The surprisingly big accountancy story behind a £2 ish chocolate milk
Every Friday, I spend around £2 on a YAZOO Chocolate Milk. I’m Carl, part of the Marketing team here at Accountancy Learning, and it’s become a small end-of-week tradition and my way of celebrating making it through another working week.
Occasionally, a particularly thankless job warrants an emergency midweek bottle too.
With National Chocolate Milk Day falling on 27th September, I started wondering what sits behind that £2 purchase. The answer involves millions of bottles, changing tastes, production costs, pricing, forecasting, profit margins and, perhaps surprisingly, quite a lot of accountancy.
First, I should probably explain the Friday YAZOO.
There’s no great story behind it. I like chocolate milk. Friday arrives. I buy one.
It’s become enough of a tradition that when my local supermarkets occasionally run out of Chocolate YAZOO, it’s a less-than-good start to my Friday.
But I’d never really thought about the numbers behind that bottle.
So, in honour of National Chocolate Milk Day, I did.
And I may have gone slightly further down the chocolate milk rabbit hole than originally intended.
Chocolate milk is older than you might think
Chocolate milk certainly wasn’t invented by YAZOO.
In fact, its history takes us back hundreds of years and comes with a little historical controversy.
Sir Hans Sloane, the physician and collector whose collection eventually helped form the foundations of the British Museum and Natural History Museum, encountered cocoa as a drink while in Jamaica during the 1680s.
Sloane is sometimes credited with inventing chocolate milk after finding cocoa more palatable when mixed with milk. However, the Natural History Museum points out that Jamaicans had been brewing cocoa with milk and cinnamon long before Sloane arrived.
Sloane did bring his version back to England, where it was initially sold by apothecaries as medicine.
Yes. Medicine.
I’m not suggesting my Friday YAZOO has medicinal properties, but I’m also not prepared to completely rule it out.
From medicine to Dino the Dinosaur
Fast-forward a few hundred years and YAZOO arrived in the UK in 1987.
According to YAZOO, it was the first flavoured milk to be sold in the UK and its original mascot was Dino the Dinosaur. Dino appeared on the bottles and even had his own Milk Cap Pogs before eventually disappearing from the packaging.
YAZOO says he fancied a career change.
Fair enough.
Chocolate, Strawberry and Banana became the brand’s big three flavours. Historical figures showed those three accounting for 89% of YAZOO’s core sales.
More recent figures show just how strong Chocolate and Strawberry remain. Each has a market value of more than £34 million, while almost one in five UK households buys YAZOO.
Suddenly my little Friday purchase is part of something rather bigger.
Just how important are my 52 bottles?
This was the statistic I really wanted.
How many bottles of YAZOO are sold in the UK every year?
I tried to find an exact, current figure. The answer isn’t quite as straightforward as you might expect.
What I did find was a much more interesting statistic: two YAZOO milk drinks are bought every second in the UK.
So I got the calculator out.
Two bottles × 60 seconds × 60 minutes × 24 hours × 365 days gives us just over 63 million bottles a year.
A small but important disclaimer here: 63 million isn’t an official annual YAZOO sales figure. It’s simply what two bottles every second would equal if that rate remained constant throughout the year.
But it’s good enough to put my contribution into perspective.
My guaranteed 52 Friday bottles represent roughly 0.00008% of that theoretical annual total.
I’ll admit, I expected it to be more.
There are, of course, those occasional emergency midweek purchases. They won’t trouble the national sales figures either, but they can make a considerable difference to Wednesday.
My annual chocolate milk budget
There’s another slightly uncomfortable calculation to make.
At approximately £2 every Friday:
52 × £2 = £104 a year.
Add a modest contingency for difficult Wednesdays and we’re probably looking at around £110.
Over ten years, at today’s price, that’s £1,100.
I wasn’t particularly looking to discover that when I started researching this blog, but that’s accountancy for you.
And, of course, my £2 doesn’t simply disappear into the supermarket till.
That one bottle has ingredients, packaging, manufacturing, energy, storage, transport, distribution, staff and marketing costs behind it.
The supermarket needs its margin. The manufacturer needs its margin. Costs change. Prices change. Customers change their buying habits.
Someone needs to keep track of all of that.
Chocolate, Strawberry or Banana?
I’m firmly in the Chocolate camp.
And it appears I’m not alone.
Finding an exact figure for how many bottles of chocolate milk are sold in the UK each year proved surprisingly difficult. But industry figures have consistently shown just how dominant chocolate is, accounting for around half of all flavoured milk sales.
For YAZOO, the numbers are pretty impressive too.
I couldn’t find a reliable current figure for exactly how many Chocolate YAZOOs are sold each year, but I did discover that Chocolate alone has a market value of more than £34 million.
So while my 52 bottles aren’t exactly keeping the company afloat, I’m clearly in good company.
Chocolate doesn’t have it all its own way, though.
YAZOO has previously said its Strawberry flavour performs about as well as Chocolate, and current figures put both at more than £34 million in market value. Banana, meanwhile, is another of the brand’s long-standing core flavours.
For YAZOO, knowing whether we reach for Chocolate, Strawberry or Banana isn’t simply interesting trivia. It’s valuable business information.
Which flavour sells the most? Does that change by location? Do people buy different flavours at different times of year? Which bottle size sells best? What happens when the price changes? Does a promotion generate additional sales or simply encourage regular customers to buy at a lower price?
And, importantly for my local supermarket, how many bottles of Chocolate should you actually put on the shelf so I don’t arrive on Friday to find they’ve all gone?
That’s forecasting.
Get it badly wrong in one direction and you’ve got unsold stock. Get it wrong in the other and you’ve got disappointed customers and lost sales.
I can personally confirm the second one.
Accountancy isn’t just about recording what happened
That’s probably the bit I find most interesting.
We sometimes think of accountancy as recording what’s already happened.
We sold this.
We spent that.
Here’s the profit.
But good financial information also helps businesses decide what happens next.
That’s also why developing people through an accountancy apprenticeship is about much more than learning how to record transactions. It’s about developing an understanding of the numbers behind a business and how those numbers can help inform better decisions.
Should we increase production?
Can we absorb higher ingredient costs?
Should the retail price change?
Is a promotion actually profitable?
Should we invest in a new flavour?
Which products deserve more shelf space?
YAZOO has experimented with limited-edition flavours including Choc Mint and Choc Caramel over the years. Launching something new involves research, development, manufacturing, packaging, distribution and marketing before anybody knows whether customers are actually going to buy it.
That’s a financial decision as much as a flavour decision.
Somebody eventually has to answer the important question:
Did we make any money from it?
One £2 purchase multiplied millions of times
And that’s what my Friday Chocolate YAZOO has to do with accountancy.
On its own, my £2 isn’t particularly exciting.
Even my £104 annual contribution isn’t going to feature prominently in FrieslandCampina’s financial results.
But put my bottle alongside millions of other individual purchasing decisions and you’ve got a substantial business.
Those decisions create sales data. They influence forecasts. They determine stock levels. They affect margins. They influence investment. And they help businesses decide what to make, how much to make and what to charge for it.
Accountancy helps make sense of all of those decisions.
It’s happening behind the coffee you bought this morning, the petrol you put in your car, your monthly streaming subscription and countless other everyday purchases we barely think about.
Including my Friday chocolate milk.
So, on National Chocolate Milk Day, I’ll raise a bottle to the accountants helping to keep the nation’s fridges stocked.
Preferably with Chocolate.
And preferably before my local supermarket runs out again.
If you’re looking to develop the accountancy and finance skills within your own business, our accountancy apprenticeships can help you develop people who understand not only the numbers, but the business decisions behind them.
Have a chat with the Accountancy Learning team to find out more. Call them on 01392 435349.
