Coca-Cola Beverages Africa (CCBA), South Africa-based Coke bottler said it has obtained the necessary regulatory approval to acquire the assets of Fairy Bottling Zambia Limited, a maker of Super Maheu (fermented maize beverage), Aqua Savana and other soft drinks trademarks.

In a statement, CCBA said “With this agreement, CCBA has acquired the production facility in Lusaka and the sales and distribution infrastructure. This follows the recent acquisition by CCBA of Kalundu Beverages Limited, trading as Coca-Cola Beverages Zambia (CCBZ).

“By combining the current sparkling soft drinks business of CCBA in Zambia with the state of the art production and distribution capability existing at Fairy, CCBA will be a more cost-effective operator in Zambia,” read the statement.

CCBA acquired Zambia Breweries’ owned Kalundu Beverages Limited, trading as Coca-Cola Beverages Zambia in December 2018, as part of The Coca-Cola Company’s (TCCC) agreement with AB InBev to re-acquire its bottling operations from the brewer following the big beer merger of 2016 and refranchise them to other bottlers. These includes bottling operations in Southern Africa (Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Swaziland, and Lesotho) as well as operations in El Salvador and Honduras .

This new acquisition is expected to yield positive results. “We believe that the acquisition of Fairy Bottling allows us to achieve greater efficiencies which ultimately means better value for consumers and improved service to customers,” said Norton Kingwill, the managing director for CCBA’s Southern Africa region which includes Namibia, Botswana and Zambia.

He confirmed that “the operations of Fairy Bottling will continue as normal and all employees will remain with Fairy after transfer.”

CCBA which was created in November 2014 by the merger of Coca-Cola’s South African operations with SABMiller’s non-alcoholic Southern African operations and Coca-Cola Sabco, is Africa’s largest Coke bottler with operations in South Africa, Namibia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Ghana, Mayotte and Comoros and Ghana.