In 2021, Coca-Cola FEMSA took significant steps across all strategic fronts while making key decisions for future growth. Importantly, we worked with The Coca-Cola Company to bolster our successful, longstanding relationship. Our enhanced cooperation framework ensures the long-term alignment of our partnership, growth plans, and strategies—enabling us to not only continue building a winning consumer-centric portfolio, but also explore new multi-category opportunities across our markets while we develop new strategic digital initiatives.

Our strategic growth and industry leadership is driven by our purpose to refresh the world anytime, anywhere—always finding the most efficient and sustainable way to put our consumer’s choice in their hands whenever and wherever they want it.

Guided by our purpose, we’re working seamlessly, collaboratively, and agilely across six strategic corridors:

• Build Out an Open Omnichannel Platform
• Develop a Consumer Centric Winning Portfolio
• Foster an Agile, Digital Savvy and People Centric Culture
• Place Sustainability at the Heart of our Organization
• Digitize the Core
• Actively Pursue Value Enhancing Acquisitions

Notably, 2021 was a year of recovery and margin protection in the context of a challenging raw materials environment. Despite supply chain disruptions and market volatility, we were able to manage our working capital while leveraging very disciplined raw material and currency hedging strategies to substantially protect our margins. We also strengthened profitability by segmenting consumers and selectively increasing prices, while continuing to offer affordability where our consumers needed it.

Our volumes for the year increased 5.3% (or 2.6% higher than pre-pandemic levels in 2019), and total revenues increased 6.1% to Ps. 194.8 billion (US$ 9.5 billion). Results reflected the easing of restrictions throughout the year, and Coca-Cola FEMSA’s ability to execute in the marketplace and gain market share. Additionally, operating income improved 8.6% to reach Ps. 27.4 billion (US$ 1.3 billion), driven mainly by favorable hedging initiatives and price-mix effects, coupled with solid top-line performance.

Building Out an Open Omnichannel Platform
During the year, we markedly accelerated the evolution of our customer-centric B2B omnichannel multi-category commercial platform.

In 2021, we continued to deepen our ongoing digital transformation by developing and deploying omnichannel capabilities to offer new solutions for order taking, customer service, route-to-market, and logistics models.

We continued to grow the capacity and reach of our omnichannel commercial platform, which is currently centered in a B2B digital order-taking chatbot that was first rolled out in Brazil and Mexico last year. The number of orders placed through this channel since launch have continued to climb exponentially, exceeding expectations. With fully automated and user-friendly functionality, the platform offers a differentiated customer experience with a convenient selling window that is accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We are serving over 500,000 registered clients, including almost 300,000 active purchasers monthly, on our B2B platform.

This year, we also reached an inflection point— with digital purchases accounting for over 6% of our total orders or almost US$ 360 million.

Importantly, during 2021, our Brazilian operation reached approximately 270,000 active users —including over 130,000 monthly buyers— on our B2B omnichannel multi-category commercial platform.

We are also focused on growing our direct to consumer (D2C) capabilities through our home delivery program, “Coca-Cola en tu hogar” (Coca-Cola in your home), which achieved double digit growth in 2021. We now serve close to 600,000 households in Mexico, and we continued to reinforce this growing value proposition by increasing the number of home delivery routes by more than 400 to reach more than 1,200.

Developing a Consumer Centric Winning Portfolio
We are developing a winning multicategory portfolio with compelling options for every consumer taste and lifestyle.

To further consolidate a winning total beverage and consumer-centric portfolio that satisfies all tastes and lifestyles, we are continuing to improve our competitive position across all products, price points, and distribution channels.

• Portfolio Innovation
  In 2021, we diversified our portfolio to capture market share and incentivize growth in the sparkling, low- and no-sugar, juice, hydration, tea, nutrition and energy categories, ahead of consumer trends.
  • We successfully launched the new formula and visual identity of Coca-Cola Sin Azúcar, or Zero Sugar, which grew double digits in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay.
  • Topo Chico premium sparkling mineral water grew over 60%, reinforcing its position as a highlight of our portfolio in Mexico, achieving consistent share growth and signaling its potential for continued expansion in sparkling water moving forward.
  • In high-growth categories, such as energy drinks, our volumes increased more than 50% in Mexico and 80% in Brazil, strengthening our competitive position in this high-potential segment.

• Affordability
  As consumers continued to face challenging economic environments amidst an ongoing pandemic, we continued to prioritize and simplify our portfolio with an emphasis on affordability. This included responding to the demand for affordable single-serve bottles, multipacks, and multi-serve returnable presentations.
  
  We rolled out our multi-serve, returnable PET universal bottle, or “Botella Única,” to more of our core markets in 2021. Bottles are returned, fully washed, and refilled with the same or another beverage (such as Coca-Cola, Sprite, Fanta or Valle Frut, a non-carbonated fruit-based beverage) and re-marked with a new label. Designed to be reused up to 25 times before recycling, the bottle not only delivers affordability to the consumers seeking it but is also an important example of the circular economy. Through this approach, we have gained up to three percentage points of market share in our flavored sparkling category and have also seen great success in the non-carbonated beverage category.
  
  Finally, to incentivize and accelerate “easy” transactions, we continued to execute on our Magic Price Points strategy across our markets, which conveniently prices single-serve beverages at the value of a single common coin or bill.

• Building a winning consumer-centric beer portfolio
  This year, together with HEINEKEN, The Coca-Cola Company, and the rest of the Coca-Cola System in Brazil, we successfully redesigned our beer distribution partnership in the country. As a result, during the year, we completed the transition of the Heineken and Amstel brands to HEINEKEN’s distribution network, and we proactively evaluated and rolled out promising new brands to complement our beer portfolio. Leveraging our continued relationship with HEINEKEN, we incorporated and launched two brands from HEINEKEN’s portfolio: Eisenbahn, a premium brand, and Tiger, a pure malt mainstream brand.
  
  We further capitalized on market opportunities to acquire Brazilian craft beer brand Therezópolis together with Coca-Cola Andina, and announced a new agreement to distribute leading Spanish brewer Estrella Galicia’s portfolio, together with the Coca-Cola System in Brazil.
  
  Additionally we continue to roll out pilot programs to test the distribution of complementary categories such as leading spirit brands, other alcoholic beverages, and leading consumer products in certain markets.

Fostering an Agile, Digital Savvy & People Centric Culture
Consistent with our commitment to foster an agile, digital savvy, and people-centric culture, we defined our Human Resources (HR) function’s long-term strategy.

To facilitate this strategy, HR acts as agents of change—leading our cultural transformation journey, reshaping our company through talent, enabling key organizational capabilities, and improving HR data and processes to deliver faster and better services to our organization. Additonally, from digital acceleration to the rise of remote, flexible or hybrid arrangements, the working world has changed, and in response, Coca-Cola FEMSA has been developing more agile, flexible structures to support these new business models.

We continue to reinforce our “KOF DNA” – a model made up of five key values that guide our people with the tools and capabilities they need to succeed: Obsessive focus on consumers and clients, Operational excellence, Owner’s mentality, People first, and Agile decisions. Grounded in this values-based culture, in 2021 we achieved several employee engagement highlights:

• Completed a self-development week of on-demand learning modules featuring 17 workshops on reskilling and upskilling.
• Accelerated our leadership development agenda by equipping more than 5,500 managers with the tools to lead strategic conversations with their teams about leadership transformation.
• Launched new KOF Academy offerings, including 300 courses across eight functional schools for up to 49,000 collaborators. We also utilized virtual KOF classrooms on mobile devices for 6,000 leaders and launched the pilot program, APPRende KOF, an app to help enable core business capabilities for front line personnel in Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Costa Rica.

Placing Sustainability at the Heart of our Organization
We are leading a sustainability strategy that incorporates environmental stewardship, social license, ESG metrics, and governance practices.

At Coca-Cola FEMSA, we are convinced that to create sustainable economic value, we need to simultaneously generate social value in collaboration with all of our stakeholders. In alignment with FEMSA’s Sustainability Strategy to support people, communities, and the planet, we continued to strengthen our key performance indicators in 2021 while extending our leadership in ESG management.

In support of the Planet pillar of FEMSA’s Sustainability Strategy, and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, we are focused on leadership and transparency in climate action, water management, and the circular economy. In 2020, we became the first Mexican company and the third Latin American company to achieve the approval of the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) for our 2030 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction goals, confirmed to be aligned with what is necessary to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.

• Climate action: In alignment with FEMSA’s goal to reach 85% of renewable energy use across all our operations by 2030, Coca-Cola FEMSA’s SBTi-approved 2030 Emissions Reduction Plan aims to drive positive environmental change across our entire value chain. To this end, Coca-Cola FEMSA will:
  • Reduce absolute scope 1 and 2 GHG emissions by 50% below 2015 levels
  • Reduce absolute scope 3 GHG emissions by 20% below 2015 levels
  • Increase annual sourcing of renewable energy to 100% by 2030
  • We also expanded the use of clean energy in our manufacturing facilities to 85% for 2021 across all of Coca-Cola FEMSA, up from 80% in 2020.
• Water management: In alignment with FEMSA’s focus on water and achieving a neutral water balance in all operations by 2030, Coca-Cola FEMSA will seek opportunities to use water more efficiently and to further protect water security in the territories where we operate. By 2030, we will continue to return to the environment the same amount, or more, of water used in the production of beverages.
  • As of 2021, we achieved a water-use ratio of 1.47 per liter of beverage produced, down from 1.49 liters in 2020.

• Circular economy: In alignment with FEMSA’s goal to send zero waste from operations to landfills by 2030, Coca-Cola FEMSA will focus on zero waste to landfill priorities. We also remain committed to World Without Waste, the global initiative led by The Coca-Cola Company, which includes 2030 targets to collect and help recycle the equivalent of 100% of the primary packaging we place in the market, as well as integrating 50% of recycled PET resin into our bottles.
  
  As of 2021, 46% of our bottling plants have earned Zero Waste to Landfill certification, including 100% of our manufacturing facilities in Mexico. We have also increased our use of recycled PET to 31% up from 29% in 2020.
  
  We began the planning and construction for our new recycling plant, PLANETA (Planta Nueva Ecología Tabasco) that, together with 18 collection centers, will be able to process up to 50,000 tons of post-consumer PET, creating around 20,000 jobs in southeastern Mexico.

Digitizing the Core
We are implementing new digital tools, automating our processes, and developing the architecture needed to enable our transformation.

In line with the development of our omnichannel capabilities, we continue to leverage data analytics to continuously improve machine learning techniques capable of suggesting orders and increasing sales. We have also been focusing on other financial enablers to digitize our core, including automating several back-office processes with the support of KOF Financial Services (KFS). This includes internal automations such as scaling and optimizing human resources and finance processes.

As part of our digital re-evolution, an agile cell is working to design and deploy a safe, frictionless, end-to-end digital payment solution to customers and consumers across all channels. Thus far, we’ve rolled out the digital credit card payment feature to almost 600,000 households throughout our over 1,200 D2C home delivery routes in Mexico. We’ve also enabled 1,200 customers to make digital QR code payments, along with over 6,600 customers who pay digitally through our B2B web portal in our Argentine franchise territories.

Actively Pursuing Value Enhancing Acquisitions
Aligned with our strategy, we are not only exploring opportunities to shape our company’s portfolio and footprint of the future, but also prioritizing adjacent categories and capabilities to enhance our value proposition.

Consistent with the enhancement of our Cooperation Framework with The Coca-Cola Company, we will bring together the strength of Coca-Cola’s sales and distribution network with our unmatched execution capabilities to explore potential new businesses, ventures, and inorganic growth opportunities that can enhance our overall value proposition and bring a positive impact to the communities where we operate.

To this end, in January 2022, in a move that complements our footprint in southern Brazil, Coca-Cola FEMSA, through our Brazilian subsidiary Spal Indústria Brasileira de Bebidas, acquired CVI Refrigerantes, which operates one bottling facility and three distribution centers in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, serving approximately 13,000 points of sale and more than 2.8 million consumers.

For more information, please visit Coca-Cola FEMSA’s 2021 Annual Report