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About The Coca-Cola Company

The world’s most valuable brand portfolio with unparalleled distribution capabilities.

Company Profile

Total beverage company.

The Coca-Cola Company (NYSE: KO) is a total beverage company with products sold in more than 200 countries and territories.

Our company’s purpose is to refresh the world and make a difference. We sell multiple billion-dollar brands across several beverage categories worldwide. Our portfolio of sparkling soft drink brands includes Coca-Cola, Sprite and Fanta. Our water, sports, coffee and tea brands include Dasani, smartwater, vitaminwater, Topo Chico, BODYARMOR, Powerade, Costa, Georgia, Gold Peak and Ayataka. Our juice, value-added dairy and plant-based beverage brands include Minute Maid, Simply, innocent, Del Valle, fairlife and AdeS.

We’re constantly transforming our portfolio, from reducing sugar in our drinks to bringing innovative new products to market. We seek to positively impact people’s lives, communities and the planet through water replenishment, packaging recycling, sustainable sourcing practices and carbon emissions reductions across our value chain. Together with our bottling partners, we employ more than 700,000 people, helping bring economic opportunity to local communities worldwide.

At-A-Glance

137 years of.

Refreshing PEOPLE EVERYWHERE

Master Brands

Products Sold In

200+ countries and territories

Worldwide in NARTD Value

Sparkling Soft Drinks

Juice, Value-Added Dairy & Plant-Based Beverages

Water and Sports Drinks

System associates worldwide

Bottling partners

Bottling plants

Retail customer outlets

Invested $8B+

System Capital Expenditure Investment in 2022

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The Coca-Cola Company Strategy

Building on solid foundations within a growing and vibrant industry.

At The Coca-Cola Company, we are in pursuit of becoming an even more consumer-centric total beverage company. Beverages are a growing and vibrant industry with long-term growth opportunities well into the future. We have established a platform for sustained performance in order to capitalize on that opportunity centered around disciplined portfolio growth, an aligned and engaged bottling system and winning with our stakeholders. All underpinned by digitizing our enterprise, fostering a growth and inclusive culture, and growing sustainably.

View Our Strategy

Our platform to accelerate revolves around the following strategies:

• Vision : Total Beverage Company
• Growth Strategy : Pursuing Excellence Globally and Winning Locally
• Sustainability: Leading in Sustainability With Collective Action
• Financials : Compounding Quality Value

Operating Segments

We operate as a local company with a truly global presence.

The Coca-Cola Company’s operational structure includes four geographic operating segments: Europe, Middle East & Africa; Latin America; North America; and Asia Pacific. The company reporting structure also includes the non-geographic segments of Global Ventures and Bottling Investments.

Production and Distribution

The coca-cola system.

The Coca-Cola Company manufactures, markets, and sells certain beverage concentrates, syrups, and finished beverages to authorized bottling partners. Depending on the product, our bottling partners combine the concentrates with sweeteners, still water, and/or sparkling water, to prepare, package, sell, and distribute finished beverages.

* The Coca-Cola Company and its bottling partners are collectively known as the Coca-Cola system. The Coca-Cola Company does not own, manage or control most local bottling companies.

About The Coca-Cola System

Concentrate Operations

We manufacture, market, and sell beverage concentrates, sometimes referred to as "beverage bases," and syrups, including fountain syrups.

Finished Product Operations

In addition to concentrates and syrups, we also manufacture, market, and sell finished sparkling soft drinks and other nonalcoholic beverages.

Bottling Partners

Our bottling partners and some Company-owned operations manufacture, package, merchandise, and distribute the finished branded beverages to our customers and vending partners, who then sell our beverages to consumers.

Driving the Growth Agenda

Meet our people.

Our company’s focus on disciplined portfolio growth and value creation is the product of our people and their strong commitment to creating beverage brands that are loved and shared by people around the world.

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• v.21(9); 2018 Jun

Coca-Cola – a model of transparency in research partnerships? A network analysis of Coca - Cola’s research funding (2008–2016)

Paulo m serôdio.

1 Department of Sociology, University of Oxford, Manor Road Building, Manor Road, Oxford OX1 3UQ, UK

Martin McKee

2 Department of Health Services Research and Policy, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK

David Stuckler

3 University of Bocconi and Dondena Research Centre, Milan, Italy

Associated Data

For supplementary material accompanying this paper visit https://doi.org/10.1017/S136898001700307X.

To (i) evaluate the extent to which Coca-Cola’s ‘Transparency Lists’ of 218 researchers that it funds are comprehensive; (ii) map all scientific research acknowledging funding from Coca-Cola; (iii) identify those institutions, authors and research topics funded by Coca-Cola; and (iv) use Coca-Cola’s disclosure to gauge whether its funded researchers acknowledge the source of funding.

Using Web of Science Core Collection database, we retrieved all studies declaring receipt of direct funding from the Coca-Cola brand, published between 2008 and 2016. Using conservative eligibility criteria, we iteratively removed studies and recreated Coca-Cola’s transparency lists using our data. We used network analysis and structural topic modelling to assess the structure, organization and thematic focus of Coca-Cola’s research enterprise, and string matching to evaluate the completeness of Coca-Cola’s transparency lists.

Three hundred and eighty-nine articles, published in 169 different journals, and authored by 907 researchers, cite funding from The Coca-Cola Company. Of these, Coca-Cola acknowledges funding forty-two authors (<5 %). We observed that the funded research focuses mostly on nutrition and emphasizes the importance of physical activity and the concept of ‘energy balance’.

Conclusions

The Coca-Cola Company appears to have failed to declare a comprehensive list of its research activities. Further, several funded authors appear to have failed to declare receipt of funding. Most of Coca-Cola’s research support is directed towards physical activity and disregards the role of diet in obesity. Despite initiatives for greater transparency of research funding, the full scale of Coca-Cola’s involvement is still not known.

There is longstanding concern that multinational companies manufacturing products harmful to health fund research seeking to prevent public health policies designed to counter the effects of their products. Thanks to the disclosure of tobacco industry documents, much has been learnt about how that particular industry conducted research designed to create confusion and to reframe the agenda in ways that advanced its interests ( 1 – 4 ) . Recently attention has turned to similar activities by the food industry. In early 2015, Coca-Cola attracted extensive criticism when it was revealed that it had funded a ‘Global Energy Balance Network’ (GEBN), led by John Peters and James Hill (University of Colorado), Gregory Hand (West Virginia University) and Steven Blair (University of South Carolina), whose main message was that there was no compelling evidence of a significant link between sugar-sweetened beverages and obesity ( 5 ) . The funding agreement with the GEBN was not visible for public scrutiny, as none of the parties involved had disclosed it on their websites, and it was made available by the recipient universities only in response to requests under freedom of information laws. However, the scale and influence of hidden research by the food and beverage industry are unclear and, so far, there has been a dearth of research on the role of vested interests such as Coca-Cola’s.

One methodological challenge is identifying those articles funded by specific actors. Previously, search tools such as Web of Science, PubMed or MEDLINE have not facilitated this. However, in 2008 Thomson Reuters implemented a large-scale indexation of the paratextual information on funding acknowledgement statements and made them available for searching in one of its databases, the Web of Science Core Collection. Building on this innovation, we developed an algorithm in R programming language that crawls the results of a Web of Science search on funding statements and scrapes, parses and compiles the metadata from the studies identified by the search, so making it possible to review systematically research funded by Coca-Cola.

Using this new dimension of bibliometric analysis and the innovative tool we designed, we undertook a systematic review of the extent of involvement of Coca-Cola in funding nutrition research. We further took advantage of a unique opportunity to evaluate the extent to which Coca-Cola is transparent and comprehensive in its disclosures.

In September 2015, Coca-Cola published a ‘Transparency List’ of 115 ‘Health Professionals and Scientific Experts’ and forty-three ‘Research Projects’ that it sponsored in the USA ( 6 , 7 ) . Following this disclosure, some of Coca-Cola’s subsidiaries and bottlers published similar transparency lists for health and wellness partnerships and financial support of scientific research in the UK ( 8 ) , France ( 9 ) and Germany ( 10 ) , in December of 2015, and in Australia ( 11 ) , New Zealand ( 12 ) and Spain ( 13 ) , in March of 2016 (see online supplementary material 1 for the full lists of health professionals and scientific experts).

Here, using this new instrument, we investigate the following questions:

• 1. Are Coca-Cola’s transparency lists complete?
• 2. How many studies and authors are funded by the Coca-Cola brand?
• 3. Which research topics and interventions are supported by Coca-Cola funding?
• 4. Are Coca-Cola funded researchers declaring their links to the company in their publications?

Materials and methods

Following PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines, we reviewed research supported by Coca-Cola funding using the Web of Science Core Collection database ( 14 ) . Starting in 2008 Thomson Reuters added funding acknowledgement and competing interest statements to all the bibliographic records of the Science Citation Index Expanded. This retrieves the funding/competing interest paratextual information in the published version of an article as well as distinguishing between a conflict of interest and a funding statement, and identifies the entities that are acknowledged as providing funding for the article – saving the user from having to read the statements and identify the funding sources manually. These changes, in contrast to other existing databases, now enable users to search the database for text strings (e.g. names of corporations) in the funding acknowledgement section, either as a funding agency or simply as part of a declared conflict of interest.

To our knowledge, Web of Science is the only bibliographic database to index this information on a large scale (Scopus developed a similar algorithm, but with a considerably lower coverage of publications and for a shorter time period; and, more recently, PubMed started adding this information to the metadata of the publication records it indexes).

To retrieve metadata from the literature searched, we developed a web scraping tool that crawls the URL address of any search run in the Core Collection database of Web of Science. Our algorithm, written for R software, runs sequentially over each study page in the search results, parses the HTML code and scrapes user-defined fields for each publication (e.g. title, abstract, authors and affiliated institutions), including the funding/competing interest statement and a table compiled by Web of Science that lists all the entities that provided funding for the article, as reported by the authors (the R script for the algorithm is provided in online supplementary material 2).

We searched for all studies that included the string ‘cola’ in the ‘funding text’ field, which indexes the entire funding acknowledgement section as reported in the published manuscript (see Fig. 1 and Appendix 1 for search strategy). This broad search strategy identified 779 articles, published between 2008 and June 2016, and included articles that acknowledged both direct funding and competing interests involving The Coca-Cola Company and all its subsidiaries. In addition, the broad search term ‘cola’ also yielded studies funded by other companies, such as ‘Pepsi-Cola’.

PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) flow diagram for the present systematic review. This PRISMA diagram describes the study selection steps and identifies at what stage we arrived at analytical Samples 1 and 2. Seven hundred and seventy-nine records (i.e. publications) were retrieved from a search on the ‘funding text’ field in Web of Science for any mention of ‘Cola’. From these records, 318 were excluded for not meeting the screening criteria (i.e. the study acknowledging direct receipt of funding from Coca-Cola). After exclusion, we arrive at Sample 1, which contains all studies funded by the Coca-Cola brand. We subset from Sample 1 only those studies funded by The Coca-Cola Company, its affiliates in the USA and those subsidiaries that published transparency lists; this leads to the exclusion of seventy-two studies for not meeting the eligibility criteria, which gives us Sample 2

The questions set out above make an implicit separation between the research funding activities of The Coca-Cola Company and those of the Coca-Cola brand, which includes all subsidiaries and bottlers around the world. With this distinction in mind, we constructed two analytical samples.

The first sample is less restrictive, composed of all studies directly funded by any company or institute part of the Coca-Cola brand that were retrieved from our search. This sample is used to answer question 2 (‘How many studies and authors are funded by the Coca-Cola brand?’).

The second sample is a sub-sample of the first, focusing on those studies funded by The Coca-Cola Company and its philanthropic arms in North America, and by the subsidiaries and bottlers that participated in the ‘Transparency Initiative’. This sample is used to answer the remaining questions (1, 3 and 4).

Below, we describe all steps in the selection of the studies and in the creation of the two analytical samples.

Study selection

The 779 studies produced by our search were screened for the inclusion of the string ‘Coca-Cola’ (or any possible variant, including affiliates of the main company, such as the Beverage Institute of Health and Wellness ( 15 ) ; see Appendix 1 for a list of all variants) as a funding agency. The goal of the initial screening was to parse through the search results and only keep studies that report direct receipt of funding from The Coca-Cola Company or any affiliates (see Fig. 1 ).

This criterion thus excluded 318 studies. These were studies where: (i) the authors only declare a competing interest due to previous relationships with The Coca-Cola Company unrelated to research funding (e.g. speaking engagements or consultancy work); (ii) Coca-Cola’s involvement in the publication was indirect (e.g. via student grants); (iii) the authors acknowledge funding from another ‘cola’, such as ‘Pepsi-Cola’; and (iv) where the algorithm used by Web of Science mistakenly included Coca-Cola as a funding agency, when the funding acknowledgement section did not indicate direct funding by the company to that particular study (this was assessed by manually inspecting all funding statements).

To be eligible for our first sample, studies had to acknowledge funding from The Coca-Cola Company or any of its affiliates, including The Coca-Cola Foundation (TCCF, the philanthropic arm of the company), Coca-Cola North America, The Beverage Institute for Health and Wellness (an organization set up by The Coca-Cola Company to support nutrition research) ( 15 ) and Coca-Cola bottlers or subsidiaries outside the USA. This criterion comprises the totality of the Coca-Cola brand in our data and did not lead to the removal of any further studies. Sample 1 is therefore comprised of 461 studies.

In the second sample, we imposed stricter eligibility criteria to isolate those studies funded by The Coca-Cola Company and its affiliates in the USA, France, Germany, Spain, New Zealand and Australia, the only countries to release records of their research funding efforts in the form of transparency lists of funded scientific experts, which were released in late 2015 and early 2016 (see full lists in online supplementary material 1).

This criterion excluded seventy-two studies that were funded by subsidiaries or bottlers other than the ones listed above. Sample 2 is thus comprised of 389 studies.

To answer the first question, concerning how comprehensive was Coca-Cola’s transparency initiative, following the revelation of its financial backing of the GEBN, we recreated Coca-Cola’s lists of ‘scientific experts’ and ‘research partnerships’ by carefully following the parameters laid out in Coca-Cola’s transparency disclosure ( 6 , 7 ) , using our own data on funding statements retrieved from Web of Science (Sample 1). We then matched our recreated list to the original ones published on Coca-Cola’s websites ( 6 – 13 ) . This was designed to identify any discrepancy that could, potentially, reflect selective disclosure on the Company’s part.

Coca-Cola included in its ‘Research and Partnerships’ lists the names of academics it funded or collaborated with according to the following criteria (these can be found on the company’s websites) ( 6 – 13 ) : (i) funding agreements sourced exclusively from The Coca-Cola Company, The Coca-Cola Foundation, Coca-Cola North America, Coca-Cola South Pacific, Coca-Cola Australia Foundation, Coca-Cola Oceania, Coca-Cola Germany and Coca-Cola Spain; and (ii) activities and studies conducted between January 2010 and December 2015.

To match these criteria, we started with the 461 studies in Sample 1 and excluded the following: (i) studies published before 2010 and after December 2015; (ii) studies funded by Coca-Cola subsidiaries and bottlers, with the exception of those listed above; (iii) studies written as part of research consortia that were themselves funded by The Coca-Cola Company, since the funding link between the company and the publication is indirect (see online supplementary material 1, Supplemental Table 1 for a complete listing of such consortia); and (iv) authors who were not listed as principal or co-investigators on the Coca-Cola grant in the original funding statement, where this information was made available (unfortunately, most funding statements did not identify the main investigator on the grant). We opted for a conservative method of removing studies to guarantee, to the highest degree possible, an approximation to the way Coca-Cola compiled its own lists of funded researchers.

One hundred and thirty-eight studies did not meet the eligibility criteria and were removed from the matching procedure.

It should be noted that although there is a gap between the time funding is awarded and the publication date of a study, which suggests that we should restrict our parameters to publications from 2012 onwards, it is not clear from the information provided by Coca-Cola that authors of research published in 2010 would not be included in its transparency list. In fact, it is the case that some studies yielding publications in 2010 were still ongoing in subsequent years. Furthermore, a large proportion of authors who published in 2010 also appeared in published research later on, which suggests that projects funded by Coca-Cola were likely to have yielded more than one publication over time. Therefore, the method we designed to match our data to Coca-Cola’s lists includes research published from 2010 onwards.

Notwithstanding, to confirm the validity of our method, we used a sub-sample of studies published between 2012 and 2015 to compare with Coca-Cola’s transparency lists; the results lend further support to our findings using studies published from 2010 onwards (see ‘Limitations of the study’ section below).

After exclusion of ineligible studies, the procedure identified 907 authors, responsible for 331 studies that fit the criteria used by Coca-Cola to compile its lists of funded research partnerships. The combined transparency lists published by Coca-Cola in the USA, UK, Australia, France and Germany (Spain and New Zealand did not contain names of individual researchers) named 218 researchers. We then proceeded with matching the names of the 907 authors we identified in our data to the 218 names of researchers listed by Coca-Cola as recipients of its research funding, using whole and approximate string matching with manual verification of the results.

Figure 2 summarizes this iterative method in a PRISMA-type diagram.

Flow diagram of the process to match Web of Science data to Coca-Cola’s transparency lists. This flow-type diagram describes: (i) the steps taken to recreate Coca-Cola’s transparency lists using our data; and (ii) the matching of our recreated list to Coca-Cola’s combined transparency lists. We start with all studies in Sample 1 and begin evaluating them against the parameters that governed Coca-Cola’s lists of scientific experts and researchers it funded, and excluding those that failed to meet the eligibility criteria. In the matching stage, we combined the lists of researchers funded by Coca-Cola in North America, UK, Australia, Germany and France and matched these names to those on the list we created using data from Web of Science. The corresponding author on studies with all unmatched names were surveyed via email and asked about Coca-Cola funding

The second question raised above seeks to reveal the universe of scientific literature funded by Coca-Cola. For this question, we focused on the Coca-Cola brand as a whole, not making any distinction between the research funding activities carried out by the main company in the USA and those of its subsidiaries and bottlers around the world.

To address this question, we employed network analysis tools to visually portray the scope of Coca-Cola’s involvement in funding scientific research, and at the same time compare it with the company’s disclosure following its transparency initiative. We built co-authorship networks for all studies that were funded by the Coca-Cola brand between 2008 and 2016. The diagrams show nodes (authors) linked via edges, which represent the co-authorship of a study. A similar approach has been used in the literature combining a systematic review with co-citation networks, instead of co-authorship networks ( 16 , 17 ) .

Network analysis was paired with text analysis to assess the content of the scientific literature funded by Coca-Cola. In addressing question 3, we shift our focus to the funding endeavours of the Coca-Cola Company and those affiliates that participated in the transparency initiative, and discuss who and what fields of research they funded between 2008 and 2016. We added a new co-authorship network and ran a community search algorithm ( 18 ) to uncover highly cohesive subgroups that may indicate the presence of different research hubs throughout the USA (and abroad).

The algorithm calculates betweenness centrality scores for each tie in the network, a metric that counts the number of shortest paths between all pairs of nodes that pass through each tie. In short, it counts how often a tie is used as a ‘bridge’ to connect, in the shortest way possible, any two pair of nodes. It proceeds by removing the tie with the highest score of betweenness, recalculating tie betweenness centrality and iteratively removing ties with the highest betweenness score until the network becomes disconnected into several subgroups. Once it achieves an optimal number of subgroups, the partitioning of the network is complete and it assigns different colours to each subgroup.

This methodology offers valuable insights on the structure and organization of Coca-Cola’s research enterprise, as it furthers our understanding of its centralization, which actors are important and whether research themes or institutions may play a role in its organization. Furthermore, it puts Coca-Cola’s transparency initiative in perspective, both in terms of scope (how complete is the disclosure) and in terms of relevance (whether the authors the company acknowledge as recipients of funding are central or peripheral players in the network).

To better understand the research themes of Coca-Cola’s funded research (the second part of question 3), we examined the abstracts of all 389 articles that met the screening and eligibility criteria that underpinned Sample 2. Using structural topic modelling ( 19 ) , a variant of the large toolbox of topic modelling estimation methods, generally described as unsupervised machine learning algorithms for probabilistic classification of large text corpora, we uncovered hidden semantic structures, or topics, that give us an insight into the different streams of research that Coca-Cola has funded since 2008.

In a nutshell, topic models estimate latent topics in a bundle of text documents and simultaneously assign the documents to the different topics, probabilistically. The algorithm works on the assumption that a document is composed of a different mixture of topics and estimates the probability distribution of documents to topics; it does this based on the semantic content of each document by leveraging information on the word frequency within and across documents. Thus, documents that share the same semantic structure (i.e. similar distributions of word frequencies) are likely to belong to the same topic.

In online supplementary material 3 we present in greater detail the estimation methods and robustness tests for the models presented here.

In the next section, the results are organized and discussed around each of the research questions set out above.

Testing the completeness of Coca-Cola’s transparency lists

Our search in Web of Science identified a total of 907 authors corresponding to 331 studies. These were the studies that met the eligibility criteria required to match their authors onto Coca-Cola’s transparency lists (for a full list of the studies included in Sample 1, Sample 2 and in the sample used to match against Coca-Cola’s transparency lists, see online supplementary material 1, Supplemental Table 2).

To evaluate the degree of transparency, first we compared the 907 names with the 218 researchers and scientific experts named directly by the company and selected subsidiaries as recipients of its own research funding. Forty-two people appear in both sets (see Fig. 2 ). This corresponds to 20 % of the names on Coca-Cola’s transparency lists and to 4 % of the names listed in Web of Science as authors of Coca-Cola funded publications.

Next we performed a series of robustness checks and tests for alternative possibilities.

First, as only one researcher per publication could be the direct recipient of a grant, we removed all publications involving any of the forty-two authors whom we identified successfully. There still remained 527 authors corresponding to 152 published articles that acknowledge Coca-Cola funding but were not named on Coca-Cola’s transparency lists.

Second, we surveyed via email 131 (fewer than 152 because of overlap) corresponding authors requesting whether they had received funding from Coca-Cola or not during the period 2010 to 2015, using the corresponding email address indicated in the manuscript. Each corresponding author was emailed twice over the course of 20 d. It should be noted that the corresponding author is, in many cases, a junior researcher on a publication, thus unlikely to be the principal investigator on the grant. Eleven per cent (fourteen authors) confirmed Coca-Cola funding, 22 % (twenty-nine authors) denied it and 53 % (sixty-eight authors) did not reply. In cases where the respondent denied funding, we asked who were the primary recipient(s) of the grant. The remaining 14 % of email addresses were no longer valid.

We altered our sample according to the results of the survey in the following manner: (i) in the cases where the respondent denied funding, we removed the respondent’s name from the sample and, in the few cases where the respondent provided the name of the primary recipient(s) of the grant, we kept the latter’s name in the sample; and (ii) in cases where the respondent confirmed receipt of funding, we removed the names of all co-authors on each publication of the respondent in the sample.

After incorporating the results from the survey, our search identified up to 471 authors corresponding to 128 articles whose names do not appear on Coca-Cola’s lists, but whose articles acknowledge funding from the company.

Mapping the universe of Coca-Cola’s research funding: a network analysis

Next, we did a broad search for all published research acknowledging financial support from any member of the Coca-Cola brand (including the main company, subsidiaries, bottlers and other affiliates), for the entire period for which we have data, 2008 to 2016.

Figure 3 depicts a network of co-authorships, where nodes represent authors and ties represent shared publications between them, for all publications that acknowledge funding from the Coca-Cola brand. Thicker lines denote a higher number of co-authored publications between any two nodes. Nodes were sized by degree centrality, a network measure that captures how central is a node in the network by adding up the weights of its ties (in this case, it will reflect the total number of co-authored publications for each author).

Network of linkages between authors of publications acknowledging Coca-Cola related funding. This network graph shows co-authored publications (ties) between authors (nodes), for publications that acknowledge funding from The Coca-Cola Company, The Coca-Cola Foundation, the Beverage Institute for Health and Wellness and any subsidiary or bottler company (e.g. Coca-Cola Brasil). Nodes in red identify authors who appear on Coca-Cola’s transparency lists. Nodes in green identify authors on Coca-Cola funded publications whose names do not appear in Coca-Cola transparency lists. Nodes in purple identify authors on publications funded by Coca-Cola subsidiaries, also not on Coca-Cola’s lists. Nodes are sized by degree centrality (total number of co-authors times the number of shared publications they have)

The colour partitioning of the network allows us to compare Coca-Cola’s disclosure with the known universe of Coca-Cola funded research since 2008. Nodes marked in red represent the forty-two authors whom we were able to match to Coca-Cola’s transparency lists. Nodes in green represent authors on studies (from Sample 2) that declared funding from The Coca-Cola Company, Coca-Cola North America, Beverage Institute for Health and Wellness and The Coca-Cola Foundation, but who were not acknowledged in the company’s transparency list. Finally, we extend the network to the whole brand (Sample 1) by colouring in purple nodes representing authors of studies funded by Coca-Cola subsidiaries, bottlers or affiliate companies that share the brand name around the world, such as Coca-Cola Brasil and Coca-Cola Hellas, and who were equally absent from those subsidiaries’ transparency lists.

The network analysis reveals that the researchers acknowledged by Coca-Cola, albeit occupying a central position in the graph, represent only a small subset of the universe of research reporting Coca-Cola funding, which involves 1496 different researchers (we assume not all grant recipients) and 12 412 co-authorship ties, corresponding to 461 publications funded by the brand. The network is sufficiently disconnected for us to find several self-contained cliques of researchers, detached from the main component of the graph, and whose names did not feature in any of Coca-Cola’s lists. In other words, Coca-Cola’s transparency list appears to cover only a small portion of research in which the company is involved.

Additionally, the network structure shows several highly dense and autonomous research groups, disconnected from the main component of the network, and with no ties to the researchers acknowledged by the company. In addition, there are other equally central nodes in the network that were not acknowledged by Coca-Cola. This suggests the company is funding several research groups but has acknowledged only a subset.

However, a caveat to this visual assessment of the completeness of Coca-Cola’s lists is that it includes a small portion of publications that precede the start date of these lists (2010) and publications funded by subsidiaries that did not participate in the transparency initiative of the main company.

Who and what is The Coca-Cola Company funding? A topical analysis of abstracts

Now we turn to mapping who and what Coca-Cola is funding, seeking to understand what areas of research and who are the academics getting its financial support.

Table 1 reports the most prolific Coca-Cola funded authors (see online supplementary material 1, Supplemental Table 3 for the top fifteen institutional affiliations; the metadata for the studies included in these two tables are available upon request). As shown in Table 1 , the researcher who has published the most articles with Coca-Cola funding is a former president of the American College of Sports Medicine (S.B.). He has received around $US 5·4 million of research funding to study the role of energy balance at high levels of energy intake ( 7 ) , and he also played a pivotal role in the creation of the GEBN ( 5 ) (see online supplementary material 1, Supplemental Table 4).

Top fifteen most frequent authors in Sample 2

Sample 2 includes only those studies funded by The Coca-Cola Company and its affiliates in the USA, France, Germany, Spain, New Zealand and Australia, the only countries to release records of their research funding efforts in the form of ‘Transparency Lists’ of funded scientific experts, which were released in late 2015 and early 2016 (see full lists in online supplementary material 1). Sample 2 was compiled by the authors using data retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection. The metadata for the studies included in this table are available upon request.

Other leading Coca-Cola researchers are: a former Dean of the School of Public Health of West Virginia University (G.H.), who was the Principal Investigator on ‘Energy Flux – are we healthier when energy balance is achieved’ (funded with $US 851 000 by Coca-Cola), which resulted in the Energy Balance Study ( 20 ) , designed to evaluate the impact of energy intake and expenditure on changes in weight; and a member of the American Society for Nutrition and the Canadian Diabetes * who received two unrestricted grants ($US 192 000) in 2014 from Coca-Cola and has argued that there is no convincing evidence that added sugars in the diet have a unique impact on the development of obesity or diabetes ( 21 ) (J.S.). His research showing there is no association between total sugars intake and risk of diabetes ( 22 , 23 ) has informed the Canadian Diabetes Association’s position statements on sugars ( 24 ) .

The large number of Coca-Cola funded studies co-authored by the small group of academics in Table 1 suggests they ought to be central nodes in the network of Coca-Cola funded research. To visualize their centrality, we plotted a network of co-authorships using data from Sample 2, restricted to research directly funded by The Coca-Cola Company, The Coca-Cola Foundation, Coca-Cola North America and the Beverage Institute for Health and Wellness, thus excluding any subsidiaries or bottlers outside the USA (see Fig. 4 ).

Network of shared Coca-Cola funded publications. Nodes are authors, edges represent co-authored publications and are sized by the number of co-authored publications between two nodes. Nodes are coloured by the edge-betweenness community structure algorithm (explained in text); labels represent a network clique of Coca-Cola funded researchers, identified in personal correspondence between academics and Coca-Cola officials obtained through freedom of information requests

In addition to the community search algorithm we ran in this network, as explained in the ‘Analysis’ section, we also applied labels to researchers who were part of a closely affiliated group of academics (with strong ties to Coca-Cola) that was identified in email communications with Coca-Cola officials obtained via requests under states’ open records laws (P Matos Serodio, G Ruskin, M McKee et al ., unpublished results). This offers an exogenous benchmark to evaluate the performance of the network community structure algorithm and to establish the validity of using co-authorship data on Coca-Cola funded publications to shed light on the company’s involvement in funding scientific research. The size of the labels varies with a measure of node betweenness centrality, which shows the number of times a researcher serves as a bridge between any other two researchers in the network – this gives us an idea of how important they are in controlling the flow of information in the network.

The coloured factions portray different research groups funded by Coca-Cola. Their location in the graph may be driven by geographical factors (such as university affiliation) and by area of research – some authors may focus on physical activity while others work on consumption of non-nutritive sweeteners. Examples of such researchers include Joanne Slavin and John Sievenpiper who focus their research on sweeteners; this moves them close together, but far from the core of the network, which is more attentive to topics of physical activity. At the same time, Sievenpiper’s affiliation to the University of Toronto pushes him away from the core of the network, mostly based in the USA.

The match between coloured subgroups in the core of the network and the location of researchers in close contact with Coca-Cola suggests this group of academics was at the heart of the company’s involvement in funding research, and in a position to participate and coordinate studies between different research groups across fields and across borders, connecting otherwise disconnected groups in the graph.

Turning to the themes of the research, we used structural topic modelling. Figure 5 shows the distribution of topics over documents and the seven most probable words for each topic. As shown, topics converge on physical activity, energy intake, weight, diabetes, exercise and obesity, which are central themes in Coca-Cola’s effort to advance a research agenda able to counteract the link between sugar consumption and obesity by providing a secondary mechanism: the lack of physical activity leading to energy imbalance. Energy balance, physical activity, diabetes and obesity topics account for over 50 % of the studies we analysed (for an interactive visualization of the twenty topics estimated see online supplementary material 3, Supplemental Fig. 5).

Distribution of topics in the included literature. Based on an analysis of 389 documents from the structural topic model, this graph shows the percentage of documents assigned to each topic. In a way, it measures the topic’s popularity within the corpus of abstracts we retrieved from Web of Science. It is important to note that, although each abstract was assigned to a single topic in this graph (the most probable topic), they are considered a mixture of topics; however, they often devote more words to a particular topic and the algorithm used that information to assign the text to a single topic. The ratio value denotes, for each abstract, how dominant was the most probable topic v . the second most probable topic; we averaged these out over all abstracts assigned to each topic in the figure. For example, a ratio of 5·7 for topic 16 means that, on average, the weight of topic 16 in those abstracts assigned to it was 5·7 times larger than the second most probable topic in these abstracts. The twenty word stems with highest probability per topic are listed in Supplemental Table 10 in online supplementary material 3. An interactive visualization of the twenty estimated topics is available in Supplemental Fig. 5 in online supplementary material 3

Finally, we evaluate the influence of the Coca-Cola funded publications based on journal impact factors. Table 2 shows the top fifteen journals publishing the greatest numbers of Coca-Cola funded studies. This included Medicine and Science in Sports & Exercise (twenty-one articles) and other high-ranked journals such as the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition , British Journal of Sports Medicine and Journal of the American Medical Association . The first of these is published by the American College of Sports Medicine, a recipient of substantial funding from Coca-Cola ( 26 ) . These respected journals lend these studies both credibility and visibility within the academic community.

Selected journals of publication of the 389 Coca-Cola funded articles in Sample 2

Sample 2 includes only those studies funded by The Coca-Cola Company and its affiliates in the USA, France, Germany, Spain, New Zealand and Australia, the only countries to release records of their research funding efforts in the form of ‘Transparency Lists’ of funded scientific experts, which were released in late 2015 and early 2016 (see full lists in online supplementary material 1). Sample 2 was compiled by the authors using data retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection.

Testing whether Coca-Cola funded researchers declare conflicts of interest

Next we ask whether the academics and scientific experts who are acknowledged by the company as recipients of research funds declare their ties to the company in research publications.

When matching the names of researchers and scientific experts on Coca-Cola’s list to our sample from Web of Science, we failed to account for 176 scientific experts (this includes people who were funded but may not necessarily be academics). These were persons whom Coca-Cola declared as recipients of funding but did not appear in our sample (note we were able to match forty-two names). Possible explanations for this anomaly are that the funded researchers did not disclose their funding sources (whether intentionally or not), disclosed them but the journal did not publish them, did not publish in indexed journals, or were not active academic researchers. To address the last possibility, we then restricted the search further to only those listed on Coca-Cola’s list whom we also were able to confirm were academic researchers (affiliated with an academic institution or actively involved in peer-reviewed research). This yielded thirty-eight confirmed academics. Searching through each of their entire publications’ entries in Web of Science, we were still unable to find any declared conflicts of interest.

Our analysis employed a novel instrument to map the scale, type and persons involved in Coca-Cola’s research networks. It makes a series of important observations. First, it revealed that Coca-Cola’s transparency lists released in the USA ( 6 , 7 ) , the UK ( 8 ) , Australia ( 11 ) , New Zealand ( 12 ) , France ( 9 ) , Germany ( 10 ) and Spain ( 13 ) (see online supplementary material 1, Supplemental Tables 5 to 9) are far from complete. There were 471 authors in 128 studies declaring Coca-Cola funding whose names did not appear in any of the transparency lists. A further thirty-eight researchers were on Coca-Cola’s lists, but their publications indexed in Web of Science failed to declare Coca-Cola funding or any conflict of interest. Second, the topical modelling reveals a pattern of consistent themes across the research publications funded by Coca-Cola, emphasizing physical activity over sugar or energy intake in relation to weight gain, diabetes and obesity.

Limitations of the study

Before interpreting the findings further, we must note several limitations arising from the nature of the data used. First, funding statements rarely identify the principal investigator (or co-investigator) on a grant, which in this case could overestimate the number of authors who appear to have a direct tie to the company. To address this issue, we surveyed the lead authors in each study that acknowledged funding from Coca-Cola and, in the cases where the lead author denied being involved on a Coca-Cola grant, we inquired who were the principal and co-investigators on the grant.

Second, funding statements rarely report the year in which the grant was awarded. It is possible that some studies were awarded grants by the company prior to 2010 but were published only post 2010, which may explain why the author(s) did not appear on Coca-Cola’s transparency lists. However, looking at a subset of articles published in the period 2012–2015, we still found over 400 authors declaring funding from Coca-Cola who were not acknowledged by the company. Furthermore, fourteen authors, involved in twenty studies, confirmed receiving Coca-Cola funding directly to us in the period 2010 to 2015 but were not on Coca-Cola’s lists.

Third, Web of Science only started indexing funding statements for articles published in 2008, which makes this review a small subset of the overall population of Coca-Cola funded studies. However, this asymmetry of information may lead only to an underestimation of the number of researchers funded by Coca-Cola. In addition, our approach is also limited by the fact that Web of Science is currently the only database indexing funding statements in a systematic way, which restricts the literature available for searching (see Appendix 2 for more details).

Fourth, Coca-Cola has amended its transparency lists multiple times. Using website crawling services that store digital archives of the web, we have found that Coca-Cola changed its list of ‘Research and Partnerships’ in the USA at least four times between October 2015 and March 2016. The last change was officially acknowledged by the company as the ‘first update’ to its public disclosure of financial support of scientific research. The update deleted five and added eleven new names to the lists of ‘Health Professionals and Scientific Experts’ and ‘Research and Partnerships’. The results reported above were updated to include the most recent version of all lists published online.

Fifth, authors may incorrectly report funding from The Coca-Cola Company, when it fact it was awarded by a subsidiary or bottler, or indeed awarded by Coca-Cola but to their affiliated institution, not directly funding their publication. Additionally, some researchers may have refused to list their names on Coca-Cola’s website – and although Coca-Cola acknowledges this issue on its website, it also reveals the total amount of funding that was allocated to said researchers was, on aggregate, relatively small: ‘Several individuals with whom we worked in the past have declined to have their names listed. The aggregate amount of funding provided to these individuals over the past five years is approximately $38,000’ ( 6 ) .

Finally, it is possible that there are authors we have missed who were not on Coca-Cola’s list and did not disclose funding in their publications; omission of funding source is, unfortunately, difficult to observe and quantify, making our results likely to be conservative estimates of Coca-Cola’s apparent lack of transparency.

These observations have important implications for managing potential conflicts of interest in research funding. We have learnt from past research that grants from corporations in the tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceutical and gambling industries can have significant effects on the results of published scientific research, although this influence is often denied by those recipients of the industry financial support ( 27 ) . A recent systematic review of systematic reviews on the relationship between sugar-sweetened beverages and weight gain found that industry-sponsored studies were five times more likely to produce results favourable to the companies ( 28 ) . Even in cases where the authors have complete independence to design, implement and analyse the results of a study, the conflict of interests created by industry funding may be enough to compromise the integrity of the conclusions (a recent Cochrane review concluded that standard ‘risk of bias’ assessments could not explain the bias found in pharmaceutical industry-sponsored studies, which suggests a ‘funding bias’ may be a better predictor) ( 29 ) . In the worst-case scenario, bias is introduced to the study design and selection of hypotheses ( 30 , 31 ) .

For policy, our results suggest a general lack of transparency both among funders and researchers. Among industry, despite ostensible efforts of transparency, there remains a significant portion of Coca-Cola funded research that appears to be in the dark. Prior to September 2015, when Coca-Cola published its first transparency list of funded research and partnerships, it is hard to imagine that the public health community and the public at large were fully informed on the extent of Coca-Cola’s involvement in funding research. In this paper, we have demonstrated that even after an important step towards transparency taken by the company, we still know very little about the full scale of Coca-Cola’s funding efforts, let alone of the entire soft drinks industry.

Turning to researchers, our results are consistent with two publicised cases of researchers apparently failing to declare conflicts. One such case involved Jeff Coombes, a professor at the Centre for Research in Exercise, Physical Activity and Health, from the University of Queensland, whose research focuses on using exercise to treat metabolic syndrome. In February of 2016, the Coca-Cola Company reported that he received an ‘unrestricted gift’ of $US 100 000 from the company in 2014 to ‘support ongoing research investigating the effect of exercise intensity on Metabolic Syndrome’ ( 32 ) . However, out of sixty-one publications of Professor Coombes between 2014 and 2016 that are indexed in Web of Science,* the Coca-Cola Company is acknowledged as a funding source on only four occasions, the first in May 2016 (article accepted in April 2016) ( 33 ) , three months after Coca-Cola publicly disclosed the details of Coombes’ grant and the press coverage it generated ( 32 ) . In fact, the funding statement in the article provides a link to the webpage of Coca-Cola Australia’s transparency list.

Another involved Fabrice Bonnet, a diabetes researcher at the Institute for European Expertise in Physiology (IEEP), who led a study between 2012 and 2014 to determine whether daily consumption of sweeteners included in carbonated soft drinks affected insulin sensitivity. Bonnet reported funding from the IEEP when registering a clinical trial on 8 January 2014 entitled ‘Comparison of the Effects of a 12-Week Consumption of Two Carbonated Beverages on Insulin Sensitivity’ ( 34 ) . However, The Coca-Cola Company acknowledged in December 2016, on its French transparency disclosure ( 9 ) , having granted €719 000 to the IEEP for a ‘research project on intense sweeteners’, for the period 2010 to 2014, which comprises the entire length of Bonnet’s study, according to the registered clinical trial ( 34 ) . Bonnet’s clinical trial did not acknowledge the financial support to the IEEP provided by Coca-Cola.

Such a lack of openness calls for reform and consideration of alternative approaches for managing potential conflicts. Currently debates are being held about the involvement of tobacco industries in e-cigarette research ( 35 ) and some academic journals have taken the strong measure of banning tobacco industry-funded studies altogether, arguing that they should be viewed as ‘marketing’ for the industry ( 36 ) . Our findings suggesting a lack of transparency in an industry that has claimed to be fully open, contribute to a climate of distrust. This may warrant the beginnings of a conversation about similar restrictions on research funded by the sugar and related industries.

Research highlights

• There is concern in public health that The Coca-Cola Company may fund research that benefits its corporate interests and diverts attention from the role of sugar-sweetened beverages in the obesity epidemic. • In 2015, The Coca-Cola Company published several lists of health professionals, scientific experts and academic researchers with whom it collaborated and whose research it funded between 2010 and 2015. It is not clear whether these lists are comprehensive. • The Coca-Cola Company, in conjunction with The Coca-Cola Foundation and the Beverage Institute for Health and Wellness, has funded 389 studies between 2008 and 2016, published in 169 journals, involving more than 1000 authors. • Although Coca-Cola took a step towards transparency, our data have shown major gaps and errors in its disclosures of research funding: Coca-Cola has acknowledged only forty-two out of 513 potential investigators on grants awarded by the company. • Coca-Cola predominantly funds research on nutrition, with a focus on physical activity, the concept of ‘energy balance’ and how these two factors relate to obesity and diabetes.

Acknowledgements

Financial support: D.S. and P.M.S. are funded by a European Research Council Grant (number 313590-HRES). D.S. is also funded by the Wellcome Trust. The funders had no role in the design, analysis or writing of this article. The lead author affirms that the manuscript is an honest, accurate and transparent account of the study being reported; that no important aspects of the study have been omitted; and that any discrepancies from the study as planned have been disclosed. Conflict of interest: All authors have completed the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors uniform disclosure form (available at http://www.icmje.org/coi_disclosure.pdf ) and declare: no support from any organization for the submitted work; no financial relationships with any organizations that might have an interest in the submitted work in the previous three years; no other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work . Authorship: P.M.S. wrote the R function to scrape, parse and clean the data. P.M.S., M.M. and D.S. discussed the research design. P.M.S. was responsible for the data analysis and plots. P.M.S., M.M. and D.S. discussed the results and wrote and revised the paper. Ethics of human subject participation: Not required.

Literature searches

• 1. Web of Science search for systematic review using Core Collection database: ft=“cola”
• 2. Web of Science search for variants of ‘Coca-Cola’: fo=“coca-cola” OR fo=“coca cola” OR fo=“coco-cola” OR fo=“cocacola” OR fo= “beverage health & wellness institute” OR fo=“beverage institute for health & wellness” OR fo=“beverage institute for health wellness” OR fo=“beverage institute for health and wellness”

Limitations of Web of Science funding acknowledgement data

The use of Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science Core Collection to study funding sources in academic research is not new ( 37 , 38 ) . However, important limitations have been raised in recent work ( 39 , 40 ) .

Thomson Reuters began to index information contained in the funding acknowledgement section of articles in 2008. This means that the first year with substantial coverage of funding information in published research is 2009. The database also presents other smaller caveats: (i) funding acknowledgement data are covered mainly for the Science Citation Index Expanded database, and not for Social Science Citation Index or Arts and Humanities Citation Index databases; (ii) information is indexed only for publications where the funding text is in English; and (iii) it only indexes information where the paratext includes mentions of ‘funding’ (other kinds of support are ignored).

For our purposes, these are minor caveats, except for the fact that the sample is truncated, since we can look at only a small window of Coca-Cola funding activities because data before 2008 are missing.

However, other concerns have also been raised about the way in which the algorithm determines whether the company listed in the funding text is indeed a funding agency for that study. Lewison and Sullivan ( 40 ) find that the algorithm over-classifies companies as the funding agencies in situations where they are simply included for other monetary arrangements with an author which would usually fall under a conflict of interest, and not a funding contract for that particular study.

We worked around this by reading the funding paratext for each publication and excluding those articles where Coca-Cola is (mistakenly) listed as a funding agency because there is simply a conflict of interest reported in the funding acknowledgement.

Furthermore, another caveat we should note is the inconsistency of use of the author strings across publications. The use of middle names, or first name initials, changes frequently across publications. To illustrate, S. Blair, Steven Blair, S N Blair, Steven N Blair are variants of the same author’s name used across publications. We standardize the author name strings for all documents to avoid duplicates in our analysis.

* Note that the Canadian Diabetes Association became Diabetes Canada on 13 February 2017 ( 25 ) .

* Here we focus on publications indexed by Web of Science. It is possible that publications by Professor Coombes that were not indexed by Web of Science may acknowledge funding from The Coca-Cola Company.

Supplementary material

Extracting Coca-Cola: An Environmental History

In its early days, Coca-Cola established key relationships in the supply chain ranging from natural resources to pharmaceuticals to achieve market dominance.

A charismatic soda and the branding to match, Coca-Cola is more than just a beverage. Today, the Coca-Cola Company is one of the largest food and beverage corporations, reporting nearly $10 billion in profits in 2023 . But, as historian Bartow J. Elmore argues in a 2013 article in Enterprise & Society , the company and its signature product’s rise to dominance from its relatively humble origins in 1886 in the hands of a broke Atlanta pharmacist was no coincidence. Instead, it resulted from a deliberately calculated plan to extract and acquire natural and social resources at minimum cost for maximum profit.

Elmore tracks how, in the early days of the company, Coca-Cola established key relationships in the supply chain ranging from public commodities to Monsanto to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics to drive down production costs. Ultimately, Elmore writes, Coca-Cola’s secret formula was a particular brand of capitalism based on the company’s “ability to embed itself in technological supply and distribution systems built, maintained, and financed by others.”

Though the recipe for Coke is famously proprietary, Elmore easily traces the environmental history of the company and beverage’s widespread success through a handful of well-known ingredients, such as water, sugar, caffeine, and coca . Elmore argues that Coca-Cola savvily siphoned resources from public and private entities to cheaply procure these key ingredients and establish a lean, mean global supply chain and market for their product.

Coca-Cola’s tactics began with an ingredient as fundamental as water, which we now experience as freely and widely available. But, in the early twentieth century in America, public commodities such as waterworks were just starting to emerge—and Coca-Cola seized the opportunity to prop up the systems through its franchised bottling model, and, conveniently offload upfront costs of bottling and shipping their “water-dense” product. Beginning in 1900, the company recruited local businessmen to rouse up $3,000 to establish regional franchises that would serve as regional bottling plants. Elmore recounts that many bottlers took out loans to start and consequently relied on the expanding public water systems to save on costs. This cost savings was then passed on to Coca-Cola, “broaden[ing] its bottling empire at low cost.” Indeed, Elmore notes that “as public water systems expanded into less-densely populated areas of the country by the 1910s, so too did Coke’s franchisees.”

Later in the twentieth century, Coca-Cola used a similar tack to expand business abroad. Elmore writes that the company secured foreign assistance loans by “argu[ing] that it could bring hydration to communities lacking basic water infrastructure” such as in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa through its earlier experience supporting American water infrastructure. Reviewing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) records, though, Elmore found that “these projects often helped Coke sell bottled water and other products rather than encourage the development of large-scale public water works.”

Most iconically, Coca-Cola used coca leaf extract in their secret recipe—sourced early on from a partnership with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. This, as Elmore puts it, “exposes yet another federal-corporate partnership that enabled Coke to purchase a key ingredient at low cost.” DEA-declassified documents in the National Archives show how Coca-Cola “secure[d] exclusive access to legal coca imports” after coca imports were criminalized in 1914. The FBN gave Coca-Cola “special exemptions” that allowed the company to purchase decocainized coca leaf extract, while denying exemptions for the same ingredient to other buyers.

“By restricting buyer access to coca leaves,” Elmore writes, “the federal government helped to create a monopsony for Coca-Cola,” ensuring they were the only buyers for the “exotic ingredient” and forever linking the substance with the brand.

Elmore outlines how Coca-Cola established similar low-cost and low-commitment relationships to source ingredients like caffeine—initially from agricultural giant Monsanto, then from decaf coffee maker General Foods—or to abdicate social responsibility, such as the endless plastic and aluminum waste their products generate. More broadly, the story of Coca-Cola told from a natural resources perspective demonstrates how, like consumer goods and agriculture, food and beverage production at scale was and is an extractive enterprise with substantial social and environmental impact.

For Elmore, with its emergence at the turn of the twentieth century, Coca-Cola heralds “a new type of corporation that emerged in the Gilded Age,” with few fixed assets but extraordinary market reach. Indeed, a product like Coca-Cola—and many of our processed foods today—“gained life by finding a way to market the excesses of mass-producing industrial firms,” Elmore writes, further distancing consumer habits from their resource-intensive origins.

Three Tips for Teaching

Cooking with Coke . Discuss the spread of the soft drink in the culinary world. Bring your favorite recipe to class!

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How Coca-Cola became one of the most successful brands in history

Table of contents.

Coca-Cola has an impressive track record of innovation which has helped propel the company to become one of the most successful brands in history. Through skillful advertising efforts, Coca-Cola is widely recognized as a symbol of American culture through its influence on politics, pop culture, and music around the globe.  

Key statistics and facts about The Coca-Cola Company: 

• Owns 43.7% of the US carbonated soft drinks market
• Net operating revenue of $38.7B
• Present in more than 200 countries and territories
• Employs over over 700,000 along with its bottling partners
• Ranked #93 in the Fortune 500
• Μarket value of $259.77 billion as of February 2023 

Who owns Coca-Cola?

There is no sole owner of Coca-Cola as it is a publicly listed company. However, the largest shareholder is Warren Buffett. Read on as we dive into the history of Coca-Cola's owners and much more below!

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The history of The Coca-Cola Company

How it all started.

The story of The Coca-Cola Company had humble beginnings in the late 1800s, in Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. John Pemberton, a local pharmacist, had developed a recipe for a sweet syrup that was originally advertised to cure headaches. It was eventually mixed with carbonated water to create a fizzy drink that was served at a soda fountain in Jacobs’ Pharmacy. The first glass of Coca-Cola was served on May 8, 1886. In the first year, Pemberton served approximately nine drinks per day which were sold for 5 cents a glass. 

While the ingredient list today is a highly guarded secret, it is well known that the original version contained extracts from the Coca leaf and Kola nuts for caffeine. The combination of these two ingredients is where the name comes from. Dr. Pemberton’s partner and bookkeeper, Frank M. Robinson, felt that spelling the name with double “C’s” would look better in advertising. So, he scripted out the logo which even today displays Mr. Robinson’s unique handwriting. 

Dr. Pemberton didn’t realize the potential of his new product. He took on several partners and sold portions of his business to various owners. Sadly, Dr. Pemberton died just two years after the creation of Coca-Cola. Prior to his death, he sold his remaining interests to an Atlanta businessman, Asa Griggs Candler. Candler knew there was something special about this new product, but little did he know that his $2,300 investment (roughly $67,000 today) would be the start of one of the most powerful brands on the planet. 

Birth of The Coca-Cola Company

The Coca-Cola Company was officially founded by Asa Candler in 1892. It didn’t take long for the Coca-Cola product to quickly spread outside of Georgia and across the nation. By 1895, Coca-Cola was being sold in every state of the union. In 1919, the company was sold to Ernest Woodruff. Woodruff's sons would continue to run the company for many years, transforming the company into a major international brand. The Coca-Cola Company was officially listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1919 under the ticker symbol KO. 

International expansion of The Coca-Cola Company

The first export of Coca-Cola was to Cuba in 1899. It wasn’t until the 1920s, that international expansion of the brand began to take off. During World War II, Coca-Cola’s President, Robert Woodruff, wanted to ensure that US service members stationed all over could have the comforts of home and pledged to transport Coca-Cola to the various bases in the European and Pacific theatres on the company’s dime. This introduction of the Coca-Cola product increased international demand. With people all over the world craving a taste of American culture, Coca-Cola began establishing partnerships with bottling companies and distributors all over the world. Today, the brand operates in more than 200 countries and territories. 

Early competition

In the early years, Coca-Cola had a lot of competition. In fact, the late 1800s and early 1900s was the most active period in the development of new soft drinks. Some of these companies went out of business or were bought out by other larger companies. However, many of these brands are still in existence today as more novelty brands and hold a very small percentage of the market. 

The most prominent competitors to Coca-Cola throughout its history have been Pepsi and Dr. Pepper. They were both created around the same time as Coca-Cola (Pepsi in 1898 and Dr. Pepper in 1885). Over time, these three giants bought up many of the smaller beverage companies. For example, Vernor’s Ginger Ale, Hires Root Beer, and Royal Crown Cola still exist but are now owned by Dr. Pepper. 

The Coca-Cola beverage was created in 1886 by Dr. John Pemberton, a pharmacist from Atlanta, Georgia. The recipe was purchased by Asa Griggs Candler and The Coca-Cola Company in 1892. The brand quickly became popular and was sold all over the United States. By the early 20th century, Coca-Cola began a rapid expansion across the globe.

The Coca-Cola system- a global franchise distribution network 

The Coca-Cola Company’s rapid expansion around the world can be attributed to its unique franchise distribution system (known as the Coca-Cola System ) that they have operated since 1889. Coca-Cola produces syrup concentrate which is then sold to various bottlers around the world. This helps the company maintain control over its top-secret recipe without the burden of having to run many of the independent bottling facilities. 

The Coca-Cola System is a network of over 900 bottling plants that produce 2 billion servings of Coca-Cola every day. The bottlers each hold contracts that allow them to exclusively operate in a predetermined territory. This reduces the need for the competition from multiple companies that sell the same product. 

These distributors handle all aspects of the production and distribution process including mixing the syrup with carbonated water and sweeteners, placing the finished product in cans or bottles, and distributing Coca-Cola to supermarkets, vending machines, restaurants, and movie theaters. Although Coca-Cola produces the main syrup, the franchise companies also control the soda fountain business in their territory. 

The exception to this model is the North American market where The Coca-Cola Company directly owns most of the bottling and distribution. Outside of the United States, Coca-Cola has continued to encourage the consolidation of its various bottling companies. Over time, Coca-Cola has acquired a percentage of ownership in many of the companies in the Coca-Cola System. 

Top 5 independent bottling partners, representing 40 percent of the Coca-Cola System distribution network:

• Coca-Cola FEMSA (Latin America)
• Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, plc (Western Europe, Australia, Pacific, and Indonesia)
• Coca-Cola HBC AG (Eastern Europe)
• Arca Continental (Latin America and North America)
• Swire Beverages (Asia and parts of North America)

Here's an example video from Coca-Cola HBC AG explaining their business model:

The Coca-Cola Company leverages a network of independently owned and operated bottlers around the world. This has enabled the company to quickly expand without having to invest billions of dollars into building facilities and navigating international rules and regulations unique to each region.

Evolution of the Coca-Cola product

The formula for Coca-Cola has undergone a few changes since its creation. Some of these changes were driven by necessity. Some were an attempt to reduce costs or gain market share. While the brand does not make changes often, some have been better received than others. 

Removal of cocaine

During the late 19th century, there were many Cocoa-based beverages available on the market. At the time, drugs like cocaine and opium were perfectly legal and used quite frequently for medicinal purposes. Since Coca leaves were used to make Coca-Cola, there were small quantities of cocaine that could be found in the drink. 

The public eventually became aware of the addictive properties of these substances, so Coca-Cola was pressured to remove this drug from its list of ingredients. The Coca-Cola Company made steps to gradually phase out sources of cocaine from its production until it was finally eliminated in 1929.

On April 23, 1985, The Coca-Cola Company took a huge risk that shocked the world. They announced that they would be changing the formula of their world-famous soft drink. Despite its massive success, the company had been losing ground to one of its main competitors, Pepsi. Pepsi’s success wasn’t just in the United States. They were quickly expanding into markets that were once considered untouchable. At the height of the Cold War, Pepsi became the first Western product to be permitted in the Soviet Union . 

Based on surveys and taste tests, consumers seemed to prefer the sweeter taste of Pepsi-Cola. So, Coca-Cola set out to rework the formula to improve its ability to compete. According to Coca-Cola’s website, their goal was to “re-energize the Coca-Cola brand and the cola category in its largest market, the United States”. After receiving positive feedback from nearly 200k customers in taste tests, New Coke was released to the market. 

The public’s response to the new version of their product was outrage. Unfortunately, Coca-Cola miscalculated its customer’s bond with the original brand. Massive protests were staged and the company was flooded with thousands of angry phone calls and letters. The backlash was so fierce that it forced the company to revert back to the old formula after only 79 days on the market, branded as Coca-Cola classic. 

This graph demonstrates PepsiCo’s rapid expansion of market share from 1970 to 1990 and subsequent fall.

Coca-Cola Zero Sugar

While Coca-Cola has vowed not to make any changes to its original product, the company plans to update the recipe and packaging for their popular zero sugar variation, Coca-Cola Zero Sugar . The company has been cautious in its promotion of the new version as to not create a blowback like the 1985 New Coke fiasco. Coca-Cola has reiterated that the new version will not be a major overhaul, rather an “optimization of flavors and existing ingredients”. The rollout is expected to hit the US market by August 2021.

Sweetener changed to high fructose corn syrup

Traditionally, the Coca-Cola recipe called for cane sugar as the primary sweetener. During the 1970s, the United States saw a massive increase in corn production. This forced the prices of corn to drop significantly. In addition, corn was heavily subsidized by the US government. This made sweeteners like high fructose corn syrup more affordable. 

In an attempt to reduce costs, Coca-Cola slowly started substituting cane sugar for high fructose corn syrup during the 1980s. The transition took place over the course of approximately 5 years. 

Today, cane sugar is still used in the production of Coca-Cola in certain regions of the world. The most popular example is Coca-Cola produced in Mexico. This version of Coca-Cola is still made with cane sugar. Some critics argue that “Mexican Coke” has a flavor that is closer to the original formula.

In 1935, Coca-Cola was certified as kosher after the company replaced the source of glycerin used in production . This was originally derived from beef tallow but was replaced with a plant-based version. However, with the change of sweetener in the 1980s to high fructose corn syrup, its kosher status was removed. Today, bottlers in markets with large Jewish populations will temporarily substitute high fructose corn syrup during Passover to obtain Kosher certification.

Recipe and flavor variations

Despite the utter failure of New Coke in 1985, The Coca-Cola Company has introduced new flavors over time in addition to Coca-Cola classic. 

Some consumers avoided Coca-Cola classic because of the high sugar or caffeine content. In 1982, the company released a diet version of their product for consumers who were concerned about consuming too much sugar. A caffeine-free version was also introduced a year later. 

The company has also tried different flavor combinations. The first was Coca-Cola Cherry in 1985 which was a huge success and remains popular today. Other flavors included lemon, lime, vanilla, orange, ginger, cinnamon, and coffee. Many of these were attempts to bring local flavors to international markets. 

Coca-Cola has achieved enormous amounts of growth by tailoring its products to local tastes and demands. They have also been able to reduce production costs by substituting expensive ingredients such as cane sugar for lower-cost alternatives. Not every change has been well received by the public. Coca-Cola infamously changed their original recipe to replace it with “New Coke”. This change faced fierce backlash and forced the company to bring back the original product after only 79 days on the market. 

Coca-Cola Growth Strategy

The company has outlined a list of key objectives that they plan to execute in the coming years to spur additional growth. This strategic plan is intended to guide the company in refocusing efforts and being more intentional with its actions.  

Focus on developing markets

Coca-Cola has identified that there is huge growth potential in the developing world. Seventy percent of all beverages being consumed in the developed world are commercialized compared to only 30 percent for the developing world. Considering the developing world contains 80 percent of the world's population, growth is expected to be exponentially higher. 

One identified area of opportunity is brand diversification. While Coca-Cola has a strong foothold globally, this is only due to its strong presence in major markets. Outside of sparkling water, Coca-Cola is trailing competitors. The focus will be on gaining momentum in other beverage categories through the experimentation of new products. 

Brand portfolio optimization

Bigger isn’t always better. The Coca-Cola Company is realizing that its efforts may be spread across too many individual brands. Their goal is to rebalance their portfolio and consolidate products into fewer master brands. They have already reduced this number from approximately 400 to 200. By having fewer master brands, they can better focus their efforts. 

Networked organization

Operating a large corporation comes with challenges. In many cases, there can be inefficiencies and duplicated efforts. Coca-Cola plans to address this by reorganizing its support and operational teams to provide better support and work more effectively. 

Brand building

The company plans to deliver world-class marketing through targeted resource allocation. The goal is to be more intentional with the way advertising and marketing investments are made. 

Coca-Cola has a goal to increase the frequency that new or existing consumers drink their products. To do this, the company has set targets to significantly increase innovation by bringing more trial products and projects into the pipeline. The goal is to increase this by 40 percent over 2020. 

Digital transformation

Coca-Cola understands that data is a powerful tool. They are in the process of undergoing a digital transformation to help the company operate more effectively and leverage data to drive decision-making. 

Revenue growth management

With this new data and digital tools available, the company can place a renewed focus on which areas have the most potential for growth. They will focus on understanding which markets, consumers, product lines, and competitors should be addressed.

The Coca-Cola Company is dedicated to growing the business through a skillfully designed and executed strategic plan. Their long-term goals are to focus on expanding the commercial beverage industry in developing countries. They also plan to optimize their product line by reducing the number of master brands, creating new innovative products, changing their internal operations teams to streamline processes, and better leverage data.

The power of advertising- Coca-Cola becomes a household name

A big part of Coca-Cola’s success over the years has been its focus on innovative marketing and advertising campaigns. In 2020, Coca-Cola was ranked as the 6th most powerful brand in the world. This accomplishment didn’t come overnight. Over the years, Coca-Cola has had to work diligently to evolve and bring fresh, new ideas to marketing and advertising.

Large contributions to advertising 

Even early on, Asa Griggs Candler spent a considerable amount of money on advertising. His original budget for advertising was $11,000 (over $300,000 in today’s money). By 1900, the budget increased ten-fold to $100,000 and again to $1 million by 1910. 

Large advertising budgets are important when a new brand is getting established. As a company grows and becomes well-known, they typically scale back on their advertising budget since most consumers recognize the brand. Coca-Cola, however, has continued to keep the pressure on its competitors. Today, the company spends about 10 percent of its revenue on advertising and marketing. This equates to approximately $4 billion in commercials, print advertising, sponsorships, and other promotional merchandise. 

Focus on the brand and human connection

Much of Coca-Cola’s advertising success comes from the way they present their brand. Instead of focusing on the actual product, they emphasize the feeling and camaraderie of making the brand part of one’s identity. Their advertisements are intended to make people feel good about themselves and want to be a part of the experience. 

Human connection is an important part of the brand message. One great example of this was the “Hilltop” commercial from 1971 that featured people from different cultures singing “I’d like to buy the world a Coke”. This showed the Coca-Cola brand as one that was intended to unite people around the world.

Celebrity endorsements

Celebrity endorsement is a way to help a brand stand out, especially when targeting specific groups. For example, sports fans will be more likely to purchase a product if their favorite athlete promotes the brand. Over the years, Coca-Cola has been endorsed by numerous high-profile celebrities, athletes, and pop culture icons. 

Hilda Clark, an American model, and actress was the first celebrity to endorse the brand in 1900 and was featured in early advertisements. Since then, Coca-Cola has received endorsements from many big-name celebrities such as Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Magic Johnson, and Elvis Presley. 

Coca-Cola in pop culture

The Coca-Cola brand has been a prominent part of American culture for decades. Coca-Cola has skillfully attached itself to key historical events, music, movies, and major holidays. 

Coca-Cola and many of its other brands have been featured in numerous films and television programs. For a short time, Coca-Cola even owned Columbia Pictures (from 1982 to 1989) and inserted Coke products into many of its productions.  A few examples include:

•  The 1933 film King Kong displays a Times Square billboard advertisement in several of the scenes.
• Coca-Cola products being used in the 1982 film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
• The modern TV series Stranger Things which takes place in the 1980s displays and makes reference to New Coke. 

The Coca-Cola Company has also made its way into music across the globe. Elvis Presley promoted Coca-Cola during his last tour in 1977. The UK sensation, The Beatles, made mention of Coca-Cola in a line of their hit song “Come Together”. In addition to lyrical references, the brand has featured musical superstars such as David Bowie, Elton John, and Whitney Houston in Diet Coke commercials. 

The Coca-Cola brand has also cleverly attached itself to popular holidays. Some of its most successful campaigns have been displayed over the Christmas holiday. One of the most iconic campaigns started in 1931 with illustrations of St. Nicholas drinking a Coca-Cola. Many credit Coca-Cola with inspiring the modern-day version of Santa Clause. 

Clever campaigns and promotions

Coca-Cola has been one of the top innovators in the advertising space. On many occasions, they have used never before seen tactics that both surprised and delighted consumers. Creating an additional buzz around their advertising campaigns helps to amplify whom the campaign reaches directly. 

During the 2012 NFL Superbowl, Coca-Cola decided to take a non-traditional approach. The Superbowl is one of the most sought-after advertising opportunities. Each year, approximately 95 million people tune in to watch the championship game. Typically, major brands spend over $5 million for a single 30-second commercial. With the rise of cell phones and other mobile devices, Coca-Cola knew that consumers would be juggling multiple devices during the game. So, they created a family of animated polar bears that would react to the game in real-time on digital media banners and a microsite. The bears would laugh, respond to audience tweets, and make faces. The campaign was a huge success. During the game, over 9 million viewers spent an average of 28 minutes engaging with and watching the polar bears in action. 

In 2011, Coca-Cola decided to take a personalized approach to advertise in Australia with their Share a Coke campaign. They selected 150 of the most popular names and printed them on the side of their bottles along with the message “Share a Coke with…”. The campaign encouraged people to share a bottle of Coke with a friend or tag them in a social media post with the hashtag #shareacoke. The campaign was so successful that it was expanded to over 80 countries and led to Coca-Cola’s first sales growth in over 10 years. 

Collectible memorabilia 

Coca-Cola has created and distributed numerous pieces of branded memorabilia that are highly sought after by collectors including toys, clothing, antique bottles, signs, household items, and old vending machines. The collectible nature of these products has nostalgia of traditional Americana and has further helped to amply the prestige and cultural connection of Coca-Cola to US history. Rare and well-preserved items can fetch tens of thousands of dollars. 

The Coca-Cola Company has created one of the most powerful and well-known brands in the world. Over the years, they have embedded themselves as an icon of American culture through music, television, and films. The company spends a significant portion of its annual revenue on advertising efforts including television commercials, social media, and other advertising. 

Growth through mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships- becoming an unstoppable force in the food and beverage industry

While The Coca-Cola Company is known for its main products such as Coca-Cola and Diet Coke, the company owns, produces, and distributes over 500 individual brands worldwide. Some of these brands are a result of new products that they created. Others were obtained through mergers, acquisitions, and special partnerships with other major companies. 

Key mergers and acquisitions

• 1960 - Coca-Cola acquires Minute Maid, a producer of juices, soft drinks, and other beverages such as the popular Hi-C brand. 
• 1993 - When Coca-Cola was struggling to gain a foothold in the Indian market, they purchased the popular local brand, Thums Up. Their business now makes up over 40 percent of the cola business in India. 
• 1995 - Acquisition of Barq’s which produces a line of root beers and cream sodas. 
• 1999 - Coca-Cola purchased 50 percent of Inca Kola for $200 million and took control of its marketing and bottling operations. 
• 2001 - Odwalla, a brand of fruit juices, smoothies, and bars was acquired. This company was discontinued in 2020.
• 2007 - Coca-Cola acquired Fuze Beverage, a producer of teas and fruit drinks that were infused with vitamins and minerals. 
• 2008 - The company purchased 40 percent of Honest Tea, a popular iced tea producer. The remaining shares were purchased in 2011 giving Coca-Cola full ownership. 
• 2013 - Coca-Cola purchased the coconut water company ZICO. 
• 2014 - 16.7 percent of the energy drink manufacturer, Monster Beverage, was sold to Coca-Cola in exchange for a long-term strategic partnership. 
• 2016 - Coca-Cola purchased a portion of Chi Limited, a major distributor of snacks, food, and beverage products in Nigeria. The remaining shares were acquired in 2019.
• 2017 - Topo Chico, a Mexican sparkling water brand was acquired by Coca-Cola. 
• 2018 - Coca-Cola purchased Costa Coffee making it the owner of the second-largest coffeehouse chain in the world after Starbucks Coffee. 
• 2018 - Organic & Raw Trading Co., the Australian producer of MOJO kombucha was acquired. 

Special partnerships

In addition to owning many brands, The Coca-Cola Company has created many successful strategic partnerships that have allowed Coca-Cola to grow exponentially. 

One of the most famous partnerships is with McDonald’s. When McDonald’s was just getting started in 1955, it needed a beverage distributor. The two companies struck a deal for Mcdonald's to exclusively sell only Coca-Cola products. McDonald’s eventually grew to become the largest restaurant chain (by revenue) and Coca-Cola products are served in nearly 40,000 of their locations around the world. Other notable restaurant chains that carry Coca-Cola products include Burger King, Chili’s, Chipotle, and Domino’s Pizza.

Coca-Cola has also partnered with numerous venues around the world to sell only Coca-Cola products in their stadiums, theatres, and concert halls. The Coca-Cola Company is a major sponsor of the Olympic Games. In 2017, the company signed a deal with Major League Baseball in which they agreed to drop their competitor Pepsi and only promote Coke products.

Most of Coca-Cola’s growth has come from strategic mergers and acquisitions of companies all over the world. They have been able to expand into new markets by buying companies that already dominate the specialty or space. The company has also developed strategic partnerships with other large companies to exclusively sell Coca-Cola products.

Controversy, regulatory issues, and criticism 

Despite the company’s overwhelming success, Coca-Cola has faced a lot of criticism throughout its history. There are many opinions related to the impacts that The Coca-Cola Company has on the environment and consumers alike. 

Health concerns

It’s no secret that Coca-Cola is a sugary drink. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), half of all Americans will drink at least one sugary beverage each day. This massive consumption of sugar is leading to an epidemic of conditions such as type 2 diabetes and obesity. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that adults consume no more than 6 tsp of sugar each day. A single 12oz can of Coca-Cola contains nearly twice this amount. 

With Coca-Cola being the leading company in the food and beverage industry, they have received a lot of negative attention directed towards their contribution to this serious problem. 

The company has responded by producing sugar-free or reduced-calorie beverages. They have also expanded their product lines to include healthy alternatives like coconut water. 

Environmental issues

Coca-Cola has been identified as the single producer of plastic waste in the world. Much of this plastic is not discarded properly and ends up in the oceans. This has contributed to the ecological disaster due to single-use plastics. This has captured the attention of environmental protection groups who claim that Coca-Cola isn’t doing enough to work toward a reasonable solution. A report from Greenpeace estimates that the company produces over 100 billion plastic bottles every year with no obvious goal to reduce single-use plastic waste. 

Coca-Cola has made some efforts to reduce its environmental impact. First, they redesigned their bottles to use less plastic (a process called “lightweighting”). While this does reduce the amount of plastic used in production, it does not reduce the number of bottles that end up in landfills or the ocean. They have also introduced their “PlantBottle” which is made from plant-based materials.

While these are steps in the right direction, most environmental groups question whether these efforts are enough. Coca-Cola appears to be spending large amounts of money lobbying politicians around the world to block legislation that would encourage more environmentally friendly manufacturing. They have also been accused of spending a considerable amount of money on “green marketing” without efforts to back up their claims.

Over the years, The Coca-Cola Company has been the center of controversy due to environmental impact and health concerns due to their products. Coca-Cola has responded by providing low-calorie, sugar-free, and healthy alternatives. They have also worked to reduce their plastic use and seek alternatives as they are the single largest contributor to single-use plastic waste.

Coca-Cola's social media strategy

The Coca-Cola Company is a social media powerhouse with millions of followers across the globe. The company is very intentional with its use of social media platforms and leverages them to drive brand awareness and interaction with customers. There are several key components that have made Coca-Cola’s social media strategy so successful. 

Positivity  

In 2018, Coca-Cola made a commitment to become the ‘most optimistic brand on social media'. They launched their #RefreshtheFeed campaign in which they completely deleted all of their social media content and started fresh. Consumers embraced this new positive approach and encouraged even more followers who wanted to enjoy the feel-good vibes of their social media posts. 

Leverage consumers to create content

While Coca-Cola’s marketing team creates a lot of content for their online platforms, they have successfully leveraged their millions of followers to create content on behalf of the brand. They have used creative hashtag-based campaigns to encourage consumers to post Coca-Cola-themed posts for their friends and family to see. One of the most successful was the #shareacoke campaign which reversed a 10-year stagnant sales record. 

Attachment to social issues

The company has a stringent social media policy to ensure that content aligns with the company’s values. In July 2020, Coca-Cola decided to join many other major brands in temporarily halting social media posts and advertisements for a minimum of 30 days. This decision came as a result of concerns about growing hate speech and misinformation on social networks. They’ve regularly supported important civil rights and other social issues over the past few decades which helps consumer groups connect with the brand. 

Coca-Cola website

The Coca-Cola Company’s main company website contains various resources for consumers, vendors, and investors. The information included in the website discusses the company’s history, its brands around the world, career opportunities, media center, and investor relations. 

According to SimilarWeb, the site is ranked 10th in the Food & Beverage category and receives about 1.8 million visitors each month. 

The Coca-Cola Company’s YouTube channel is a platform that is used to post promotional videos and other advertisements from all over the world. The channel was started in 2006, has 3.6 million subscribers, and has nearly 3.5 billion views. About 8 percent of their website traffic comes from YouTube.

Coca-Cola’s LinkedIn account has over 6 million followers. The company uses this platform to post company updates for the business community. It is also used to promote job openings and attract top talent from the LinkedIn community. 

Twitter is one of Coca-Cola’s most powerful social media accounts. Their Twitter account ( @CocaCola ) was started in 2009 and has posted nearly 300,000 tweets to its 3.3 million followers. Most of the tweets are short inspirational or funny messages to enhance daily brand awareness or encourage engagement. Coca-Cola’s Twitter account generates 62 percent of the traffic to their website. 

Coca-Cola’s Instagram account has 2.8 million followers. The account is mostly used to post promotional stories on the platform. 

Coca-Cola’s Pinterest account is used to post drink and food recipes and promote Coca-Cola products like customizable Coke bottles. Their account has about 30,000 followers and receives over 10 million views each month. 

With over 105 million followers, Coca-Cola’s Facebook account is massive. It’s the 5th most-followed account on the social media platform, only behind Facebook itself, Samsung, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Real Madrid CF. The site is used to post videos and promotional content in many different languages for their followers. 

So, Why is Coca-Cola so Successful?

Few companies can boast the tremendous success and growth that The Coca-Cola Company has enjoyed for over 135 years. This accomplishment can be attributed to industry-leading advertising, innovation of their products, and delivering a positive brand message. Let's take a look at what makes Coca-Cola so successful!

Recap: growth by the numbers

Key takeaways.

• Coca-Cola has leveraged a network of independent bottlers around the globe to aid in rapid expansion. These distributors have territorial rights which help prevent competition and price wars.
• The Coca-Cola Company has made changes to its main product over the years but learned a very valuable lesson with the introduction of New Coke in 1985. The launch was a disaster and faced a fierce backlash from consumers who demanded the return of the original product.
• Coca-Cola’s long-term strategic plan includes focusing on the developing world where consumer beverages have a lot of growth potential, optimizing the number of master brands, revamping their operational network, and leveraging technology and data.
• Coca-Cola’s advertising focuses on creating human connections and making people feel good. They have led the advertising world in cutting-edge approaches to marketing that have never been seen before.
• Coca-Cola has inserted its brand and products in films and television to become an easily identifiable American icon.
• Acquisition of other companies has been a major part of Coca-Cola’s expansion efforts giving them the ability to quickly reach into new markets or acquire existing popular products.
• The Coca-Cola company has been the target of criticism due to its potential negative impact on consumer health and the environment. 

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Coca-Cola Company

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Q&A: Author of 'Bottled: How Coca-Cola Became African' on Coke's surprising history

A store in Monrovia, Liberia, advertises Coca-Cola. The photo is from circa 1947. Alberts/Alberts/Three Lions via Getty Images hide caption

A store in Monrovia, Liberia, advertises Coca-Cola. The photo is from circa 1947.

Author-historian Sara Byala had an epiphany about Coca-Cola's role in African life and culture in 2003. She and a group of fellow graduate students had found their way across Mali's Saharan Desert via an arduous journey that involved a broken-down jeep followed by bouts of hiking and hitchhiking.

When the exhausted group reached a Niger River ferry stop the next day, the pause that refreshes took on new meaning. "Boarding, grimy and parched, we are offered — as in a dream — ice-cold Coca-Cola," she writes in her book, Bottled: How Coca-Cola Became African.

At the time, she wondered, "How is this here ... Where was this bottled, how was it transported and, most importantly, how was this cooled?"

Good questions, all — which she pursued and now answers in her new book. After writing it, Byala, associate director of the University of Pennsylvania's Global Documentary Institute and a senior lecturer in critical writing there, has come to conclude "that an ice-cold Coke far up the Niger River was as much about Mali as it was emblematic of an American corporation's reach."

If this sounds a bit like an explanation for how the blog you are reading came to be called "Goats and Soda," you are not far off.

"The blog is aptly named," Byala affirmed in a telephone conversation about how Coca-Cola and Africa became so intertwined — and the pluses and minuses of their shared history.

Egyptian workers push Coca-Cola refrigerators through a Cairo street in 2000. Mohammed Al-Sehti/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Egyptian workers push Coca-Cola refrigerators through a Cairo street in 2000.

Byala also explained how the American multinational company made its soda seem "local" in even the most out-of-the-way areas in Africa; how the company dealt with divestment and apartheid; and how the company is addressing health and environmental challenges.

Here are excerpts from the interview, which has been edited and condensed for clarity and space:

How big is Coca-Cola's footprint in Africa?

It's huge. The company employs about 70,000 people in Africa. [Each of] these jobs in turn supports between four and ten additional people in secondary jobs, in industries providing bottles, crowns [caps], carbonic gas [for the water], advertising. This multiplier effect makes it responsible for up to 750,000 jobs.

It's also ubiquitous. You see signs advertising Coca-Cola everywhere. Being able to sell Coke came to signify modernity — because to serve it cold you need electricity and refrigeration. People also came to trust Coke as safe for consumption, which cannot always be assumed about water in remote places.

What were Coke's beginnings in Africa?

Kola nuts, native to Africa, are sorted in the Ivory Coast. The nuts were used in the original recipe for Coca-Cola and gave the soda half of its name. The company does not give out its current formula but numerous articles on Coke assert that extract of kola nuts is no longer used. Sia Kambou/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Kola nuts, native to Africa, are sorted in the Ivory Coast. The nuts were used in the original recipe for Coca-Cola and gave the soda half of its name. The company does not give out its current formula but numerous articles on Coke assert that extract of kola nuts is no longer used.

The story begins with the kola nut. It had been cultivated [in its native Africa] and used as everything from a stimulant to [medical] restorative in all parts of the continent for centuries [usually it was chewed]. By the 1880s, kola samples had reached Europe and America. Atlanta-based patent medicine maker John Pemberton formulated a non-alcoholic brew (a marketing plus for the temperance-minded) that combined carbonated water with kola, sugar, caramel and coca leaves.

According to official Coca-Cola history, the beverage itself didn't appear on the continent until 1928, but I found records of it being sold as early as 1909 at a soda fountain in Cape Town.

And as you note in the book, kola nut extract is no longer likely part of the recipe: "Somewhere along the way, the amount of kola nut that could be found in Coca-Cola became close to, if not, negligible."

How did Coke become so popular in Africa?

By becoming local. It sounds counterintuitive. But what became apparent to me in researching the book was that though it is an American product, throughout Africa it's considered local.

So in addition to Coke's appeal as a sign of modernity, it was also seen as local? In what way?

Coke exports a concentrate to two factories in Africa where it is then mixed with carbonated water and sugar and other ingredients, all provided locally. Any local bottler will be getting shipments of that concentrate and doing everything locally. There are bottling plants in the vast majority if not all of African countries — and usually several within a given country.

From there, the many distributors and distribution centers — including small, independently run depots, most of which are owned and run by women — transport Coca-Cola via large truck or bicycle or boat or small ships or mule, including to the most remote points in the continent.

Is it unusual to have women entrepreneurs in Africa?

Bottles of Coca-Cola are sold at a market in Northern Cameroon. Pierre Guillaud/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Bottles of Coca-Cola are sold at a market in Northern Cameroon.

Coke worked with NGOs, governments, and other actors to provide access to mentorship, credit and employment to women. Because female entrepreneurship is so entrenched in sub-Saharan Africa, women rapidly took advantage of these new opportunities. The work in north Africa was similar but faced a different set of cultural values.

How else did Coke become both visible and local?

Coke also found numerous ways to make the brand visible everywhere, helping to sponsor parades, beauty pageants, tournaments, sports, music concerts, public events, major and minor, throughout the continent.

A group of Rwandans waits for transportation near a Coca Cola placard. The photo is from 1994. Hector Mata/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

A group of Rwandans waits for transportation near a Coca Cola placard. The photo is from 1994.

You also see fascinating ways in which Coke waste materials get upcycled, recycled, and repurposed. I was in Uganda last summer and saw petrol being sold to drivers in Coke bottles.

Coca-Cola bottles get repurposed all over Africa in all sorts of ways. In this case, they were used to sell small amounts of petrol, presumably because that quantity is all people either needed or could afford.

You can buy numerous arts and crafts items among other objects on sale, all made from Coca-Cola bottles both plastic and glass, cans, labels, and so on.

Like the Coca-Cola picture frame with the photo of your family?

I've been collecting these kinds of items for years! Coca-Cola cans, bottle tops, and bottles are upcycled in all sorts of ways to make everything from toys and purses to trivets and frames. This means that the containers are used as mediums for artisans who produce items that are worth more than the original material. Hence, my picture frame, made out of flattened Coke bottles, and housing a family picture from my cousin`s wedding in 2013 Durban.

How did Coke respond — or not – to apartheid?

Many Coke plants resisted so-called "petty apartheid" rules such as segregating bathrooms and canteens. Still, in the 1970s the company remained reluctant to sign the "Sullivan Principles" that called for disinvestment in apartheid South Africa. That was one reason why, in 1981, American civil rights activists threatened to boycott Coke. In response, Coke promised to hire and promote Black employees in the U.S. and review how to deal with apartheid in South Africa. Coke figured out a way to simultaneously keep selling the product there while also technically divesting themselves from the country, thus depriving the apartheid state of tax revenue.

In addition, Coke funded a $10 million independent charity [based in South Africa] called the Equal Opportunity Fund to support education, housing and business development. And it allied itself with Nelson Mandela's ANC party to help end apartheid.

The EOF was based in South Africa and funded work solely in South Africa. In the book, I write about Coca-Cola's work with the ANC, Nelson Mandela's party. This work never took the form of a formal alliance. Nor was the company ever outwardly committed to working with the ANC or helping end apartheid. Still, the company played an important and never before written about role in doing just that, through funding, disinvestment and creating on-ramps to economic participation for previously disadvantaged South Africans that helped ease the transition to the post-apartheid order.

Are there costs to Coke's popularity in Africa?

First, there are threats to the human body: sugar is not good for you, and liquid sugar is worse for you.

Second: waste from packaging, leaving landfills stuffed with plastic and glass and cans.

Third: water.

Do you mean using supplies of potable water that would/should go to the general public?

Yes and no.

Coca-Cola cannot be produced without access to clean water. The environmental challenges around water are vast and include procuring enough water, making sure available water is clean and being sure to put back into the environment as much water as it uses so as not to use more than its fair share.

How does Coke address these issues?

These are threats to Coke's business as well as to humanity.

Many people in Africa lack sufficient water. In 2010 the company launched the Replenish Africa Initiative (RAIN) a huge umbrella project to address the water crisis throughout the continent.

A shopkeeper win Zanzibar, photographed in 2005. Marco Longari/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

A shopkeeper win Zanzibar, photographed in 2005.

In just over a decade, about six million Africans had improved water access while over one million Africans had access to better sanitation and nearly half a million hectares of land had improved water access. While critics argue that RAIN's success is but a drop in the bucket in terms of human need, it remains the case that it has done more than any other benefit scheme.

And how about sugar, and its relation to obesity and related health problems?

Coca-Cola's approach to sugar is multifold: one, reduce package size; two, expand into non-sugar and low-sugar drinks, including bottled water and juice; and, three, lower the amounts of added sugar in established brands. There are many [other] products on the market that contain high levels of added liquid sugar, like drinkable yogurts and Frappuccino's. Coca-Cola's aim is, in its breadth of products and variety of sizes, to provide options for all consumers.

And what about landfills?

Just as Coca-Cola seeded recycling in America, so too the company is at work to create mechanisms for recycling in Africa, thus reducing landfill. In the book, I detail the work of PETCO, a Coca-Cola driven consortium of PET or plastic producers in South Arica, that has successfully driven that country's recycling rate.

The company also partners with governments and NGOS to provide their technical or logistical expertise. One example is Project Last Mile , whose website asks, "If you can find a Coca-Cola product almost anywhere in Africa, why not life-saving medicines?" The group partners with other organizations (including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a funder of this blog) to get medical resources to those who lack access to necessary medicines. Coca-Cola helps apply its logistical knowledge base to help with issues of storage, distribution, marketing and delivery.

So on balance, how would you describe the benefit/harm ratio of Coke in Africa?

My book does not offer a clearcut verdict on the benefit/harm ratio of Coke in Africa. Rather, my book is a work of explanation that sets out to show how Coca-Cola became ubiquitous across Africa and to describe what this ever-presence means. In laying out this complex story, I show how the company uses resources, brands the continent and leads the rise of noncommunicable diseases. But, I also show how with the spread of Coca-Cola came the spread of electricity, human capital, employment and water. I leave it to the reader to wrestle with the verdict.

Diane Cole writes for many publications, including The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. She is the author of the memoir After Great Pain: A New Life Emerges. Her website is DianeJoyceCole.com .

• Bottled: How Coca-Cola Became African

Coca Cola Company Report

• Published: July 2015

• DESCRIPTION

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• COMPANIES MENTIONED

This report contains application of SWOT, PESTEL, Porter’s Five Forces and Value-Chain analytical frameworks towards the case study of Coca Cola Company. The report also comprises analysis of Coca Cola’s marketing strategy and company’s approach towards Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).

The world’s largest beverage company, The Coca Cola Company is owner or licenser of more than 500 non-alcoholic beverage brands. The company sells a wide range of beverages that include waters, enhanced waters, juices and juice drinks, ready-to-drink teas and coffees, and energy and sports drinks . Products belonging to Coca-Cola Company are sold in more than 200 countries around the globe since its incorporation in 1886.

Incorporated in 1919, The Coca Cola Company offers well-known brands such as Coca-Cola, Fanta, Sprite, Minute Maid, Powerade, Del Valle, Schweppers, Aquariues and others. In addition to its core business of manufacturing and selling non-alcoholic drinks, Coca Cola Company is also engaged in some other affiliated businesses such as distribution of Monster Energy beverage drinks, products of DPSG brands and joint venture with Nestle S.A. to produce and distribute Nestea products in Europe, Canada and Australia.

Coca Cola Company’s 2020 Vision is based on its mission that consists of three parts: a) to refresh the world, b) to inspire moments of optimism and happiness and c) to create value and make difference. Recently the company initiated a new marketing campaign ‘One Brand’ that aims to unite four different brands – Coca Cola, Diet Coke, Coca Cola Zero and Coca Cola Life under the umbrella of Coca Cola.

1. Introduction 2. SWOT Analysis 2.1 Strengths 2.2 Weaknesses 2.3 Opportunities 2.4 Threats 3. PESTEL Analysis 3.1 Political Factors 3.2 Economic Factors 3.3 Social Factors 3.4 Technological Factors 3.5 Environmental Factors 3.6 Legal Factors 4. Marketing Strategy 4.1 Advertising 4.2 Sales Promotion 4.3 Events & Experiences 4.4 Public Relations 4.5 Direct Marketing 4.6 Personal Selling 5. Porter’s Five Forces Analysis 6. Value-Chain Analysis 6.1 Primary Activities 6.2 Support Activities 7. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) 7.1 CSR Programs and Initiatives 7.2 Apple CSR Criticism

List of Figures Figure 1 Carbonated soft drinks market share Figure 2 Beverage consumption in the US Figure 3 One Brand” that unities four different brands Figure 4 Porter’s Five Forces Figure 5 Coca Cola spending on supplier diversity program (figures in millions) Figure 6 Value Chain Analysis Figure 7 Distribution of Coca Cola CSR expenses

List of Tables Table 1 Coca Cola SWOT Analysis Table 2 Coca Cola vs. PepsiCo main indicators Table 3 Major bottling partners and areas they serve Table 4 Coca Cola CSR performance

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Kraft Foods Group, Inc.

Mondele-z International, Inc.

Monster Energy

Nestle S.A.

Nutrinova Nutrition Specialties & Food Ingredients GmbH

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Suntory Beverage & Food Limited

Unilever Group

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Figure 1: Organizational Chart of Coca-Cola

Source: Self generated from Girard (5)

Coca-Cola’s products are consumer products, and are rather responsive to consumer’s disposable income; therefore, the company’s management reports two possibilities that serve to figure out its arrangement related to this factor – first, consumers think soft drinks as inexpensive pleasure and so even in temporary environment of steady or slightly dwindling disposable income, consumers are unlikely to relinquish soft drinks.

Second, Coca-Cola scrutinizes disposable income in over 200 countries including Saudi Arabia where it sells soft drinks; this information suggests that disposable income is gradually rising around the world and that individual consumers are eventual buyers of soft drinks; additionally, Coca-Cola interprets this to mean more purchases of consumer products, particularly in countries where consumer product purchasing has been negligible.

Nevertheless, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo’s real ‘buyers’ have been neighbouring bottlers who are either franchised or owned, particularly in the case of Coca-Cola; it is arguable that whilst Coca-Cola and its competitors release their franchises, those bottlers in turn develop the ‘channel’ in the course of which these comprehensive beverage brands attain the local customers even in the rural areas.

Environment Analysis of Coca-Cola in Saudi Arabia

In order to convey an assessment of Coca-Cola’s operations in the Saudi Arabian business environment, it is imperative to consider a number of factors such as the country’s demographics, economic, political, socio-cultural, technological factors:

Figure 2: External Environment of Coca-Cola Operation

Source: Self-generated

Demographic Factors

It is crucial for Coca-Cola Company to examine the demographic features of the country to ensure that it is undertaking effective tactical steps. In 2010, Saudi Arabia had a total population of 25,731,776; the average age of the total population was 24.9 years (with an average of 26 years in men, and 23.4 years in women) and a populace growth rate of 1.548 percent annually.

Recently, the birth rate of the country is 19.43 births per 1000 people and death rate is 3.34 deaths per 1000 people; moreover, the net migration rate of Saudi Arabia is -0.61 migrants per 1000 people. The urban inhabitants represent 82 percent of the total population with a rate urbanisation of 2.5 percent; the life expectancy of the total population is 73.87 years and total fertility rate is 2.35children per woman.

According to Indexmundi (1), the government expends about 5.7percent of the total gross domestic product for education purposes of Saudi Arabia and it is arguable that the literacy rate of the total population is 78.8 percent. The following table shows the age configuration of the total Saudi Arabian population:

Table 2: Age Configuration of the Saudi Arabian Population

Source: Self-generated from Indexmundi (1)

Whilst carrying out the operations in Saudi Arabia, another vital issue is for Coca-Cola to make sure that it has the appropriate preparations and competencies to serve people from every ethnic background. The table below illustrates the languages, literacy rates, ethnic, and the religious groups present in the country:

Table 3: Religious and Ethnic Groups

Economic Factors

Since the impact of the global financial crisis was not excessive in the KSA, Coca Cola’s operation over there had no severe hindrances by this economic determinant. However, the company suffered significantly by the recession from its operations in the rest part of the world.

The 2010 fiscal year substantiated to be rather complicated for the company because of the continuance of the recessionary affect that the company faced in 2008 to 2009 period creating difficult general retail environments for all of its trading entities. As per Yahoo Finance (1), during this time, the share prices of the company faced a sudden slump as shown in the figure below:

Figure 3: Basic Chart of Coca-Cola

Source: Yahoo Finance (1)

In spite of these tough situations, Coca-Cola engendered a quite remarkable development in the income and started to revive back its stock prices.

Political/legal Factors

The political matters can play a significant role in the entire process of Coca-Cola’s KSA operation, consequently affecting its producing, allocating, and retailing activities to the final consumers; the changes in political environment could affect this industry accordingly through both direct and indirect link.

Governmental instabilities, strikes, political violence, state of emergency, etc can for example, severely affect the business environment of the soft drinks industry in the country. On the other hand, the company always need to comply with all the lawful barriers including complying with the Islamic laws, environmental and labour legislations, and many other rules and regulations as well.

Socio-cultural Factors

The Saudi Arabian population is a quite conservative and sensitive in terms of adoptions of religious values. Being a multinational-Company, it has been in many instances quite difficult for Coca-Cola to adapt all the socio-cultural issues of the country and behave in accordance to the societal and communal attitudes towards marketing activities and advertisements of the company.

Technological Factors

The company believes that in this rapidly changing competitive world it is essential for its Saudi Arabian division to adapt the latest technological infrastructure to gain competitive advantage. Therefore, its IT department constantly works for ensuring the greatest technological assistance in this market. Moreover, it is imperative to note that the company has hi-tech instruments that help it in rapid production in KSA.

Core Competencies of Coca-Cola

Apart from the fact that the company possess a well-built organisational culture, many other factors exists that enhances the company’s position not only in Saudi Arabia, but also in the global context. These factors include the core competencies of Coca-Cola Company that provides it with competitive advantages over the rival businesses. Some such core competencies have outlined below.

• Marketing: Coca-Cola has considered as one of the instigators of contemporary marketing model; throughout its long history of marketing activities, it has pioneered many innovative advertising techniques and styles to capture market and it was the first company to offer a gimmick with its product. In 1900, this company started presenting its signature drink as a delicious and refreshing formula and this slogan has repeated for over the century of advertising Coke in the globe; in fact, through its powerful marketing campaigns, it has created an image that has reflected in what customers think of when they buy Coke;
• mySAP: Coca-Cola turned to the Strategic Enterprise Management (SAP SEM) competencies of mySAPTM Financials and mySAPTM Business-Intelligence (mySAP BI) to manage the task of running its regular operations by using the mySAPcomTM platform internationally; SAP SEM solutions has integrated strongly with Coke’s transaction system to consolidate financials, power financial-planning, and provide comprehensive view of corporate financial performance across the organizational-structure. This strategic approach of the Coca-Cola Company has played a significant role in enhancing its position in Saudi Arabia and in the global context.
• Innovation: Coca-Cola has been able to survive and grow in an ever-changing market because of its capacity to methodically innovate and distribute new products; in 1990s, it showed earnings growth of 15 to 20 percent per year, and it was apparent that the market was changing – to cope up with these changes, Coca-Cola transformed into a total beverage company.
• Size: the large organizational structure of the company allows it to employ huge distributors in KSA who have the capacity to deal with stadium, universities, and school systems to include them in Coca-Cola’s customer base; these distributors possess capability to carry out massive-purchases that significantly lowers cost; moreover, Coca-Cola’s has come up with an effective customer management-scheme to remain competitive.
• Distribution channels: by means of a powerful distribution network throughout KSA and the global village, there are rather a very few places left in the world where the products of this company has not reached yet. To simplify, even though Coca-Cola is an industry giant with a global presence, the fact that the availability of its products remain unswerving even in the remote places of the world has ensured by the widespread supply chain of the company.

Strategic Analysis of Coca-Cola Company

Kotler and Armstrong (79) argued that strategic options are coordinated and interrelated set of proceedings that has designed for utilizing the core capacities and competencies for achieving the competitive advantage. Therefore, according to the standard model, Coca-Cola generates numerous strategic options in Saudi Arabia by some systematic phases from business-level to co-operative strategy, which has shown in the following figure.

Figure 4: Primary phases of formulating strategy

Source: Self-generated from Kotler and Armstrong (79)

• Business-level strategy: Coca-Cola Company could generate this type of strategy for KSA by using Porter’s generic strategy as below-

Figure 5: Porter’s generic strategy for Coca-Cola Company

If it follows the cost leadership strategy, Coca-Cola will be able to provide its beverages at the lowest costs in relation to other competitors’ like PepsiCo or Mecca Cola; on the other hand, if it follows the differentiation strategy, it can deliver unique attributes and features to the target customers. Here, Coca-Cola can offer the finest colas, juices, carbonated, and non-carbonated drinks or other items through unique tastes, flavors, and nature that would be much better than some other competitors like PepsiCo does. The formulation of differentiation strategy has shown as the following-

Figure 6: Porter’s generic strategy for Coca-Cola Company

Self-generated from Kotler and Armstrong (79)

• Competitive dynamics: at this stage, Coca-Cola can attempt to create competitive dynamics for its KSA business that comes from a series of competitive actions and responses among the competitors within the ready- to- drink beverage industry which may be affected by a number of reasons, like- similarity of resources, relative size of the company, innovation, quality and so on.
• Corporate- level strategy: this strategy is important to decide the structure of the company; this concept focuses on diversification that involves the Coca-Cola retail segment offerings and the diversified sales mix of its beverage items.
• Issues of production
• Demand condition
• Connected and supporting industries
• Its strategy, structure, and rivalry
• By composition of strategic alliances in Saudi Arabia, Coca-Cola can combine the resources, capabilities, and core competencies with other firms for gaining the mutual interest in designing, distributing, and producing goods.
• Through joint- ventures, it can enjoy benefits by the combination of assets as it is doing now. Nevertheless, Coca-Cola should consider following things before incorporating the strategies, which includes the following-
• Internal service quality: In Saudi Arabia, Coca-Cola’s internal quality has maintained by the path of higher employee selection and training process, neat and clean workplace, quality work environment, higher salary and strong support for those who are dealing with the customer’s and franchisee.
• Satisfied and Productive Service Employees: Employees of Coca-Cola are more satisfied, dependable, and hard working because they draw higher remuneration then other companies.
• Greater service value: Coca-Cola affords more effective and well-organized customer value creation and service delivery for the Saudi Arabian market; as a result, Coca-Cola service value is greater than many of its competitors.
• Customer Satisfaction and Unique Customers: Coca-Cola always struggles to convince all of their customers in KSA; therefore, each an every customer is significant and loyal to them. They believe that if they can satisfy them they in future they will purchase their foods and refer other customers.

Present Perspective of CCBCSA

Olayan Group that formed CCBCSA joint venturing with Coca-Cola is a major giant of Saudi privates sector and engaged its highest effort to establish this US brand in Saudi Arabia through localization strategy. Khaled Olayan, the chairperson of the Olayan Group, argued that in working as an agent of Coca-Cola, this group has constructed and maintained a wonderful network of partnerships and relationships some of which are working together for more than decades; he further added that it constantly strives to strengthen existing relationships in an even better position to assure operational proficiency. The Olayan Group (3) suggested that it maintains well-trained employees, advanced technological support, impressive administrative control, as well as strong delivery systems in order to ensure better performance of Coca-Cola in Saudi Arabian market. The group believes in the fact that Coca-Cola has an outstanding brand reputation and prominent image that assists it to increase its profit gradually; in addition, it appreciates that apart from regular customers, new customers are also important to develop company’s market segments and that to retain and attract customers it has popularity for its superior customer service. In addressing the factors that the Saudis appreciate most about Coca-Cola, the group stated that people are attracted about its widely diversified product ranges starting from juices to carbonated drinks as well as the strong distribution channel that makes it possible to deliver the products even in very rural areas.

However, some arguments suggest that it spend comparatively a large part of the budget for advertisement and promotional actions that increases its operating expenses. On the other hand, it lacks sufficient strategies to address the fact that Saudi Arabia is a conformist nation in terms of religion, culture, and values and therefore, its advertising campaigns should correspond with this fact and not create any situation that is disheartening for the Saudi communities. It is arguable that in many cases Coca-Cola’s marketing activities created immense controversies in the country.

Alternative Solution as To How This Problem Can Be Alleviated

Considering the dilemmas that the Coca-Cola has been evidencing with the challenging issues in Saudi Arabia and rest of the globe, it is proper time to rethink the raised issue how to respond to them by standardizing marketing efforts across the host countries.

Sands (1) responded to this question with the single-minded views that there are states of affairs in which standardized marketing looms would deliver problem-solving approach with greater profit generation while the companies would drive with purely local approach. The localized multinational marketing strategy of Coca-Cola could successfully demonstrate that its marketing strategy is uniform through out the national boundaries but moderately diversified for the problematic regions of the excising markets

The Coca-Cola Company possible recognize the challenges and threat and would be able to identify the appropriate solution which would be applicable in the concerned market while it may simply distinguish the opportunities towards greater profitability within the standardized multinational strategy just like completely local approaches.

Coca-Cola has to pursue that for any case, while any opportunity or challenge would appear then the standardized multinational marketing strategy with completely local approach would be the right solution. It is also notable that in the concerned market, any alternative approach to overcome existing dilemmas would be localized, without local approach; none of the strategy would be successful and may connect with risk. With is logical ground the suggestive alternatives for Coca-Cola are as follows-

Alternative-1: Integrating National Identity:

In Saudi Arabia Coca-Cola face the dilemmas of boycotting American goods, to avoid anti-American moves Coca-Cola has the opportunity to integrating National identity that positively influence the buying behavior of Saudi people. In Saudi market Coca-Cola has been manufacturing under the banner of CCBCSA, which has registered in KSA, thus there is no problem to integrate national identity.

For instance, Coca-Cola can write in its Bottles “Made in Saudi Arabia – by the Arabs” and such statement could be used in the advertising that will ultimately motivate public perception in this region.

Alternative – 2: Removing linguistics dilemmas:

It has demonstrated in the case-2 of this research that the dilemmas were generated form linguistic problems from which the ‘Coca-Cola boycotting’ moves ere started. To overcome such further misunderstanding, Coca-Cola can translate its name into Arabic while there evidence that before entering China market, Coca-Cola has conducted billion dollar research to translate the brand name into Chinese. Moreover, Coca-Cola would be attentive to integrate Arabic in its promotional and advertising copies would be in local language.

Alternative – 3: Localizing Political Stands:

Coca-Cola is a multinational corporation – doing business and generating profit is its ultimate goal, it has no political agenda to establish rather than business. History tells that the company has alleged as an intellectual collaborator with notorious political affiliation staring from Hitler’s Nazi affiliation to supporting Israel.

Rather than any affiliation with anarchist political stand, Coca-Cola needed to stand beside the local people. During the US aggression in Iraq, if Coca-Cola appeal to the government to stop war against humanity- what was lose to the company but he gaining could be supposed to be positive perception from the local communities and never be boycotted.

How Each Alternative Can Be Implemented

USCIB (2) reported that in the leadership award, ceremony-2008 the president and CEO of Coca-Cola Muhtar Kent explored his anxiousness to the anti-globalization and anti-American moves and he suspect that if America does not shift its position, America would be isolated from the globe with its recessional economy.

He urged the government, business communities, and the civil society to working together to recover US democratic image rather than notorious warier and such a view would contribute to implementing the Alternative-3.

Alternative 1 and 2 could be implemented by following tools-

• Attitude of the Host Country : Being an MNC Coca-Cola needed to remove all difficult of its operation in the host country – Saudi Arabia by exactly accepting the approximately and non-confrontational behavior of the Arabs;
• Local Custom and Religion: It is the strapping challenge for the Coca-Cola to become conscious the core values of the local custom of Islam in Saudi Arabia including other existing multi cultural customs as well as ethnic groups and minorities live and work in KSA;
• Special Emphasis on Religious Issues: As the Muslims are zero tolerant regarding their religion issues and respond sensitively with bad temper, Coca-Cola needed to extremely conscious to deal with such issues in Saudi Arabia;
• Recruitment challenges: Coca-Cola must lead its recruitment policy in Saudi Arabia with ‘best talents with best pay’ aspect and during the selection of proper talents; the recruiters may face barely credible challenges to guarantee the effectual service for bet fit with the organizational objectives where religious orientation also an influential aspect here,
• Assessing Social Status : Coca-Cola needed to conduct particular market survey concerning Saudi Arabia’s social structure along with life style with the aim to addressing its social values, religious sentiment, as well as interaction;
• Cross-cultural Training : It is essential for the Coca-Cola to introduce a new fortune in its operation and to do so it will conduct well-organized Cross-Cultural Training aimed to motivating the spirit of the both management and employees in Saudi Arabia.

The future implication of alternatives or any other strategy would be thrown into dark prospect while the corporate crime of the Coco-Cola Company would be analyzed and people would lose their all faith and dependency on this MNC. Alsop (8) mentioned that the Coca-Cola plant in Columbia oppress its workers more brutally than slavery, the workers started movement substance wage and duration of work.

The management did not come into any negotiation but haired the corrupt paramilitary and they faired 129 union leaders at a time. In India Coca-Cola used extreme level of pesticide into the Coca-Cola Bottle, which has identified by the Indian government and banned its production for several months while the company also involved with conflict with the local farmers.

The colorful propaganda and advertising including the literature of its corporate social responsibility does not really indicate the actual core values of the company but humanities would identify it as a corporate terrorist Thus the future implication of alternatives very significant to the company for its long run sustainability and Coca-Cola surely lead to address the alternative implications.

Implications for Future Use

A number of strategic approaches exist that the company can implicate as future maneuver in order to exercise flourishing operational attributes in all parts of its business sphere in Saudi Arabia. Some such future implications include the following illustrations:

Figure 8: Future Implications for Coca-Cola Company

Source: Self generated

• Augmentation of Diminishing-Size of Carbonated-Soft-Drinks Market – Along with rising awareness amongst health conscious population of KSA, it is evidential that the market for such drinks are lowering by a certain rate; Coca-Cola will be augmenting the market size of this drink by emphasizing and investing more on its R&D to come up with something that is safe for health.
• Coping Up with Enhanced Competition from PepsiCo and Mecca Cola – In order to attain competitive advantages over the competitors of the Saudi Arabian market, the company will come up with pioneering policies that would be in accordance to an appropriate response to rivalry to achieve and maintain industry leadership.
• Reconciliation of Conflicting Issues with Bottlers – The Coca-Cola Company has a number of conflicting and unresolved issues with the bottlers in Saudi Arabia that pose a major hindrance for the business by increasing its operational expenditures. The company with very soon sit together with such bottlers and try to reconcile those conflicts by means of appropriate negotiations.
• Improvement of Technical Infrastructure – To ensure efficiency in manufacturing techniques of Saudi Arabia, the company will be seeking assistance from its machinery suppliers to provide it with the most up-to-date technical equipments that would be fast enough to cut down production time.

Conclusion and Recommendation

Recommendations.

• It should try to be more focused in terms of compliance to the Islamic rules and regulatory barriers in Middle East countries and shape its behavioral conduct so that it is not incompatible with the religious sentiments of the local residents for which it could lose its market;
• Coca-Cola should be watchful about the expectations of the Saudi market since there is a chance of reducing customer base at an extensive and sharp rate for the recession;
• Being a multinational corporations, Coca-Cola must maintain cooperative trend rather than conflicting with the Saudi Arabian government and let the government to understand that this MNC and its subsidiary beverage companies are here to mutually benefit each other using KSA’s competitive advantage;
• It is essential for Coca-Cola in KSA to assess risks and unforeseen events connecting to external-environments and ensure mobilization of internal resources and capabilities to cope with the adverse effect of unique regulatory bindings until the progress of governmental attitude; therefore, it is necessary to have local decision-making power in Saudi Arabian office rather than waiting for headquarters’ approval;
• The long historic corporate scandal of Coca-Cola from Nazi affiliation to genocide of 470 workers in Colombia would urge just a question mark to the corporate social responsibility. Within the changing global political environment, the Coca-Cola Company needed to come from malicious corporate scandal and inhuman activity. In this regards to bring workers and employees trust the company needed to conduct schooling for its management regarding what is corporate social responsibility rather than documentation.
• History demonstrates that the company has accounted serious lode to your revenue due to its alignment towards Israeli rather than Arabs, either the company needed to stand beside majority of people rather than fewer or it needed to act naturally without any political affiliation. The company need to demonstrate more business diplomacy regarding Middle East peace process that would crease clean image of the company
• There is enough evidence that the company has lost some plants and assets in foreign counties due to the US governmental policy, while US legislation or government policy creates global conflicting situation that hamper the company’s interest, it is ought for the company to protest such governmental initiatives.
• The high-level use of pesticides into the soft drinks in India has generated the public perception that the Coca-Cola Company may not bother for public health issues but to making profit with harmful product depending on colorful advertising is ultimate objective of the company. To the instance the Coca-Cola Company may needed to beg unconditional apology to the Indian people and compensate for public health injury. On the other hand, to improve product quality the company needed to conduct more research with appreciates guidance by the academia and health specialist and it would dement huge investment on research.
• Market can adversely affect for few reasons; therefore, Coca-Cola should monitor the increased competition in KSA, customers perception about the price of new items, down slopping trend in housing, upward interest rates, limited disposable earnings, lack of confidence of customers, reduced demand for the different beverages, ineffectively hedged costs of goods, like- high labor expenses, construction costs, IT and logistics costs;
• It should impose more control on the existing supply chain of Saudi Arabia since it is running on different risks, such as- disruption of its beverages to the third- party logistics and service distortion through general transportation within its own servicing channels;
• Since the customer choices are changing in Saudi Arabia, it should introduce new products considering the market demand of the population by launching delicious drinks with distinct flavors and tastes;
• At this moment, the company has to compete against the brands such as Mecca Cola and PepsiCo as these companies are increasingly posing a great threat for Coca-Cola, which may create low switching costs for many customers.

Being a US-based brand that has established in 1886 with its global presence as the most popular ready-to-drink items’ seller, there hardly exist any provinces where people are not aware about the name of the Coca-Cola Company. Its products are available even in very remote places all around the Saudi Arabia and people of nearly all ages enjoy taking the pleasure of its refreshments.

In spite of all these praiseworthy features of the company, in some instances, this brand had to face public remonstrations for operational inappropriateness. This happened when the Arab world noticed a remorseful advertisement of the company engendering adverse situation for its operational activities.

Additionally, the business has also suffered from diverse complexities in the Middle East and the GCC nations long back during the gulf war. However, with the help of its strong financial position, strategic approaches, brand identity, and operational excellence it expects to uphold its reputation and implement all its future strategies.

Works Cited

Alsop, Natalie. Solidarity trip planned on Coca Cola’s crimes . 2002. Web.

Amidon, Bradford. Coca-Cola Annual Report Project . 2010. Web.

Bloomberg Businessweek. COCA-COLA CO/THE (KO: New York) . 2010. Web.

CCI. America, The World, and the New Challenges for Global Brands. 2004. Web.

ECOS. Sudan’s Oil Industry Facts and Analysis . 2008. Web.

Favaro Ken, Tim Romberger, and David Meer. “Five Rules for Retailing in a Recession.” Harvard Business Review . 2009. Web.

Girard, Richard. Coca-Cola company: Inside the Real Thing. 2005. Web.

Godiwalla, Yezdi. “The MNCS Global Ethics and Social Responsibility: A Strategic Diversity Management Imperative.” Journal of Diversity Management 1.2 (2006) Web.

Indexmundi. Saudi Arabia Demographics Profile 2010 . 2010. Web.

Kotler, Philip, and Armstrong Gary. Principles of Marketing. New Delhi: Prentice-Hall, 2006. Print

MEPC. US Challenges and Choices Saudi Arabia : A View from the Inside . 2004. Web.

Rarick, Charles. MECCA-COLA: A Protest Brand Makes Its Mark . 2008. Web.

Slide Share Inc. Crisis Management – Coca-Cola . 2010. Web.

The Coca-Cola Company. ITEM 1A. RISK FACTORS. 2009. Web.

The Olayan Group. Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Saudi Arabia . 2009. Web.

The Olayan Group. The Olayan Group in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East . 2004. Web.

USCIB. Accepting USCIB Award, Coca-Cola CEO Says Financial Crisis Jeopardizes Market Openness. 2008. Web.

Yahoo Finance. The Coca-Cola Company (KO). 2010. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2023, November 17). The Coca-Cola Company Research Paper. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-coca-cola-company/

"The Coca-Cola Company Research Paper." IvyPanda , 17 Nov. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/the-coca-cola-company/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'The Coca-Cola Company Research Paper'. 17 November.

IvyPanda . 2023. "The Coca-Cola Company Research Paper." November 17, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-coca-cola-company/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Coca-Cola Company Research Paper." November 17, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-coca-cola-company/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Coca-Cola Company Research Paper." November 17, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-coca-cola-company/.

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25 Coca-Cola Facts That Will Blow Your Mind

Posted: December 4, 2023 | Last updated: December 5, 2023

Coca-Cola is a drink enjoyed all over the globe. But did you know that the first Coke drink was red wine mixed with cocaine? And can you guess which country consumes on average 700 glasses per year? How about the version that tastes like space?

 Read on as we reveal Coca-Cola's secrets and some little-known facts.

The recipe isn't as secret as you might think

Coca-Cola makes a big deal about its recipe being a closely-guarded secret, going as far to say that it’s locked in a high-security vault in Atlanta (pictured). But in 2011, This American Life published what it believed to be the recipe, found in a 130-year-old notebook belonging to the inventor's best friend. The drink's 15 ingredients include cinnamon, neroli, cilantro and nutmeg oil. Coca-Cola insisted, if anything, this was an old recipe.

Early Coca-Cola didn’t contain much cocaine

The first Coke was red wine mixed with cocaine

Pemberton’s inspiration for the drink was a popular concoction called Vin Mariani, invented in France. It was a mixture of Bordeaux red wine and cocaine. This poster pictured here, from 1895, shows how it was marketed as a tonic that "fortifies and refreshes the body and brain". However, the US, especially the Deep South, was in the midst of an anti-alcohol movement. This gave Pemberton the idea of creating a drink for those who were abstinent.

Coca-Cola's name comes from the coca plant and the kola nut

The name Coca-Cola was born out of two components of the drink: cocaine which was derived from the coca plant and caffeine from the kola nut (alliteration was deemed to be more marketable). The logo hasn’t changed much since 1886, aside from a few tweaks. The Spencerian font first used is still evident in today’s design – the most noticeable addition was the wavy underline in 1969. This advert was published in Family Circle  magazine, in July 1953.

Coca-Cola's success is down to Asa Griggs Candler

Coca-Cola was once given out for free

Originally, Coca-Cola was only sold on tap

When the famous Coca-Cola bottle was first introduced, it was a landmark moment for the brand because it was originally only available from soda fountains. The place pictured is Jacobs' Pharmacy in Atlanta, where Coca-Cola was first sold. In 1899, three businessmen – Benjamin Thomas, Joseph Whitehead and John Lupton – bought the rights to bottle Coca-Cola for just $1.

Bottles were shaped like cocoa beans

In 1915, owner Candler set up a competition to create a bottle design that would distinguish Coca-Cola from its competitors. The winner was The Root Glass Company based in Terre Haute, Indiana. The bottle’s bulbous design was modeled on a cocoa bean – an ingredient incorrectly believed to be in Coca-Cola. This image shows how the bottle's design has changed from 1899 to 2007.

There's an optimum temperature to serve Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola might have invented multi-packs

Not only was Coca-Cola one of the first brands to devise a modern way of bottling its product, it was also an early adopter of multi-packs. Noticing a trend in shoppers buying more than one bottle at a time, in 1923 it introduced six-packs so consumers could carry multiple glass bottles home without them smashing. This advert was published in The Ladies Home Journal  in 1948.

Coca-Cola’s adverts from 90 years ago are still remembered

Coca-Cola was the first Olympic sponsor

Coca-Cola didn't completely invent Santa Claus

It’s a common myth Coca-Cola invented the image of Santa Claus as we know it today. Santa had been portrayed as a man dressed in red as early as 1870. However, Christmas adverts, such as this famous 1931 one by artist Haddon Sundblom, did improve his friendly and rosy-cheeked image.

Troops were sent Coca-Cola as a matter of great importance

Coca-Cola helped McDonald’s grow

Looking to become the biggest fast food chain in America, McDonald's chief Ray Kroc approached Coca-Cola in 1955 to create a partnership with the already well-established soda brand. One meeting and a handshake later and the pair haven’t looked back. In the early days McDonald’s used Coca-Cola’s offices to get up and running and McDonald’s is now Coca-Cola’s biggest customer. Pictured is a McDonald’s advert from 1975.

Coca-Cola was among the first brands to vary bottle size

Tab still exists and has a cult following

Tab (pictured) – with its shiny pink cans and adverts with a bikini-clad Elle Macpherson – came out in 1963 and was Coca-Cola’s first diet soda. While Diet Coke was brought out in 1982 and has gone on to be wildly successful, Tab still has a cult following, even though it's harder to find in stores. Apparently, Tab's taste is more enjoyable because it isn’t trying to mimic sugar.

Coca-Cola was the first soft drink to be consumed in space

The 1980s was a particularly exciting time for the brand, with Coca-Cola becoming the first soft drink to be consumed in space. In 1985, astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger drank the fizzy drink from special Coca-Cola space cans.

The world's Coca-Cola consumption reaches the moon and back

It would take you 11 years to try every product

Coca-Cola is a universal language

Coca-Cola claims that its name is the second most-understood term in the world, with more than 94% of people recognizing it. The top term is ‘okay’. Equally impressive, the red and white logo is reportedly recognized by more than 90% of the world’s population. Here it is on a billboard in Piccadilly Circus, London.

The average person drinks a Coca-Cola product every four days

It isn’t hard to see why Coca-Cola is so well-recognized. It's estimated that the average person around the world drinks a Coca-Cola product – whether that's Coke, Sprite or Fanta – every four days. We truly are a globe of soda addicts.

Coca-Cola is massive in Mexico

Coca-Cola’s largest fan base is in Mexico, where the average person drinks more than 700 servings per year – that’s nearly double what Americans drink. Its popularity began around the same time that Coca-Cola sponsored the Mexico City Olympics and World Cup in the early 1970s.

Coca-Cola once tried to replace coffee

Fancy Coca-Cola in the morning? In the 1980s, the brand tried to convince people they did. There was a media storm reporting figures that suggested people were swapping their morning coffees for a cool and fizzy caffeine fix. A Los Angeles Times article wrote that only agrarian societies enjoyed hot bitter drinks in the morning. However, the PR campaign failed because people couldn't be persuaded it was normal to wake up with soda.

There's a flavor that tastes like space

Having conquered the world, Coca-Cola next set its sights on other galaxies... sort of. The drinks company launched space-inspired Coca-Cola Starlight which it says, "combines great Coca-Cola taste with a dash of the unexpected, including a reddish hue. Its taste includes additional notes reminiscent of stargazing around a campfire, as well as a cooling sensation that evokes the feeling of a cold journey to space." The drink is available for a limited time only across North America and in select countries globally.

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Rigorous scientific research is essential to support our innovation efforts, but also ensures we offer products that are safe and meet global regulatory requirements, and allows us to address questions of public health and consumer interest..

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