The Coca-Cola Company

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Coca-Cola Company was born from a personal crisis. In May 1886, a pharmacist named John Stith Pemberton was searching for a way out of a morphine addiction he had developed after being severely wounded in the American Civil War. Cocaine, at the time, was being promoted as a cure for opioid dependence. So Pemberton mixed coca leaves with kola nuts, added water, and called the result a patent medicine. He had no idea he was making one of the most recognized products in human history.

  What was in that original formula would be unthinkable today. The drink contained both cocaine from the coca plant and caffeine from kola nuts, and the two stimulants worked together to produce an effect Pemberton marketed as a healthy tonic. The name itself was chosen by his bookkeeper, Frank Mason Robinson, who picked it because of those two ingredients and because the double hard-c sound made it an alliteration. Robinson also drew the famous logo. Then Pemberton took a break and left Robinson alone to make, promote, and sell the drink with whatever budget he had. Robinson succeeded.

  Two years later, the formula and brand changed hands for $2,300. The buyer was a businessman named Asa Griggs Candler, who turned a pharmacy experiment into a corporation formally incorporated in Atlanta in January 1892. From that point forward, the story of The Coca-Cola Company became something far stranger than any single beverage: a saga of front organizations, Hollywood studios, a blocked Chinese acquisition worth billions, a racial discrimination settlement, and a plastic-waste footprint that a 2024 study found was larger than that of any other company on earth.

• 2. Candler and Early Reach

  ›

  By 1895, just three years after Asa Griggs Candler incorporated the company, Coca-Cola was being sold nationwide across the United States. Candler moved fast, and he moved differently from his competitors. He was among the first businessmen to build advertising around physical merchandise, turning branded objects into marketing tools rather than relying only on newspaper notices.

  The earliest Coca-Cola advertisement carried the lines "Delicious! Refreshing! Exhilarating! Invigorating!" reflecting the drink's origins as a medicinal product meant to relieve headaches and available primarily at drugstores. Within decades, that medicinal framing had given way to something much larger. As of 1948, the company claimed roughly 60% of its market. That dominance did not last forever; by 1984, new competition had pushed its share down to 21.8%.

  The franchised distribution model that underpins the business today was already in place by 1889. Rather than bottling its own product at scale, the company produced the syrup concentrate and sold it to independent bottlers holding exclusive territorial contracts. Those bottlers combined the syrup with filtered water and sweeteners to produce the finished drink, then handled retail, vending, and restaurant distribution. In 1919, the company was sold to Ernest Woodruff's Trust Company of Georgia and soon reincorporated under Delaware law. A predecessor bank of SunTrust received $100,000 for underwriting that 1919 public offering; the bank eventually sold its stake for over $2 billion in 2012.

• 3. Hollywood and Acquisitions

  ›

  In 1982, The Coca-Cola Company bought Columbia Pictures for $692 million, drawn in part by the film studio's low monetary value at the time. It was the first and only film studio Coca-Cola has ever owned. Under Coca-Cola's ownership, Columbia released Ghostbusters and The Karate Kid, among other films. But two years after the 1987 film Ishtar became both a critical and commercial failure, the company moved to exit the entertainment business. It sold Columbia to Tokyo-based Sony in 1989 for $3 billion.

  The entertainment sector did not vanish cleanly. Before selling Columbia, Coca-Cola had expanded its holdings to include Merv Griffin Enterprises and Embassy Communications, grouping them under what it called the Entertainment Business Sector, which then merged with Tri-Star Pictures to form Columbia Pictures Entertainment. Coca-Cola also sold off two separate assets in 1986, Presto Products and Winker-Flexible Products, to an investment group led by E.O. Gaylord for $38 million.

  The acquisition strategy continued long after the Hollywood chapter closed. Minute Maid had been purchased as early as 1960. In 1993 the company acquired the Indian cola brand Thums Up, followed by the American soda company Barq's in 1995. In 1999, it purchased 50% of shares in Inca Kola, a Peruvian cola that had outsold Coca-Cola in its home market, for $200 million. In 2007 it paid an estimated $250 million for Fuze Beverage. One of its largest single moves came in August 2014, when it paid $2.15 billion for a 16.7% stake in Monster Beverage, with the option to increase that stake to 25% over the following four years. In 2018, it agreed to buy Costa Coffee from Whitbread for £3.9 billion, closing that deal on the 3rd of January 2019.

• 4. The Bottler Network

  ›

  Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, headquartered in the United Kingdom, operates across 29 countries in Western Europe, Oceania, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea. Coca-Cola owns a 19.36% stake in the company. That single fact illustrates the unusual structure at the center of how The Coca-Cola Company actually works: it does not, for the most part, make the drink that carries its name.

  The company produces the syrup concentrate and sources coffee beans, tea leaves, and juices. Everything after that point falls to a global network of independent and partially owned bottlers who mix the concentrate with water and sweeteners, then package and distribute the final product. These bottlers hold territorially exclusive contracts. Since the 1980s, the company has pushed actively to consolidate them, often taking temporary ownership stakes through the Bottling Investments Group it formed in January 2006.

  The network is enormous. Coca-Cola FEMSA, headquartered in Mexico, operates across ten countries in Latin America. Coca-Cola HBC AG, based in Switzerland, covers 28 countries stretching from Western Europe through Russia and into Nigeria, with a 23.2% ownership stake held by The Coca-Cola Company. In Japan, Coca-Cola Bottlers Japan Holdings covers roughly 90% of the volume sold in that country. In the United States, the largest independent bottler is Coca-Cola Consolidated, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, in which The Coca-Cola Company holds no ownership at all.

  In September 2015, the company announced the sale of several U.S. production plants and territories to large independent bottlers, alongside the creation of the Coca-Cola National Product Supply System, which now controls 95% of the territory in the United States.

• 5. Front Organizations and Health

  ›

  In 2005, a Coca-Cola executive named Donald Short, then a vice president at the company, published a paper in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition outlining the company's commitments to consumer health. Behind that commitment, a different picture was forming.

  The Beverage Institute for Health and Wellness, led by Rhona S. Applebaum who simultaneously served as the company's Chief Science and Health Officer, sponsored continuing education for dietitians, nurses, and other health professionals. Critics argued this arrangement allowed corporate influence to shape the positions of nutrition professionals. More directly, the company funded the creation of the Global Energy Balance Network to push back against evidence linking its products to childhood obesity and the rise of type 2 diabetes in the United States. The GEBN ran its own studies designed to reach conclusions set in advance and selected data to serve a corporate public relations agenda. An investigative report in August 2015 exposed the network as a Coca-Cola front organization. It was shut down shortly after.

  Three years later, the company was connected to a separate effort in China called "Happy 10 Minutes," funded through the International Life Sciences Institute. The initiative promoted physical exercise as an answer to diet-related disease while deliberately avoiding any discussion of the link between sugary drinks and conditions like type 2 diabetes and hypertension. ILSI had previously advanced tobacco industry interests in Europe and the United States through the 1980s and 1990s.

  By 2017, Coca-Cola sales had fallen 11% from the prior year as consumers shifted away from sugary drinks.

• 6. Plastic and Environment

  ›

  A study published in Science Advances in 2024 found that The Coca-Cola Company was responsible for 11% of global branded plastic pollution by count, a greater share than any other company on earth. The company produces over 3 million tonnes of plastic packaging every year, including 110 billion plastic bottles annually.

  In 2023, plastic made up 47.7% of Coca-Cola's packaging composition, with aluminum at 26% and glass at 10.4%. Only 1.2% of its packaging was reusable in the year measured. Since 2019, the company has increased its use of virgin plastics by approximately 6%.

  In 2018, Coca-Cola pledged to use 50% recycled materials in its packaging and to recycle the equivalent of 100% of its packaging by 2030. In December 2024, the company walked back both targets. The recycling goal was revised down to 70-75% of packaging by 2035, and the recycled-materials target dropped to 35-40% by 2035. The company acknowledged it would not meet the original goals.

  Water use has generated separate criticism. Documents from India's government water ministry showed that water levels in Kaladera, Rajasthan, remained stable from 1995 until 2000, when a Coca-Cola facility became operational. Levels then dropped by almost ten meters over the five years that followed. A research study published in 2025 found that Coca-Cola, together with PepsiCo and Nestlé, contributed between 14 and 21 million tonnes of plastic waste to aquatic environments between 2000 and 2023.

• 7. Advertising and Civic Power

  ›

  Coca-Cola sponsored Walt Disney's first television show, "One Hour in Wonderland," broadcast on Christmas Day 1950. Seven decades later, the company was spending approximately $4 billion annually on global advertising, with its 2019 spending reaching $4.24 billion in a single fiscal year.

  The scale of that advertising presence has extended into politics and civic life in ways that go beyond typical sponsorships. When Martin Luther King Jr. won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, Atlanta's business elite initially resisted plans for an interracial celebratory dinner in the still-segregated city. J. Paul Austin, then chairman and CEO of Coca-Cola, and Mayor Ivan Allen gathered key city leaders and Austin told them directly: "It is embarrassing for Coca-Cola to be located in a city that refuses to honor its Nobel Prize winner. The Coca-Cola Company does not need Atlanta. You all need to decide whether Atlanta needs the Coca-Cola Company." Within two hours of the meeting's end, every ticket to the dinner had been sold.

  In November 2000, the company agreed to pay $192.5 million to settle a class action racial discrimination lawsuit, promising to change how it managed, promoted, and treated minority employees. In February 2021, a leaked employee training course instructed workers to "be less white," a phrase the course equated with being less arrogant and oppressive.

  Sports sponsorships span the Olympic Games, FIFA World Cups, the UEFA European Championships, NASCAR, the PGA Tour, and the NFL. In 2017, Major League Baseball signed a multi-year deal naming Coca-Cola the official soft drink of the league, replacing Pepsi. By 2023, twenty-one MLB teams were selling Coca-Cola products in their ballparks.