks (CSDs). I went to Germany, Poland and Italy, looking at equipment, and put a plan together in 2003. Within five months, we were running a 24/7 operation.

The next October, we put in our second line, which had a bit more capacity. In 2008, we put a further line into Queenstown. This time it was a substantially larger line, producing 36 000 litres an hour, and with that base, we started distributing to niche customers around the country.