Aviad Meitar for the NY Times: Taking the Pepsi franchise into an ice-cold Romania

Aviad Meitar (in picture), one of the founders of the Pepsi franchise in Romania back in the early 90s, remembers the early days of his business venture into the newly democratic country of Romania in an article recently published in the New York Times. “It was also the time of the first Gulf War, and no one really wanted to travel anywhere. I had a tough time getting someone to accompany me to Romania, but I eventually talked a colleague into going with me,” Meitar writes for the NY Times. Suffering because of the cold winter, he “kept thinking the whole idea wasn’t very good,” he confesses. “Nonetheless, my colleague and I made a trip to Romania every month in 1991, spending a total of 93 nights in the country. We officially opened our business there in 1992,” he writes. Aviad Meitar and Eli Davidai, the other investor in the Quadrant Amroq Beverages, the Pepsi bottler in Romania, sold the business to Pepsi Americas in 2006. Meitar is currently the chairman of Quadrant European Beverages Limited, the Pepsi bottling company in neighbor country Bulgaria. Read the entire article from the New York Times here. Aviad Meitar has also published a book about the creation of the Pepsi business in Romania. The book, called 'An imaginable journey- How Pepsi beat the odds in Romania', can be bought from Amazon here. Read more about the book on its official website here. editor@romania-insider.com