Flavoring liquid medications is a simple solution to a common problem for your patients: getting kids to take their medicine. When your pharmacy offers a tastier alternative to yucky medicine, it leads to happier kids and more importantly, to happier parents.
“If a mom comes into the pharmacy to pick up medicine for her child and the pharmacy offers this cool service that will save her a lot of hassle, then chances are she’s going to be a customer of that pharmacy for a long time,” said Chad Baker, vice president of marketing at FLAVORx, a company that makes medication flavoring for pharmacies.
A 2012 study by Temple University’s School of Pharmacy and WilsonRx, a healthcare consumer research company, found that parents preferred filling their children’s medications at pharmacies where custom-flavoring services were available. The study also found that parents were more likely to recommend a pharmacy that actively informed them about the services over one that did not.
A well-run flavoring program clearly offers some enticing benefits for your business. It can create additional revenue, drive more traffic to your store and enhance your customer service efforts—to name a few perks.
1. Increase business and profits
Flavoring provides a good profit margin if you charge a fee for the service. “Most pharmacies charge about three dollars,” Baker said. “It’s a pretty high margin for the pharmacy, about 70 points in margin, if not more, depending on the specific drugs they’re flavoring.”
Besides offering flavoring to your current youngster patients, you can also use your flavoring program to gain new patients by promoting the service to local physicians, daycare centers and other kids organizations.
“Kids ages two to nine are the sweet spot demographic for providing flavored medications,” Baker said. Watermelon or bubble gum? Cherry or grape? Kids love being able to choose their favorite flavor for their medicine. And, parents love not having to fight to get kids to take the medicine they need.
2. Tap into new markets
Flavoring kids’ prescriptions isn’t the only aspect of a flavoring service. Don’t forget that over-the-counter liquid medicines like those for allergies, cold and flu can also be flavored. So can pet medicines.
“If you can promote your pharmacy as a place to get yummy beef-flavored medicine for pets, that’s definitely a huge untapped market for pharmacy,” Baker said.
Get the word out to your patients and to your local vets that you can customize medications to taste like tuna, beef, chicken, bacon or peanut butter for pets.
3. Boost marketing
Using marketing materials, especially social media, to promote your flavoring service to local prescribers, patients and vets is a good way to let people know about this service, Baker said. But the best way, he said, is to let your patients know directly.
“Signage is great, but at the end of the day, it needs to be something that’s brought up with mom when she comes to either drop off or pick up the prescription,” Baker said. “The pharmacies that execute flavoring programs the best either consistently recommend the service for all liquid medications or they at least make sure to suggestively sell.”
Some great lines to use to suggest flavoring to patients include, “This is a really bad tasting drug, we highly recommend a flavoring,” and “How would you like this medication to taste? We can customize it for only $2.99.”
Besides making life a little easier for everyone in the family, a flavoring service can also improve patients’ adherence. “Consumers don’t really get into the words adherence and compliance, but that’s the main benefit for kids,” Baker said. “They’re going to be way more adherent to their medication regimen; it really does have an impact on quality of life.”
Bonus
Don’t let the financials of starting a flavoring service put a bad taste in your mouth. With minimal effort and fewer expenses than you might think, you can start a profit-generating flavoring service at your pharmacy.
“It’s easy to do,” Baker said. “People tend to think that a flavoring program is more involved and expensive than it really is. It’s not hard to get started and we provide everything needed to promote the program and make a success out of it.”
