Day 2 Dispatch: In Nepal With Coca-Cola #NepalNow

During my recent trip to Nepal I said time and time again how surprised I was about the country. It was honestly nothing like I had expected. I thought (since it shares a border with India) that it would be a carbon copy of it southern neighbor. That, however, couldn’t be further from the truth. Nepal is very different from India. The food is completely different and definitely not as spicy. That’s not to say you can’t get great Indian food in Nepal. It’s just to say their cuisine is very, very different.

Even though Kathmandu is a crowded city, it never felt overwhelming like Indian big cities where you can drown in people and your senses go into hyper overdrive. I glean that Nepal is just a lot more laid back as a country and its people are more relaxed. I loved that about being in Nepal.

Day 2

On our second day, we went to the Bottlers Nepal Limited (BNL) campus where we learned a bit about Nepal as a country from the Director of BNL, Puneet Vatshney, and also took a tour of its bottling plant. We couldn’t take photos inside the plant, but suffice it to say that it was fascinating to see how Coca-Cola’s beverages get mixed and bottled and the steps it takes to get to the final product. Everything is precise, measured, and exact on the soda’s assembly line to maintain the quality of the drinks.

5by20

After visiting the plant we walked over to BNL’s 5by20 training of women shopkeepers. Coca-Cola’s 5by20 program is a global initiative to empower five million women in its supply chain by 2020. BNL has committed to empowering 10,000 women to help reach that milestone.

Pallavi Gautam, Senior Executive, Public Affairs and Communication (PAC) at Bottlers Nepal Limited conducts a 5by20 training on September 13 in Kathmandu.

Read my recent story, Nepal Women Increase Earning Potential Through Business Training.

After a busy day at BNL, we headed to lunch in Lalitpur which is Nepal’s third largest city. It sits about five to ten minutes from the capital city. It is where you will find Patan Durbar Square, the UNESCO World Heritage site that we visited throughout the afternoon. It was lovely that the BNL team arranged such a fantastic experience in such a historic area of Kathmandu Valley.