“Sai ‘aupito ‘a e quality pea vave hono ‘oatu mai ki Tonga ni.”
Patrick, CEO, Coca-Cola Tonga — translation: “The quality is very good, and the delivery is also fast.”
The situation
Coca-Cola Tonga is the local arm of Coca-Cola Europacific Partners Fiji – Tonga, the regionally controlled bottler that runs the Coca-Cola portfolio across the Kingdom. Six staff in Tonga supply Coca-Cola, Fanta, Sprite, Minute Maid and Mother Energy into retail outlets and hospitality venues from a small office on the ‘Alaivahamamaó Bypass Road in Ma’ufanga, with brand standards set globally and regional sign-off chains running through Suva.
Campaign-driven point-of-sale print — A2 posters, A5 tent cards, A5 counter cards, A6 cooler decals, shelf talkers — is the visible end of every promotional cycle. Without that print landing on time and on-brand, the campaign exists on paper only.
The local supply chain had two routes, and neither worked. Tongan printers had the relationships but not the equipment to produce point-of-sale work to Coca-Cola world standards. The Fiji-based supplier had the equipment but sat at the wrong end of a freight chain that gives priority to perishables — print shipments routinely waited a month for cargo space out of Nadi, by which point the campaign window had closed.
Cost was a problem, but it wasn’t the headline problem. Campaigns were running late.
The challenge
Three things made this engagement materially harder than a domestic print job:
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Coca-Cola world brand standards. Every job had to meet global brand specifications — colour matching, file format conformance, plus a multi-level approval chain with eProofing sign-off before any sheet went to press. There is no “close enough” on a Coke red.
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Late artwork, fast turnaround demands. Campaign artwork frequently arrived late from the brand and approval teams, but the in-market delivery date held. Compressing the production-and-freight window without losing brand compliance was the binding constraint on every job.
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A seven-day window from New Zealand to Tonga. Alpine Print, our commercial-print partner, produces in New Zealand. Production and international freight and customs clearance and hand-delivery into Tonga had to fit inside a seven-day envelope. The window was not a “best effort” — campaigns were already built around it.
What we did
Phase 1 — Direct business development. Aisea Fakaosi, our account executive in Tonga, proactively approached Coca-Cola Tonga to introduce Ricoh Tonga and Alpine Print’s commercial print capability. The opening conversation wasn’t a price quote — it was a conversation about why the existing supply chain wasn’t working and what a New Zealand-via-Tonga route could do that Fiji-via-Tonga couldn’t.
Phase 2 — Quoting and eProofing to Coke world standards. Once the customer supplied artwork, Ricoh Tonga prepared quotes, ran the eProofing sequence with the Alpine Print production team, and walked each job through the multi-level brand approval chain. Mid-job pivots — artwork changes, paper sizing changes — were absorbed inside the same envelope rather than restarting the clock.
Phase 3 — Production, freight and hand-delivery. Alpine Print produced each job in New Zealand. Ricoh Tonga handled the freight booking, customs clearance and in-country distribution — capabilities we run in-house rather than outsourcing to a forwarder. On arrival, Aisea hand-delivered the print materials to the customer site himself, the same way every job has been delivered since.
Coordination ran two-handed: Aisea in Tonga on the customer relationship, local freight management and final-mile delivery; Avi Sharma, our Regional Sales Manager, in New Zealand managing production sequencing and the international freight leg.
Results
- Seven-day turnaround, sustained — from artwork sign-off to printed materials in the customer’s hands in Tonga, including the international freight leg. Previous Fiji supply chain ran at approximately a month per job.
- Six invoiced jobs, August 2025 to April 2026. Additional jobs were also completed inside the same engagement; the six invoiced jobs are the published-visible portion.
- Approximately 10,600 prints across the six invoiced jobs. Visible volume only — the full engagement is larger.
- Approximately TOP $22,800 in invoiced revenue across the six jobs, ex-tax.
- Five Coca-Cola brand lines covered — Coca-Cola, Fanta, Sprite, Minute Maid, Mother Energy.
- Five print formats delivered consistently — A2 posters, A5 tent cards, A5 counter cards, A6 cooler decals, shelf talkers.
- Recurring engagement. This is no longer a project — it is the customer’s ongoing campaign print pipeline.
What made it work
Three decisions, in order of importance:
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Restructuring the supply chain, not just bidding on it. The previous Fiji supplier was bidding to do the same thing faster. We bid to do a different thing — produce in New Zealand on Alpine Print’s commercial press equipment, land in Tonga on freight relationships that don’t compete with perishables, and clear customs in-house with our own logistics capability rather than handing it to a forwarder. Different supply chain, different binding constraint, different result.
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In-country logistics, every step. A remote print supplier can be cheaper or faster on production, but cannot manage the customs clearance, the freight booking with priority status, the warehouse handling on arrival, and the physical delivery to site. Those four steps are where a remote supplier loses, and where a local operator with in-house freight and logistics capability wins. The decision to sign was made on this layer of the work, not on the print quote.
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Relationship gestures that the brand can see. Aisea hand-delivers every job to the customer site himself. That is not a logistics requirement — there are obvious ways to drop materials at a warehouse and call it done. It is a deliberate relationship signal in a Pacific market where named, repeatable, human-to-human delivery is the difference between a transaction and an account. The customer credits it.
For Ricoh Tonga as a business, this engagement is strategically significant for a separate reason: it marks the deliberate expansion of the Tonga branch beyond copier and device sales into commercial print as an active revenue pillar. The Coca-Cola Tonga account is the proof point. Other Tongan retailers and FMCG operators with similar campaign-print needs now have a New Zealand-grade supply chain available locally for the first time.
Want similar work for your team?
If you are running campaign or point-of-sale print into a Pacific market — and the supply chain you are currently using is built around freight priorities that don’t match your campaign calendar — get in touch. We can scope what a New Zealand-via-Tonga or New Zealand-via-Samoa supply chain looks like for your brand standards and your timeline, including the situations where it is not the right answer. The first conversation is a discovery one, not a quote one.