|
FlavoRx, the Bethesda company that makes the most bitter of children's medicine taste like berry mix or bubble gum, is packaging a few flavors into a home kit to debut on 3,400 Wal-Mart shelves this spring.
And FlavoRx's leaders have an inadvertent phone call to thank for the blockbuster deal topping a half-million dollars.
One day four months ago, when the kit merely topped a brainstorming list or two, the company's Wal-Mart account manager accidentally misdialed, ending up with the retail giant's executive in charge of over-the-counter pharmaceutical products. The latter, searching for Wal-Mart's spring featured pharmacy product, happened to ask about the home kit. By the time they hung up, the two had worked out a rough timeline to produce FlavorIt.
The unlikely partnership is a departure from the local company's initial philosophy, which favored independent pharmacies over brand-name chains. But this move propels 11-year-old FlavoRx to new marketing levels since its earliest days, when word-of-mouth won it its first 20 contracts with small pharmacies.
"It's easier when it's done this way," says CEO Kenny Kramm, who founded FlavoRx after he had to feed medicine four times a day to his daughter with cerebral palsy. "When people know there's a big company behind it, there's a lot of trust factor in it."
FlavoRx will ship 61,200 of the flavoring kits to Wal-Mart stores, which retain 30-day exclusive marketing rights, to sell for $9.99 apiece. Then starting this summer, the company hopes to roll out the kit to more of its 35,000 pharmacies and drug stores, from one-person independents to mega-franchises such as Rite Aid, Walgreens, Target, Kmart and CVS.
The kit, a mini collection of the popular orange, bubble gum, grape and watermelon flavorings and a sweetener that parents can blend with anything from cough syrup to infant formula, is expected to last about a year.
Already, FlavoRx has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars
on the kit's development. Its contents resulted from at least
three national surveys and four focus groups on what parents
would likely end up buying.
Bad-tasting medicine is "not a huge problem, but we do hear about it," says Dr. Marjorie Hogan, a pediatrician and spokeswoman for the American Academy of Pediatrics. "I can see some limited use for it in selected patients."
Kramm, who started his business in a 10-foot-by-20-foot room in his father's three-decade-old pharmacy, expects $11 million in revenues for this fiscal year, which ends June 30. That's a nearly 60 percent leap from the company's $7 million in revenues in the prior fiscal year.
FlavoRx, which works with two major manufacturers to produce the flavoring products for pharmacists and parents, is also partnering with California-based Fillmaster Systems to build a dispensing machine that lets pharmacists add flavoring to a prescription with a push of a button.
The machine, Kramm says, should be ready in six months, replacing the current process of pharmacists manually adding the sugar-free drops to prescribed medications when a doctor calls for it to be flavored with cotton candy or candy canes.
In the next two years, FlavoRx envisions even more growth. By this fall, the 40-employee company expects to expand to about 50. By this time next year, Kramm says he hopes to raise another roughly $2 million, bringing his corporate total to $6 million. And by the end of 2008, he hopes to find larger quarters for the company in Montgomery County, complete with production space and a loading dock.
But for the next six months, the company's biggest test is left to the fickle taste buds of unwell children -- and the buying power of their parents.
"The market will determine whether it's a successful launch or not, whether parents think it's necessary," says Catherine Polley, senior vice president and chief policy officer for the American Pharmacists Association. "Hopefully the end result will be increased compliance in kids taking their medicine."
 Go to Top
|
