For God, Country, and Coca-Cola

by Mark Pendergrast

  Coke shareholders were certainly happy, with the stock hitting $70 by the end of 2011, and it neared $80 the following year, splitting 2 for 1. In 2011, the Company earned $46.5 billion in revenues, spending nearly $3 billion of that on advertising. Operating income—cash profit—jumped to $10.2 billion. Kent revealed that Coke planned to sink more than $30 billion into the global business over the next five years.

  Coca-Cola had survived management disasters, morale problems, obesity concerns, human rights and environmental allegations, and more. In the midst of the worst economic decline since the Great Depression, Coke was thriving. “We intend to be around another 125 years and more,” Muhtar Kent said. Then, without a trace of irony, he asserted, “Coca-Cola is the greatest idea in the world that brings people together.”

  __________________

  * The Company introduced the internal Coca-Cola Design Machine, allowing bottlers around the world to access and customize print advertising, product photography, and packaging designs.

  * Without fanfare, the Spartanburg plant quietly closed in 2011 when it failed to turn a profit.

  * Coca-Cola bottlers around the world out-sourced low-paying, non-union jobs, including in the United States, Canada, the Philippines, China, Pakistan, Turkey, Colombia, and Mexico.

  * Collingsworth now works for the Conrad and Scherer law firm and International Rights Advocates. The lawsuit ended up in a New York federal district court.

  † See Chapters 17 and 18.

  * Gacek was laid off as the assistant director of the AFL-CIO’s International Department shortly before going to work as a consultant for Coca-Cola.

  * For the 2011 Christmas season, Coke distributed white Coke cans as part of the polar bear campaign, but it backfired over concerns that diabetics would mistake the cans for silver Diet Coke, and the Company hastily switched back to red cans.

  ~ 26 ~

  World Without End?

  You can run from it, but you can’t hide. Sooner or later, no matter how far you think you’ve ventured from the comforts and conveniences of the modern world, Coke will find you. Go to the foothills of the Himalayas, the hurricane pounded fishing islands off the coast of Nicaragua—go to the birthplace of civilization, if you like. Coca-Cola will be waiting for you.

  —New York Times editorial, 1991

  Traditionally called “Mecca” by devout employees, the North Avenue complex throbs with the worldwide Coca-Cola heartbeat. But the headquarters represent less than the tip of an ever-expanding iceberg. Nearly 150,000 people work directly for The Coca-Cola Company worldwide, but if you include those who work for Coke bottlers, that number jumps over 700,000. And that doesn’t count the drink’s twenty million retailers or the countless people who indirectly earn their livelihood from Coke by producing containers, trucks, water purifiers, pallets, computers, and the innumerable give-away promotional items. In 2012, for the thirteenth consecutive year, Coca-Cola claimed the number one spot on the Interbrand list of Best Global Brands.

  A personal anecdote illustrates the astonishing range of the soft drink. On May 21, 1991, I was interviewing Doug Ivester—who would succeed Goizueta as CEO a few years later—when we were interrupted by the news that Rajiv Gandhi had been assassinated hours after casting a ballot for himself in the Indian elections. We adjourned to a TV monitor and watched CNN in sorrowful silence. As we walked back, another pragmatic Coke executive said, “Well, that’s not too good for us.” And it occurred to me that any major world event would have an impact on Coca-Cola but that none would really impede the drink’s inexorable advance for long. Though Company men had been working closely with Gandhi, they soon enough struck a deal with the new government, and Coke, which had been forced to depart the country in 1977, re-entered India in 1993. It planned to sink another $3 billion into Coke’s Indian operations by 2020.

  Similarly, when the U.S. government established tentative diplomatic relations with the repressive regime in Myanmar (formerly Burma) late in 2012, Coca-Cola swiftly moved into the country to establish a market, leaving only two nations in the world—Cuba and North Korea—where Coke could be bought only on the black market.

  At the outset of this book, I asserted that Coca-Cola both affected and was affected by its times. Clearly, Company officials have reacted to events more than they have caused them. The Company didn’t plot the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, for instance, or the Depression or World War II—all moments in which Coca-Cola played an important part. Coke employees themselves have always insisted that the soft drink is just a “small pleasure,” one that people could certainly live without if absolutely necessary. “No one thinks the world will shift on its axis if Coca-Cola ceased to exist,” one executive told me. And yet. And yet. . . .

  There is no question that this fizzy, syrupy beverage means much more than Coca-Cola executives would have us believe. Certainly, it means more to them—it is a way of life, an obsession. The lobby at the North Avenue headquarters used to feature a large medallion with an image of a Coke bottle superscribed on top of the globe, with visions of other galaxies yet to conquer spinning wildly above it. These guys really are missionaries. In their homes, many of them maintained what I privately term “Coca-Cola shrines”—autographed photos of Robert Woodruff, gold replicas of the hobbleskirt bottle, and other personal memorabilia.

  Members of the international Coca-Cola Collectors Club are, if anything, more obsessed with their shrines. Germinating in a basement room or garage, their collections often literally pushed them out of their bedrooms and homes. “It’s kind of like a drug addiction,” one collector told me at a gathering that filled an entire Atlanta hotel. At the silent auction, where bids were placed on items and might be topped by someone else, the tension crackled. “It makes you sick, you’re so worried,” a Delaware woman moaned. Late into the night at these affairs, club members swapped and dickered, invading one another’s rooms.

  While these fanatical collectors may simply appear ludicrous, they are not the only ones to take Coca-Cola seriously. Social commentators, political activists, nutrition-ists, and anthropologists have all attacked Coca-Cola as if it were the distillation of Evil on earth. One angry observer called Coca-Cola’s history “the most incredible mobilization of human energy for trivial purposes since the construction of the pyramids.” It was, he said, “what went wrong with the American dream.” Much of the criticism has focused on advertising, which, according to one distressed clinical psychologist, conveys the notion that “life will never be boring, that you will be sexually popular beyond your wildest dreams, and that you’ll always be able to dance well if you drink colas.”

  Coke officials wouldn’t argue with that statement. In fact, it seems rather restrained. Beginning with John Pemberton, Frank Robinson, and Asa Candler, its manufacturers have touted the soft drink/patent medicine as a magical potion, though the message has been modified over time, abandoning overt medicinal claims in favor of uplift, joy, and other image-intense attributes. Nonetheless, it still bears a startling resemblance to the fabled Elixir of Life sought by the alchemists. Indeed, an eighteenth-century reference book defined an “elixir” as a “dark-coloured medicine composed of many ingredients and dissolved in a strong solvent”—a pretty good description of the acidic, caramel-colored soft drink.

  A NEW RELIGION

  Throughout this book, I have treated Coca-Cola as a tongue-in-cheek religion of sorts, but the notion actually isn’t so far-fetched. After all, the world’s first coin-operated vending machine, invented in the first century C.E., dispensed holy water. The metaphor continually crept into the interviews I conducted. “Coca-Cola is the holy grail; it’s magic,” one Coke man told me. “Wherever I go, when people find out I work for Coke, it’s like being a representative from the Vatican, like you’ve touched God. I’m always amazed. There’s such a reverence towards the product.” Shortly before his death, Roberto Goizueta even made it explicit: “Working for The Coca-Cola Company is a calling. It’s not a way t
o make a living. It’s a religion.”

  What else but a religious impulse could account for the idolatry with which corporate worshipers treat the outsized Coca-Cola bottles the Company produces, such as the thirty-foot tall bottle glowing at night atop the World of Coca-Cola museum? Or the forty-nine-foot bottle looming over Atlanta’s Turner Field, with its LED lights producing 16.7 million different colors and fireworks spouting out the top after Braves’ home runs? Or the six-story, thirty-ton version in New York’s Times Square, with its million-dollar computer system to coordinate the displays, wasting enough power to run ten homes?

  Or the insane statistics the Company dispenses to the press? “If all the Coke ever produced were in 8-ounce contour bottles, and these bottles were laid end-to-end, they would reach to the moon and back 2,136 times.” Or, “If all the Coke ever produced were to erupt from Old Faithful at its normal rate of 7,525 gallons per hour, this geyser would flow for 7,498 years.” Similarly, “if all the Coca-Cola ever produced were poured into a six-foot-deep swimming pool. . . .” But enough. Unless you, too, are a Believer, the idea of a breaststroke through forty-nine miles of dark, sweet, fizzy waters eight miles wide probably doesn’t appeal.

  Anthropologist Clifford Geertz defined religion as “a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.” That’s quite a mouthful, but it’s a fairly accurate description of the world according to Coca-Cola. The “pause that refreshes” surfaced just when organized religion was suffering from the writings of Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, and other scientists. Coke has achieved the status of a substitute modern religion that promotes a particular, satisfying, all-inclusive worldview espousing perennial values such as love, peace, happiness, and universal brotherhood. It provides a panacea whenever daily life seems too difficult, harried, fragmented, or confused. As a sacred symbol, Coca-Cola induces varying “worshipful” moods, ranging from exaltation to pensive solitude, from near-orgasmic togetherness to playful games of chase.

  Most religions have relied on a drug-laced drink of one sort or another. Christianity reveres its communion wine, which Coca-Cola has literally replaced at various times. The Greek gods drank nectar, while Dionysus sported as the lord of wine. Teutonic deities quaffed their mead. Arab Sufi monks drank coffee to keep themselves awake for midnight prayers. In India, the juice of the soma plant placated the gods. Throughout history, shamans have relied on coca, tobacco, caffeine, and other mind-altering drugs to induce trance and contact God. “The widespread use of drugs around the world,” asserted a contributor to Man, Myth & Magic, “makes it plain that man is a discontented animal beset by psychological and physical troubles, by boredom and spiritual ambitions.” As Robert Woodruff and Muhtar Kent observed, the world belongs to the discontented.

  The most powerful Coca-Cola appeal has not, ultimately, been sexual or physiological, but communal: if you drink Coke, the ads suggest, you will belong to a warm, loving, accepting family, singing in perfect harmony. If we can’t quite succeed in finding that stress-free society today, never mind—we’ll find it tomorrow. We’ll build a better world for you, and me, and everyone. Just Open Happiness. Two guards patrolling opposite sides of a tense border share a Coke and a brief smile in a 2011 ad that implicitly conveys, If only everyone drank Coca-Cola, the world would live in peace and harmony. It’s a beautifully seductive message, because it’s what we all want. A harsh critic of Coca-Cola once admitted that she found the “Hilltop” commercial “almost irresistible,” even though it disturbed her.

  For some moralists, this manipulation of basic human desires is evil. In The Brothers Karamazov, one of Roberto Goizueta’s favorite books, the terrifyingly hypocritical Grand Inquisitor mocks all of us “pitiful creatures” who must find “something that all would believe in and worship; what is essential is that all may be together in it. This craving for community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time.” For the Grand Inquisitor, we are all pathetic, insecure souls desperately seeking any sort of meaning. We must, therefore, find mystery and miracle—a secret formula for living, a 7X of the soul.

  In February 1992, ten Tibetan monks visited the World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta. Standing in front of an endless conveyor belt simulating a bottling operation, the maroon-robed monks smiled and nodded, chatting in their own tongue. A translator explained that they enjoyed finding “modern discoveries,” and Coke was one of the great ones. The Buddhists seemed delighted with this temple to the great American soft drink—“this church of consumption,” as one snide commentator put it. Perhaps instinctively, they saw the museum as a religious manifestation, a necessary ordering of the universe. According to Buddha, all such order is illusory, part of the world of maya, but that rendered phenomena like Coke no less important. “Like all great love affairs,” Ike Herbert told a group of fountain salesmen shortly before he retired, “ours depends to a large extent on creating a set of illusions, feelings that we are special. We are who we are because we are all things to all people all the time everywhere.” Paul Foley, the longtime head of McCann-Erickson’s umbrella agency, summarized it best. “We’re selling smoke,” he always reminded his creative staff. “They’re drinking the image, not the product.”

  SHADES OF HARVEY WILEY

  No wonder my mother wouldn’t let me drink Coca-Cola, the opiate of the people. She thought it was bad for me: it would rot my teeth, keep me awake, and spread chemicals throughout my body. There was something mysterious and enticing about the dark, bubbly liquid, though. In high school, when I read the witches’ incantation in Macbeth, I naturally assumed that they were brewing Coca-Cola in their caldron. Like generations before me, I longed for the forbidden drink. Sometimes, after we finished playing football, Billy Krenson and I would go to his house, where his mother served up Coke with cracked ice. Nothing has ever tasted so sinfully good. As another surreptitious Coke drinker described it, “the effervescence was boldly astringent and as clean as a knife; the flavor suggested the corrupt spices of Araby and a hint, perhaps, of brimstone.”

  Ever since Harvey Wiley, reformers have identified Coca-Cola as the temptation of the devil, particularly for innocent children. Today, Michael Jacobson, founder and executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, leads the crusade, lamenting that a twelve-ounce Coke can contains the equivalent of ten teaspoons of sugar, supplying “empty” calories—while the twenty-ounce bottle delivers sixteen teaspoons and the 7-Eleven Super Big Gulp doubles that amount. In his 2005 publication, Liquid Candy, Jacobson observed that sugar-sweetened beverages provided 9 percent of the calories in the American diet, and 13 percent for teenagers. “In 1977–78,” he wrote, “boys consumed more than twice as much milk as soft drinks.” Twenty years later, those figures were reversed. Jacobson was particularly concerned about girls, who also consume twice as much soda as milk and who build 92 percent of their bone mass by age eighteen. Though American soft drink per capita consumption peaked in 1998, Americans still drank an average of 714 eight-ounce servings of soft drinks per year in 2011—that’s about two drinks per day for every man, woman, and child in the United States.

  For former CEO Doug Ivester, that was cause for jubilation rather than concern. “Actually,” he observed, “our product is quite healthy. Fluid replenishment is a key to health. . . . Coca-Cola does a great service because it encourages people to take in more and more liquids.” At the 2012 annual shareholders meeting, I heard Muhtar Kent proudly observe, “People reach for our beverages 1.8 billion times every day. . . . Every one of our drinks is good, offering a choice of great non-alcoholic beverages for hydration and moments of happiness.” Indeed, a fifth of American toddlers drink an average of seven ounces of soft drinks a day.

  So what? Why all the conce
rn? Because by relying primarily on the instant energy of glucose, people forego vitamins, minerals, fiber, and other necessary nutrients. While it is possible to get those vital nutrients elsewhere, Jacobson argues that the more Coke you drink, the less room you find for healthy food in a typical 2,500-calorie daily “budget.” It is more likely that Coca-Cola fiends, particularly those who use it to wash down junk foods, will ingest too many calories—one of the reasons that by 2012 two-thirds of Americans were overweight, and half of those were obese.

  That’s why New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, unable to get a soda tax passed, got the NYC health board to ban the sale of sugar-sweetened beverages in cups larger than sixteen ounces at the city’s restaurants, food carts, fast-food outlets, movie theaters, and sports arenas, which went into effect in March 2013. But it didn’t stop the Big Gulps sold in 7-Elevens or oversized soft drinks in grocery stores. Even though the health edict was mild and relatively ineffective—anyone could buy a second sixteen-ouncer—the soft drink industry protested loudly that this was tyranny and a threat to freedom of choice.

  The obesity epidemic is real and growing. Since the last edition of my Coca-Cola history, I wrote Inside the Outbreaks, a history of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), the disease detectives of the CDC, another Atlanta institution. Much of that book focused on infectious diseases, but near the end I observed that heart disease and stroke—both associated with obesity, along with diabetes—accounted for a third of all deaths around the world. “Humanity’s worst problems are self-inflicted,” I wrote.

  The year 2012 saw an avalanche of media about the causes and impacts of obesity. Richard Jackson, a public health physician and EIS alum, starred in a documentary, Designing Healthy Communities, and published a book with the same title in which he noted, “If we do nothing, about a third of our children will become diabetic [due to obesity], with a reduction in their average life span of fifteen years. . . . We are on a trajectory of declining life expectancy for the first time in our country’s history.”