research on coca cola

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 46% of the US carbonated soft drinks market
• Net operating revenue of $45.8B with a 6% growth YoY
• Present in more than 200 countries and territories
• Employs over over 700,000 along with its bottling partners
• Ranked #95 in the Fortune 500
• Μarket value of $306.73 billion as of September 2024

Who owns Coca-Cola?

There is no sole owner of Coca-Cola as it is a publicly listed company . However, the largest shareholders are BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY INC., Vanguard Fiduciary Trust Co., and BlackRock Advisors LLC. 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 950 bottling plants that produce 2.2 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

In August 2021, Coca-Cola introduced a reformulated version of Coca-Cola Zero Sugar in the United States, following a July 2021 announcement about the new recipe . The update was designed to enhance the flavor profile while still delivering the same zero-sugar, zero-calorie experience. The reformulated product expanded to the Canadian market in September 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 pillars that they plan to execute in the coming years as part of their growth strategy , a fundamental part of their strategic plan which 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

Coca-Cola is reorganizing its structure to address inefficiencies and improve operational performance through its networked organization model. This approach enhances Coca-Cola’s ability to operate at a global scale while delivering localized solutions to individual markets. By integrating capabilities across creative, media, social, and production disciplines, Coca-Cola can execute faster and more effectively, producing thousands of digital assets and measuring results in real time. This structure also improves collaboration across teams, enabling more consistent execution across global markets.

Brand building

Coca-Cola’s marketing approach has undergone a major transformation, moving from a TV-centric model to a digital-first strategy. By increasing digital spend from 30% in 2019 to 60% by 2023, the company is able to connect with consumers in more personalized and meaningful ways. The creation of StudioX, a digital ecosystem, further enhances Coca-Cola’s ability to scale content creation and engagement, allowing for more focused and impactful campaigns. This evolution enables Coca-Cola to build deeper, more personalized relationships with its consumers while staying aligned with emerging market trends.

Coca-Cola has made innovation a priority, aiming to increase the frequency of new product launches and projects by 40% over 2020 levels. This disciplined approach focuses on developing relevant products and packaging that align with consumer preferences. Coca-Cola’s innovation pipeline is driven by local experimentation, allowing for rapid testing and scaling of successful products across global markets. This ensures that Coca-Cola remains at the forefront of consumer demand, continuously evolving its offerings to maintain market leadership.

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. 

One of the most recent steps in this journey is a five-year partnership with Microsoft, announced on April 23, 2024 . This partnership aims to speed up Coca-Cola's use of cloud technology and generative AI to drive innovation and boost productivity worldwide.

As part of the deal, Coca-Cola has committed $1.1 billion to using the Microsoft Cloud and its AI tools. Microsoft Cloud is now Coca-Cola’s preferred platform for technology, helping the company improve efficiency and increase innovation across its global operations.

Revenue growth management

Coca-Cola’s Revenue Growth Management (RGM) strategy focuses on identifying high-potential revenue streams and optimizing product offerings to align with consumer demand. By utilizing data and digital tools, Coca-Cola is able to make more informed decisions about pricing, packaging, and product lines. The RGM process is iterative, continuously evolving to reflect market trends and consumer behavior, ensuring Coca-Cola can sustain long-term growth.

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. In 2023, the company spent $5 billion (+10% of its revenue) on advertising and marketing —including 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.
• 2011 - The remaining shares of Honest Tea were purchased 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.
• 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
• 2019 - Coca-Cola completed the acquisition of Chi Ltd. in Nigeria (after buying 40% of the company in 2016)
• 2020 - The Coca-Cola Company acquired 100% of dairy brand Fairlife

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 controversy

Coca-Cola has been identified as the #1 producer of plastic waste in the world positioning the brand at the top of "global corporate polluters" in 2023 . 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.

The company has also been accused of "greenwashing" and using misleading eco claims about their plastic water bottles being "100% recycled".

In response to these challenges, Coca-Cola has outlined several sustainability goals aimed at addressing environmental concerns. These goals focus on key areas such as packaging, water stewardship, climate action, and more.

Coca-Cola's Sustainability Goals

• Water Leadership : Coca-Cola plans to achieve 100% regenerative water use across 175 facilities by 2030 and improve the health of 60 critical watersheds. They aim to return 2 trillion liters of water to nature and communities globally between 2021 and 2030.
• Portfolio : The company is committed to offering drinks with reduced added sugar and providing more beverages with nutrition and wellness benefits, while ensuring clear nutritional information and responsible marketing.
• Packaging : Coca-Cola aims to make 100% of its packaging recyclable by 2025 and increase the use of 50% recycled content by 2030. Additionally, the company plans to collect and recycle a bottle or can for every one sold by 2030 and reduce the use of virgin plastic by 3 million metric tons by 2025.
• Climate : The company targets a 25% reduction in absolute emissions by 2030 compared to 2015 levels and has set the ambition to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.
• Sustainable Agriculture : Coca-Cola has committed to sustainably sourcing 100% of its priority agricultural ingredients over time.
• People & Communities : Coca-Cola plans to mirror the diversity of the markets it serves by 2030, aiming for 50% leadership by women globally and aligning U.S. race and ethnicity representation with U.S. census data across all job levels.

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 4.47 million subscribers, and more than 5.6 billion views. About 8 percent of their website traffic comes from YouTube.

Coca-Cola’s LinkedIn account has over 7.7 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 more than 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 3 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 almost 40K followers and receives over 10 million views each month. 

With over 109 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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• 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

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Study Uncovers How Coca-Cola Influences Science Research

Coca-Cola has poured millions of dollars  into scientific research at universities. But if the beverage giant doesn’t like what scientists find, the company has the power to make sure that their research never sees the light of day.

That’s according to an analysis published in the Journal of Public Health Policy that explains how Coca-Cola uses contract agreements to influence the public health research it financially supports. The paper explains that Coca-Cola uses carefully-constructed contracts to ensure that the company gets early access to research findings, as well as the ability to terminate studies for any reason. 

Researchers say this gives the beverage company the ability to squash unfavorable research findings, such as studies that connect the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages to obesity.

The study’s authors are affiliated with the University of Cambridge, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of Bocconi, and U.S. Right to Know, a nonprofit organization that advocates for greater transparency in the food system. They based their report on Coca-Cola research contracts obtained through numerous Freedom of Information requests, which uncovered over 87,000 pages of documents.

In the stack, the study’s authors found five Coca-Cola research agreements with four universities: Louisiana State University, University of South Carolina, University of Toronto and the University of Washington. Much of the research Coca-Cola supports  is related to nutrition and physical activity. While their analysis focused on Coca-Cola, the researchers say that these types of contracts aren’t unique in the world of corporate-sponsored science.

As the U.S. government spends less on research , corporate sponsors are kicking in — but not always for the common good. POM, Monsanto and PepsiCo have sponsored health studies related to their products. But by revealing how just one company can influence and even kill studies without reason, the study's authors make the case for greater transparency in corporate-sponsored scientific research.

The Fine Print

In parsing the fine print of these contracts, researchers found that Coca-Cola is entitled to review studies before they’re published, can provide comments on the research, and has the right to terminate research projects at any time, without reason. Contractual provisions also ensured that Coca-Cola maintained intellectual property rights connected to the research.

Although the researchers didn’t uncover concrete examples of Coca-Cola concealing research findings that could be harmful to the company, the researchers say it’s telling that these restrictive contractual clauses exist in the first place. “Coca-Cola is writing into some of its research agreements the ability to influence — and even kill — its research projects. 

"This is very significant,” said study author Gary Ruskin, who is also co-director of U.S. Right to Know, in an email. “One of the tenets of the scientific method is that the outcomes of experiments are not predetermined. But in some cases, Coca-Cola had the power to predetermine scientific outcomes, in that it could kill the studies if they turned out badly for Coca-Cola and its profits. That's not science. It's public relations.”

The study’s authors uncovered email exchanges showing scientists and university officials discussing Coca-Cola contract agreements. In one such email, a scientist expressed uncertainty over a study termination and expressed concerns over intellectual property ownership. In another email exchange, a scientist at another university remarked that their contract was "very restrictive for an unrestricted grant."

Corporate Interests

It’s not the first time the public is hearing about Coca-Cola’s questionable involvement in scientific research. A few years ago, Coca-Cola disbanded its Global Energy Balance Network , a group led by scientists and created by Coca-Cola.

The group was criticized by the public health community for promoting the idea that lack of exercise, not poor diet, was primarily responsible for the obesity epidemic. The paper's authors say the findings call into question the company’s motivations for funding health research. 

They are calling on Coca-Cola and other corporate backers of scientific research to publish lists of terminated studies. Ruskin said that journals should require scientists to share any research agreements with corporate funders and make them accessible.

In a statement from the company, Coca-Cola said “we agree research transparency and integrity are important,” but did not comment on specifics for this story.

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Coca-Cola's Global Dominance - Decoding the Beverage Giant's Business Strategy

From its humble beginnings in 1886 at a local pharmacy in Atlanta, Coca-Cola has grown into one of the world's most recognizable brands and successful global businesses. The company now operates in over 200 countries and sells nearly 2 billion beverage servings every single day.

However, Coca-Cola did not achieve worldwide dominance by chance. Behind the brand's global expansion is an equally impressive business strategy focused on distribution partnerships, product diversification, mass marketing, and understanding local consumer demands.

This case study takes a deep dive into Coca-Cola business strategy across dimensions like functional and corporate strategy , marketing, innovation, revenue growth management, and more. For any business leader looking to go global, there is much to unpack from Coke's 130+ year journey.

Functional Strategy Powering Global Growth

A key driver of Coca-Cola's worldwide growth is its functional strategy involving strategic global partnerships. Rather than handle bottling and distribution entirely on its own, Coca-Cola adopted a unique franchising model early on. This involved partnering up with local bottling companies while focusing internally on brand building and product concentrate manufacturing.

Such bottling partnerships gave Coca-Cola a highly asset-light and flexible structure, making rapid global expansion more feasible. Moreover, having strong regional bottling partners enabled the adaptation of products to local tastes and the gaining of deeper cultural insights. This win-win arrangement remains central to Coca-Cola's operations around the world even today.

Other functional areas like marketing, innovation, analytics, and HR also now leverage an integrated "Networked Organization" structure. This facilitates collaboration and best practice sharing globally across business units and regions. Aligning all functions towards the overall corporate vision has been key.

Crafting a Global Brand and Marketing Machine

Coca-Cola puts branding and marketing at the heart of its global business dominance. The company utilizes a "one brand, one visual identity" policy internationally to ensure universal recognition. Such standardization at scale brings unmatched mental recall globally, triggering impulse purchases by travelers and locals alike.

Moreover, while maintaining a consistent identity, Coca-Cola's advertising is tailored to resonate culturally across diverse markets. Commercials tap into universal themes like family bonding and festive joy that transcend geographies. Even today, Coke allocates enormous budgets across TV, sports sponsorships, social media, and experiential events to craft captivating campaigns.

Beyond promotion, the product portfolio itself has expanded greatly over the decades to include lower-calorie options like Diet Coke and Coke Zero. Category diversification moves into juices, coffee, energy drinks, and enhanced waters to cater to wider consumer needs. This multi-brand approach, combined with world-class marketing, has been a proven tactic in Coca-Cola's global success.

Strategic Innovation Focus Areas

Innovation in flavors, packaging, processes, and business models also plays a key role in Coca-Cola's growth story. However, the company does not innovate randomly but with clear strategic intent after rigorous testing.

Some focus areas driving innovation include healthier formulas, more sustainable packaging, premium/affordable pack formats for different consumer segments, and digitally-enabled equipment/experiences.

Rather than purely novel ideas, Coke focuses innovation investment on scalable platforms with the highest ROI potential based on needs assessments. The goal is ultimately global replication of big wins, not just local trials.

With such targeted innovation, Coca-Cola manages to consistently keep its product offerings relevant amid dynamically changing consumer preferences. This prevents lost market share to new beverage entrants.

Revenue Growth Management Driving Performance

Apart from great branding and innovation, Coca-Cola also actively manages revenue growth opportunities through advanced analytics. Techniques like predictive modeling, geo-demographic segmentation, pricing elasticity analysis, and promotional optimization leverage data to maximize sales and profits.

By determining the highest potential customer groups, retail channels, and portfolio/pricing mix for any given market, resources can be scientifically allocated for efficiency. Digital dashboards also enable tracking leading performance indicators and competitive benchmarking.

Such Revenue Growth Management (RGM) capabilities allow Coca-Cola to remain agile despite its massive scale. RGM will continue maturing as a key business discipline for global beverage players.

Global Expansion

When entering new international markets, Coca-Cola has a proven expansion playbook involving strategic partnerships, product localization, mergers & acquisitions, and technology transfers. Executed in a calibrated manner, this four-pronged approach has fueled Coke's rapid growth across developed and emerging markets.

• Local Bottling Partnerships Instead of setting up capital-intensive owned plants, Coca-Cola's established global practice has been to partner up with local bottlers and distributors who already possess regional scale, logistics infrastructure, and route-to-market. Such affiliates understand nuances like consumer preferences, languages, business norms, and distribution intricacies better in their geographies. Tapping into these local insights via bottling partnerships instead of going solo proved a highly prudent and successful growth strategy for Coca-Cola in diverse markets like China, India, the Middle East, and Latin America. This asset-light franchise model provides flexibility to expand faster while also benefiting local partners through technology access and a lucrative alliance with an aspirational global brand like Coca-Cola. Both parties thus experience a win-win arrangement.
• Product Portfolio Localization While maintaining brand consistency across core trademarks like Coca-Cola, Sprite, and Fanta, the product formulations and packaging formats are tailored to align with local tastes and sensibilities. For instance, soy-milk-based variants were launched in Asian countries to cater to dietary preferences. Coca-Cola offers fruit juice blends in Europe, dairy-based fusions in Latin America, and lower-sweetness dry drinks in Japan based on regional taste inclinations. Moreover, pricing and pack sizes are strategically adapted to align with income pyramid dynamics in a market, thus improving product penetration and affordability. Such portfolio localization, while keeping core branding intact, has been vital for Coca-Cola's growth in international markets.
• Mergers & Acquisitions Over the past decade, besides organic innovation, Coca-Cola has also accelerated growth by acquiring strong regional beverage brands across categories. Key acquisitions include Costa Coffee, an innocent smoothies brand, mineral water labels like Topo Chico, and the sports drink BodyArmor. Such tactical Mergers & Acquisitions instantly allow Coca-Cola access to new consumer segments, local distribution networks, and innovation capabilities already nurtured by the acquired brand. This faster route to enhancing market share has benefited Coke across Europe, North America, and premium beverage categories.
• Technology Transfers To support hyper-growth in developing markets, Coca-Cola also actively enables technology transfers to impart world-class concentrate production and bottling know-how to regional partners. By providing proprietary food-grade chemical processes, quality protocols, supply chain best practices, and equipment capabilities to affiliates, Coca-Cola empowers consistent local manufacturing capacity across global geographies. This transfer of intellectual property and operational expertise establishes sustainable execution capabilities for both concentrate production and last-mile distribution across the company's worldwide bottling network - catalyzing wider reach.
• Inclusive Distribution Network The Coca-Cola system also focuses on developing inclusive distribution models to ensure availability across retail outlets catering to all income segments in a market. Beginning with niche high-margin stores, distribution gradually expanded across neighborhood grocers, small eateries, and roadside vendors, accessing mass consumer segments. This micro-market distribution strategy centered on establishing an omnipresent network rather than chasing volumes alone has been instrumental to Coke's exponential rise in Asian and Latin American emerging economies. By tailoring engagement across dimensions like partnerships, products, M&A, and knowledge sharing, Coca-Cola has devised a replicable expansion strategy template fueling worldwide growth. Blending global standards with regional adaptations allows for customizing Coca-Cola's solution for local relevance worldwide.

Key Takeaways

Few businesses can claim to have perfected global scale, local relevance, and mass brand appeal as successfully as Coca-Cola. Across 131 years, the company has proven itself highly versatile at navigating international expansion.

While much mystique surrounds Coca-Cola's secrets to market leadership and worldwide recognition, several replicable principles underpin its winning recipe:

• Think global, act local - Consistent identity yet locally tailored
• Function follows form - Align all infrastructure to growth strategy
• Consumer is king - Stay on the pulse of evolving preferences
• Brand and data advantage - Differentiators not easily replicable
• Value of partnerships - Leverage mutually beneficial relationships

There is much for companies to unpack from Coca-Cola's global success playbook. With its strong corporate vision, functional alignment, consumer-centricity, and partnerships at its foundation, Coca-Cola continues expanding its growth runways even today. This case study offers several takeaways to inform smart internationalization strategies across industries.

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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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Why does Coca‑Cola fund scientific research?

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.

We agree that research transparency and integrity are important. That’s why in 2015 we committed to posting all our funding for well-being scientific research and partnerships, going back to 2010. This list can be found here .

Whether it is the research we fund independently or when we work in partnership, our company associates and others with whom we engage are required to adhere to the highest level of scientific integrity and to align with our research principles. For the latest updates on our approach to stakeholder engagement and scientific research, please visit our Transparency in Partnerships page.

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• Introduction

Current business structure

Founding and early history, post–world war ii, coca-cola in the new century, coca-cola and controversies, coca-cola and sustainability, a look ahead.

The Coca-Cola Company

The Coca-Cola Company is an American corporation founded in 1892 and today engaged primarily in the manufacture and sale of syrup and concentrate for Coca-Cola, a sweetened carbonated beverage that is a cultural institution in the United States and a global symbol of American tastes.

The company also produces and sells other soft drinks and citrus beverages. With more than 500 brands available in more than 200 countries, Coca-Cola is the largest beverage manufacturer and distributor in the world, one of the largest corporations in the United States, and one of the most successful brands in marketing history. Its headquarters are in Atlanta , Georgia .

Coca-Cola is a publicly traded company (ticker symbol KO) with a top-down corporate structure that includes a chair and board, as well as a chief operating officer. The company has four geographic operating segments and uses a licensing structure with local bottlers and distributors.

As a company, Coca-Cola has a long history of steady growth and stability, having raised its dividend each year for more than 60 years. That makes it one of the so-called dividend kings (i.e., companies that have raised their annual dividend for 50 years or more).

The drink Coca-Cola was originated in 1886 by an Atlanta pharmacist, John S. Pemberton (1831–88), at his Pemberton Chemical Company. His bookkeeper, Frank Robinson , chose the name for the drink and penned it in the flowing script that became the Coca-Cola trademark .

Pemberton originally touted his drink as a tonic for most common ailments, basing it on cocaine from the coca leaf and caffeine -rich extracts of the kola nut . The cocaine was removed from Coca-Cola’s formula in about 1903.

Pemberton sold his syrup to local soda fountains, and, with advertising, the drink became phenomenally successful. By 1891 another Atlanta pharmacist, Asa Griggs Candler (1851–1929), had secured complete ownership of the business (for a total cash outlay of $2,300 and the exchange of some proprietary rights), and he incorporated the Coca-Cola Company the following year. The trademark “Coca-Cola” was registered with the U.S. Patent Office in 1893.

• Coca-Cola sales rose from about 9,000 gallons of syrup in 1890 to 370,877 gallons in 1900.
• Between 1890 and 1900, syrup-making plants were established in Dallas, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. The product came to be sold in every U.S. state and territory as well as in Canada.
• In 1899 the Coca-Cola Company signed its first agreement with an independent bottling company, which was allowed to buy the syrup and produce, bottle, and distribute the Coca-Cola drink.
• Capitalized at $100,000 in 1892 upon incorporation, the Coca-Cola Company was sold in 1919 for $25 million to a group of investors led by Atlanta businessman Ernest Woodruff.
• Robert Winship Woodruff, Ernest’s son, guided the company as president and chair for more than three decades (1923–55).

Coca-Cola and licensed distribution

Coca-Cola’s 1899 licensing agreement formed the basis of a unique distribution system that now characterizes most of the American soft drink industry. Independent bottlers produce and package the products and distribute them locally. Coca-Cola completed its most recent refranchise effort in 2017.

The post–World War II years saw diversification in the packaging of Coca-Cola and the development or acquisition of new products.

• Coke. The trademark “Coke,” first used in advertising in 1941, was registered in 1945.
• Fanta. In 1946 the company purchased rights to Fanta, a soft drink previously developed in Germany.
• McDonald’s. Coca-Cola partnered with McDonald’s to sell branded soft drinks in 1955, an exclusive partnership that lasted until 2007, when some locations began selling Pepsi products. There is still a strong partnership between Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, with Coca-Cola maintaining a separate McDonald’s division.
• Coke bottle. The contoured Coca-Cola bottle, first introduced in 1916, was registered in 1960.
• Orange juice. With its purchase of Minute Maid Corporation in 1960, the company entered the citrus juice market.
• Sprite. Lemon-lime drink Sprite was introduced in 1961.
• Tab. Coca-Cola’s first diet cola, sugar-free Tab, was launched in 1963.
• Fresca. The brand Fresca was added to Coca-Cola’s stable in 1966.
• China. In 1978 Coca-Cola became the only company allowed to sell cold packaged beverages in the People’s Republic of China .
• Diet Coke. In 1982 the company introduced its low-calorie, sugar-free soft drink Diet Coke (originally named Diet Coca-Cola).
• New Coke/old Coke. In an effort to address its decline in market share, the company adopted a new flavor of Coca-Cola in April 1985, using a formula it developed through taste tests. New Coke was not well received, however. Owing to the public outcry, Coca-Cola revived its original flavor in July, which was then marketed as Coca-Cola Classic.
• Media. From 1982 to 1989, the company held a controlling interest in Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. , a motion picture and entertainment company.
• Global reach. The company began selling products in East Germany in 1990 and in India in 1993.
• Recycling. In 1992, the company introduced its first bottle made partially from recycled plastic—a major innovation in the industry at the time.

Coca-Cola created many new beverages during the 1990s, including the Asia-marketed Qoo children’s fruit drink, Powerade sports drink, and Dasani bottled water. Also during this period, the company acquired Barq’s root beer in the United States; Inca Kola in Peru; Maaza, Thums Up, and Limca in India; and Cadbury Schweppes beverages, which were sold in more than 120 countries across the globe.

Coca-Cola has continued to reign as the largest beverage company in the world through various leadership changes in the 2000s.

• Douglas N. Daft: 2000–04, presided over continued expansion into emerging markets. In 2005 the company introduced Coca-Cola Zero, a zero-calorie soft drink with the taste of regular Coca-Cola.
• E. Neville Isdell: 2004–08, presided over the acquisition of Energy Brands, known as Glacéau, marking Coca-Cola’s entrance into the enhanced water market in 2007. Also in 2007, Coca-Cola announced it would join the Business Leaders Initiative on Human Rights (BLIHR), a group of companies working together to develop and implement corporate responses to human rights issues that affect the business world.
• Muhtar Kent: 2008–17, presided over the purchases of Honest Tea in 2011 and ZICO Pure Premium Coconut Water in 2013.
• James Quincey: 2017–present, presided over the entrance of Coca-Cola into the coffee market by completing the acquisition of Costa Limited in early 2019. The company also relaunched its Coke Zero product in 2017, calling it Coke Zero Sugar and touting its updated taste.

In the early 2000s, Coca-Cola faced allegations of illegal soil and water pollution , as well as allegations of severe human rights violations. The company has also faced criticism over its efforts to obscure the health impacts of its drinks.

• In 2001 the United Steelworkers of America and the International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF) filed a lawsuit against Coca-Cola and Bebidas y Alimentos and Panamerican Beverages, Inc. (also known as Panamco LLC; the primary bottlers of Coca-Cola’s beverages in Latin America ), claiming that the defendants had openly engaged so-called “death squads” to intimidate, torture, kidnap, and even murder union officials in Latin America. The controversy gained worldwide attention and led several American universities to ban the sale of Coca-Cola products on their campuses. The lawsuit was eventually dismissed.
• In April 2002, protests at Coca-Cola’s Plachimada plant in India highlighted water accessibility issues caused by the company. Local residents complained that the plant was drying out wells and contaminating the water supply . The plant operated on and off during a years-long legal battle, but was eventually closed permanently.
• Students spearheaded efforts from 2005 through 2007 to have Coca-Cola products removed from campuses due to alleged human rights and labor violations.
• In 2015 Coca-Cola came under fire for its effort to direct health issues away from its sugary drinks and put more blame for obesity on a lack of exercise. The company was involved in efforts to provide financial support to scientists and researchers who would then downplay the impact of sugary drinks like Coca-Cola on diabetes and other health-related problems.
• Coca-Cola announced a water security strategy in 2023 with the goal of achieving circular water use in 175 facilities and returning two trillion liters of water back to nature and global communities by 2030.
• Additionally, Coca-Cola announced a goal to make 100% of its packaging recyclable by 2025 and use at least 50% recycled materials in its packaging by 2023.

Coca-Cola continues to cement its place as a total beverage company. Beginning in 2018, the company launched its foray into alcoholic beverages with Lemon-Dou in Japan . Today, Coca-Cola sells hard seltzers like Topo Chico and offers premixed cocktails, such as its Jack and Coke brand through its partnership with Jack Daniels.

As one of the premier American brands and cultural touchstones, it’s unlikely that Coca-Cola will be dethroned anytime soon, especially as the company continues to push its brands worldwide and focus on publicizing its efforts to become a sustainable company.

More From Forbes

The amazing ways coca cola uses artificial intelligence and big data to drive success.

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The Coca Cola Company is the world’s largest beverage company selling more than 500 brands of soft drink to customers in over 200 countries. Every single day the world consumes more that 1.9 billion servings of their drinks including brands like Coca Cola (including Diet and Zero) as well as Fanta, Sprite, Dasani, Powerade, Schweppes, Minute Maid and others.

Of course, this also means that it generates mountains of data – from production and distribution to sales and customer feedback, the company relies of a solid data-driven strategy to inform business decisions at a strategic level.

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In fact, Coca Cola was one of the first globally-recognized brands outside of the IT market to speak about Big Data , when in 2012 their chief big data officer, Esat Sezer, said “Social media, mobile applications, cloud computing and e-commerce are combining to give companies like Coca-Cola an unprecedented toolset to change the way they approach IT. Behind all this, big data gives you the intelligence to cap it all off.”

More recently, Greg Chambers, global director of digital innovation, has said “AI is the foundation for everything we do. We create intelligent experiences. AI is the kernel that powers that experience.”

Product development

Coca Cola is known to have plowed extensive research and development resources into artificial intelligence (AI) to ensure it is squeezing every drop of insight it can from the data it collects.

Fruits of this research were unveiled earlier this year when it was announced that the decision to launch Cherry Sprite as a new flavor was based on monitoring data collected from the latest generation of self-service soft drinks fountains, which allow customers to mix their own drinks.

As the machines allow customers to add their own choice from a range of flavor “shots” to their drinks while they are mixed, this meant they were able to pick the most popular combinations and launch it as a ready-made, canned drink.

Coca Cola is also looking to follow the lead of tech giants by developing something similar to their “virtual assistant” AI bots such as Alexa and Siri. The AI will reside in vending machines , allowing greater personalization – for example, users will be able to order their favorite blend from any vending machine, with the machine mixing it to their individual preference. The AI will also adapt the machines’ behavior depending on its location. This could mean more lively and excitable vending machines in malls or entertainment complexes, and more somber, functional behavior in a hospital.

Healthy options

As sales of sugary, fizzy drink products have declined in recent years Coca Cola has also hooked into data to help produce and market some of its healthier options, such as orange juice, which the company sells under a number of brands around the world (including Minute Maid and Simply Orange).

The company combines weather data, satellite images, information on crop yields, pricing factors and acidity and sweetness ratings, to ensure that orange crops are grown in an optimum way, and maintain a consistent taste.

The algorithm then finds the best combination of variables in order to match products to local consumer tastes in the 200-plus countries around the world where its products are sold.

Augmented reality

Augmented reality (AR) where computer graphics are overlaid on the user’s view of the real world, using glasses or a headset, is being trialed in a number of the company’s bottling plants around the world.

This allows technicians to receive information about equipment they are servicing, and get backup from experts at remote locations who can see what they are seeing and help to diagnose and solve technical problems. It is also used to inspect problems with vending machines and dispensers in remote or difficult-to-reach locations, including cruise ships while they are at sea.

Social data mining

With 105 million Facebook fans and 35 million Twitter followers, social media is another hugely important source of data for the company.

Coca Cola closely tracks how its products are represented across social media, and in 2015 was able to calculate that its products were mentioned somewhere in the world an average of just over once every two seconds.

Knowing this gives insight into who is consuming their drinks, where their customers are, and what situations prompt them to talk about their brand. The company has used AI-driven image recognition technology to spot when photographs of its products , or those of competitors, are uploaded to the internet, and uses algorithms to determine the best way to serve them advertisements. Ads targeted in this way have a four times greater chance of being clicked on than other methods of targeted advertising, the company has said.

Looking further ahead, the company is also interested in the idea of using AI to create adverts.

Speaking at Mobile World Congress this year, global senior digital director Mariano Bosaz said “content creation is something that we have been doing for a very long time – we brief creative agencies and then they come up with stories … what I want to start experimenting with is automated narratives.”

Digital transformation

The Coca Cola company is a shining example of a business which has re-ordered itself based on data and intelligence. It has long shown an appreciation of the fact that today’s technology offers unprecedented opportunity to reassess just about every aspect of how business is conducted. Rethinking itself as a technology-driven company with a focus on strategic implementation of data and AI means it is likely to retain its place at the head of the pack for the foreseeable future.

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“Always read the small print”: a case study of commercial research funding, disclosure and agreements with Coca-Cola

• Original Article
• Open access
• Published: 08 May 2019
• Volume 40 , pages 273–285, ( 2019 )

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• Sarah Steele 1 ,
• Gary Ruskin 2 ,
• Martin McKee 3 &
• David Stuckler 3 , 4  

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Concerns about conflicts of interest in commercially funded research have generated increasing disclosure requirements, but are these enough to assess influence? Using the Coca-Cola Company as an example, we explore its research agreements to understand influence. Freedom of Information requests identified 87,013 pages of documents, including five agreements between Coca-Cola and public institutions in the United States, and Canada. We assess whether they allowed Coca-Cola to exercise control or influence. Provisions gave Coca-Cola the right to review research in advance of publication as well as control over (1) study data, (2) disclosure of results and (3) acknowledgement of Coca-Cola funding. Some agreements specified that Coca-Cola has the ultimate decision about any publication of peer-reviewed papers prior to its approval of the researchers’ final report. If so desired, Coca-Cola can thus prevent publication of unfavourable research, but we found no evidence of this to date in the emails we received. The documents also reveal researchers can negotiate with funders successfully to remove restrictive clauses on their research. We recommend journals supplement funding disclosures and conflict-of-interest statements by requiring authors to attach funder agreements.

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Funding and Stakeholder Involvement

He who pays the piper calls the tune setting the stage for an informed discourse on third-party funding of academic business research.

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

Introduction

In the wake of criticisms about a lack of transparency of financial support for medical and scientific research, several multinational corporations (MNCs) recently committed to publishing relevant information on the scale and nature of their investments in research, publishing lists of projects they fund and developing principles to apply to their relationship with researchers. But are these measures sufficient to disclose the potentially complex nature of these relationships and associated contractual obligations?

To answer this question, we have undertaken a case study about one of the corporations that seeks to position itself at the forefront of this process, The Coca-Cola Company. The company is an appropriate example to study because, following criticism of its activities, it has published a ‘Transparency List’ of researchers whom it funded from 2010 to 2017. It also progressively refined an explicit set of principles for the researchers it funds, providing a basis for comparing its stated intentions and its practice. In 2016, it brought together its principles formally [ 1 ]. It also released the list of partnerships and research funding with an explicit statement that those researchers that it funded on the list were:

“expected to conduct research that is factual, transparent and designed objectively”;

to have “full control of the study design, the execution and the collection, analysis and interpretation of the data”;

“encouraged to publish” and

“expected to disclose their funding sources in all publications and public presentations of the data”. It added that the company did not “have the right to prevent the publication of research results” and that funding was not “conditioned on the outcome of the research”.[ 2 ]

These four major assertions provide a base for comparing Coca-Cola’s stated intentions to its actual practices. We see on Coca-Cola’s own website that it makes these claim around its research funded since 2010 [ 2 ](Fig.  1 ):

At least on the surface, these principles conflict with anecdotal reports of the corporation’s activities following their publication. As one example, in 2015, a New York Times exposé revealed that Coca-Cola designed its funding of the Global Energy Balance Network (GEBN) to divert attention from the role that sugar-sweetened beverages play in the obesity epidemic by excessively emphasising the role of lack of exercise [ 3 ]. The Times article asserted that Coca-Cola, just like Big Tobacco, had sought to influence public health and medical researchers, and to deploy them to promote the Company’s agenda, even though some of these researchers reported the funding to be ‘unrestricted’, meaning that it can be used for any purpose or by an organisation, rather than being given for a specific project or purpose [ 3 , 4 ]. GEBN was subsequently closed in November 2015, on which Coca-Cola declined to comment [ 5 ]. A 2019 article revealed Coca-Cola’s funding of bodies like the International Life Sciences Institute in China, showing how the latter organisation is deployed to shape obesity science and related policy [ 6 , 7 ]. A feature in the British Medical Journal suggested also that the transparency list was incomplete, and highlighted how Coca-Cola acts to exercise ‘soft power’ by using its funding to influence everything from conferences to academic positions [ 8 ]. So how can these pieces of information be reconciled? Does Coca-Cola really uphold its public commitments on research funding? Have its grants—past and present—really allowed researchers to operate free from influence as Coca-Cola suggests on its website?

Here, we seek evidence supporting or rejecting Coca-Cola’s four major research principles detailed above, using information obtained from United States (US) state and federal, as well as Australian, British, Canadian and Danish Freedom of Information (FOI) requests for communications between Coca-Cola and leading public health academics or federal or state agency employees who were known to receive funding from or to collaborate with the company. Our FOI requests yielded a large volume of material on Coca-Cola’s engagement in public health-related issues. These include five agreements between researchers or their host organisation and Coca-Cola, plus a large amount of related correspondence that enables us to assess whether these principles were being observed previously as asserted, and are now being upheld in relations with researchers. We look both at the legal (or de jure ) aspects of the agreements and how they were operationalised in practice in the relationships with researchers (de facto).

A non-profit consumer and public health research group in the United States, U.S. Right to Know (USRTK), based in Oakland, California, investigates the food and agrichemical industries, examining their public relations, political and lobbying campaigns, as well as the health risks associated with their products [ 9 ]. (One author, GR, is a co-director of USRTK). Drawing on the approach used in past studies of corporate behaviour and related litigation [ 10 ], between 2015 and 2018, USRTK sent 129 FOI requests to United States (US), Australian, British, Canadian and Danish public bodies related to Coca-Cola’s links with public health actors, including academics. USRTK selected the higher education institutions because they were governed by FOI laws (that exist in many jurisdictions around the world to encourage openness and transparency by public bodies, including at the state and federal level in the US, as well as in Australia, Britain, Canada and Denmark where USRTK also sent requests), or because USRTK identified these institutions as having received funding from Coca-Cola through its recent public disclosures [ 2 ].

The responses yielded 87,013 pages of documents, including five research agreements made with Louisiana State University [ 11 , 12 ], University of South Carolina [ 13 ], University of Toronto [ 14 ] and the University of Washington [ 15 ]. The research team archived the FOI responses using document discovery software used across the legal services industry, extracted the research agreement and then two members of the research team read the documents to assess the concordance between Coca-Cola’s principles detailed above. One of these researchers is trained as a lawyer (SS) and the other is a public health researcher (DS).

Inevitably, the sample has potential limitations to its external validity. First, the sample is not comprehensive, as redactions and removal of some emails from the batch are allowed in line with certain legislative exemptions, and it is impossible to ascertain whether FOI responses form a complete sample of communications and other contractual documents between Coca-Cola and associated researchers. As with a small number of cases, quantitative study was not feasible, we thematically and legally evaluated the agreements by testing whether there existed evidence to confirm or refute Coca-Cola’s four major assertions on research transparency and independence of researchers. To limit the scope for personal biases in interpretation, the entire research team engaged in reflexivity, reviewing the selection and interpretation of the source material. Second, the five research agreements pre-date Coca-Cola’s publication of its transparency principles in 2016, although its own website states that all of the disclosed health and well-being research complied with these four assertions. Furthermore, several researchers themselves publicly claim that the funding had no influence on their research, which we examine more fully below [ 16 ]. Third, we report extracts as they appear in the agreements and quote any related emails “in their own words” to allow readers to assess critically our interpretations. To ensure reproducibility of our study, all agreements and cited communications are posted on Internet.

We summarise our findings in as they pertain to each of Coca-Cola’s four major research transparency assertions [ 2 ].

Researchers retain full control over the design, execution, analysis and interpretation of research

The documents obtained by FOI indicate that, although it does not have the capacity to direct and control the day-to-day conduct of studies, Coca-Cola retains varied rights throughout the research process, including the power to terminate studies early without giving reasons. Several agreements reveal that the company maintains the right to receive and comment on research prior to submission for publication. However, the researchers may reject these changes. Thus, the company can influence but not direct the research output, but may use termination provisions as a mechanism to discontinue research.

The emails we obtained reveal that academic partners recognise Coca-Cola’s influence on the research it funds, even where it is not directing the research. For example, Tommy Coggins, Director of University of South Carolina’s (USC) Sponsored Award Management and Research Compliance, in an email to Professor Tom Chandler of USC’s Norman J. Arnold School of Public Health, explained that several of the research agreements entered into at the University allowed Coca-Cola to have:

a substantial say in how it [the research] was conducted and how results are handled, including ownership of all IP. None of this is wrong or unusual, but it is a typical industry research agreement. Also, contains a good bit of language about confidentiality and sharing results with Coca-Cola, but no bar on publication [ 17 ].

Coggins was commenting on a study that aimed to uncover the “extent to which variation in total energy expenditure and variation in total energy intake contribute to changes in body weight and fat among young adults”. The agreements we obtained specify that Coca-Cola’s comments are non-binding unless its suggested revisions to drafts pertain to information covered in the confidentiality provisions in the agreement, under which Coca-Cola retains the right to redact content accordingly.

Taking a specific example, as part of the “Sponsored Clinical Trial Research Agreement” between Coca-Cola and the Board of Supervisors of Louisiana State University, represented by Pennington Biomedical Research Center (PBRC), we find a 2012 research agreement for a study with Timothy Church as Principal Investigator related to fluid balance and performance with ad libitum water, flavoured placebo or carbohydrate-electrolyte beverage intake during exercise in the heat (known henceforth as the “The APEX Study”) [ 18 ]. The contract sets out mutual obligations of all parties as including regular reports to and data sharing with Coca-Cola, as well as the standard termination provision, which allows Coca-Cola to retain all data. Article 6.1 specifies:

Publication prior to delivery of the final report of any information gained in the course of performing the Project must be in a peer reviewed journal, must be approved in writing by both parties prior to such publication, and must acknowledge that the Study was funded by The Coca-Cola Company. Notwithstanding the foregoing, the Sponsor will not be approving the content of the publication, but has a right to review and provide comment before submission for publication [ 12 ].

Thus, while Coca-Cola contends that its guidance is not tantamount to approval, it does retain the right to comment on papers prior to publication, and holds the ability to terminate studies at any time without reasons.

Indeed, Coca-Cola may simply terminate an agreement if the findings are not in its interests or if its comments and revisions are rejected. Such provisions do, however, vary amongst the research agreements we obtained. As one example, we show a “Research Agreement” between Coca-Cola and the South Carolina Research Foundation, a non-profit entity that accepts donations for USC, to fund a study entitled “Energy Balance” in 2010–2015. Section “ Discussion ” of the agreement provides that Coca-Cola can make non-binding suggestions and may only redact information covered by its confidentiality provisions in Section “ Results ”. According to Section “ Results ”, “Confidential Information” includes disclosures made “orally or in writing” pertaining to “technical or business information regarding the Sponsor’s products, marketing plans, public relations plans or Protocol”. Notably, this agreement empowers Coca-Cola to terminate the agreement with notice and to require the return or destruction of all of this Confidential Information. Specifically, Section 6.2 states that, as long as 15 days written notice is given and with no need to give a reason:

6.3.4: SCRF shall immediately discontinue any work and shall take such precautions as requested by Sponsor, including returning to Sponsor or certifying in writing to Sponsor that it had destroyed all documents and other tangible items containing Sponsor Confidential Information [ 13 ].

Other agreements contain provisions that do allow for recall of all research documents and materials on termination. In the Church APEX study, detailed above, the termination provisions of this agreement are stronger, stating in Article 4.4 that:

Upon receipt of a notice of early termination, PBRC will immediately discontinue all work under this Agreement and return all copies of Sponsor data, or other materials, and deliver to sponsor all work in progress, including incomplete work… [ 12 ]

Such termination provisions could, hypothetically, allow Coca-Cola to quash studies progressing unfavourably, or allow Coca-Cola to pressure researchers using the threat of termination. However, we found no evidence that this has occurred in our FOI batches. In one instance, we did find Coca-Cola had ended a study with little or no information being sent to researchers or their institutions. For example, emails between researchers at USC pertaining to the Active Healthy Living Programme funded by Coca-Cola, state:

As you know, the contract with Coca-Cola to develop and evaluate the Active Healthy Living Program has terminated. While I am not sure, because they have not communicated with us in several months, it appears that Coca-Cola has dropped the program. We put a lot into development of the program, and if possible, I would like to obtain/retain the intellectual property. Please look into where we stand with this, and let’s figure out next steps. Thanks [ 19 ].

Our FOI, however, does indicate that Coca-Cola may be willing to negotiate the terms of agreements to moderate language regarding pre-publication communication and consultation with Coca-Cola. In emails between University of Toronto Professor John Sievenpiper and Coca-Cola’s Susan Roberts regarding a proposed, then signed, research agreement, Sievenpiper requests revision of provisions he regards as restrictive. The original text, which Sievenpiper requests to be deleted in its entirety, states:

U of T will afford TCCC [The Coca-Cola Company] the prior right to review and approve (or reject) any communication or other material developed by U of T or its employees, contractors or agents discussing this Agreement or the underlying grant, the related work or accomplishments of U of T and/or TCCC, or any related or other association between U of T and TCCC, or otherwise mentioning TCCC’s name or displaying TCCC’s trademarks [ 14 ].

Sievenpiper comments that it is “very restrictive for being an ‘unrestricted grant’”, and Coca-Cola agreed to change the wording to “consult with each other in good faith regarding any communication with third party/ies…”. This involved significant back and forth emails and discussion, suggesting that the original wording may be standard wording in other Coca-Cola research agreements.

Researchers are encouraged to publish and Coca-Cola does not have the right to prevent the publication of research results

Our research confirms that Coca-Cola encourages researchers to publish in peer-reviewed publications and generally only retains limited rights to delay publication to protect its proprietary interests or to obtain a patent. However, many agreements contain the above-discussed termination provisions, allowing either fixed-notice period termination, or early termination according to the agreement’s terms (as described above), some restricting publication following such a termination.

For example, in the agreement pertaining to Church’s APEX study, Article 6.1, provided above in full, states that publication “ must be in a peer reviewed journal, must be approved in writing by both parties prior to such publication, and must acknowledge that the Study was funded by The Coca - Cola Company”. While this indicates that Coca-Cola does encourage publication as it states, and does not have a right to prevent publication, only providing comments, Article 6.2 makes clear that Coca-Cola can issue a written notice to require a delay to publishing where its proprietary interests are at stake; but there is no general right to control publication of results unfavourable to Coca-Cola’s commercial interests [ 12 .] The provisions do, however, convey a right of Coca-Cola to comment and prompt revisions, as discussed above.

Similar provisions are found in a “Research Agreement” between Coca-Cola and the South Carolina Research Foundation [ 13 ]. Section “ Discussion ” on “Publication Rights and Use of Project Results” states similarly that Coca-Cola can require a delay where it wishes to file a patent or protect its proprietary interests, and that such a delay should not exceed 120 days. Retention of a capacity to delay publication is consonant with ordinary industry-funded research provisions, but in public health research it may delay significant findings from reaching the public.

Notably, the APEX study agreement does not contain provisions that allow Coke to prevent publication absolutely, but does require written permission for publication of all peer-reviewed publications where such publication would be prior to the final report to Coca-Cola (Art 6.2). This, in concert with the termination provisions that require cessation of research and the full and complete handover of all study documents, may enable Coca-Cola to shape unfavourable findings in advance of publication (Art 4.4). Thus, while Coca-Cola cannot stop publication, termination provisions could allow it to prevent publication through termination and recall of documents, along with the written consent requirement obligation in Article 6.2. Notably, this provision only has effect prior to the report to Coca-Cola, and thereby is not absolute in its effect. The agreements themselves are unclear as to the nature of the required reports and whether they will be made public and subject to peer review.

Researchers are expected to disclose their funding sources in all publications and public presentations of the data

We found that the agreements identified in our study routinely allow for the attribution that a study, paper or report was “funded by The Coca-Cola Company”. For example, Article 6.3 of the research agreement between Coca-Cola and the South Carolina Research Foundation states:

Publication shall acknowledge authorship according to generally accepted criteria for authorship and subject to journal requirements, if applicable. PBRC agrees that if Sponsor so requests, and only if Sponsor requests, substantive releases and/or written reports contemplated by this Article 6 may include language to the effect that, “The Study was funded by The Coca-Cola Company” [ 13 ].

Notably, the phrasing “PBRC agrees that if Sponsor so requests, and only if Sponsor requests…” does not grant the University the right to use this attribution on all outputs. However, the peer-review provisions in Article 6 seem to imply that Coca-Cola expects the disclosure of funding sources in publications, as this is routine practice amongst reputable journals. The provision extends to publicity related to the research, placing the funding attribution within the hands of Coca-Cola rather than with the host or researcher. The contracts allow for a funding declaration to be phrased in a way that does not extend to a complete and detailed declaration of Coca-Cola’s input into the research, although the agreements are silent as to whether more robust statements are allowed.

Coca-Cola does not make funding conditioned on the outcome of the research

The research agreements contain no provisions on any outcomes of any study. However, as noted above, this could hypothetically be exercised through the termination provision. Thus, while we found no direct conditions pertaining to outcomes of the research, the effect of permissive termination provisions and recall of data provisions could indirectly have a ‘chilling effect ‘on researcher’s work, influencing what researchers conclude. Past research has revealed that researchers do strive to maintain positive relations with Coca-Cola and produce results favourable to them [ 20 ].

Our review of Coca-Cola’s research agreements reveals that it uses terms in line with standard funding agreements seen with other corporate actors. Specifically, these contractual agreements contain no provisions granting the company absolute control over the studies it funds, but they could allow it to assert influence over studies and resultant publications. We found that Coca-Cola requires regular reports and input into projects, and maintains the ability to terminate agreements early and without reason. Of course, in some cases such early termination provisions are justifiable; for example, when there is improper behaviour like harassment or bullying, a failure to deliver work in accord with the contract or the other such examples, which tend to be given as reasons for termination. In contrast, the contractual terms for early termination  without  reasons are arguably beyond the legal scope needed to address such justifiable concerns, although they are not uncommon in commercial agreements generally and there is no evidence of their use in our batch. In light of past evidence of ‘soft influence’, whereby researchers sought to please funders in ways which, albeit not contractually specified, in practice operated to the same effect, the company’s continued input and early termination provisions undermine its public assertions of researcher independence [ 20 ].

Before interpreting the implications of our study for research, policy and improving management of COIs, we must acknowledge several limitations. First, our case studies focused on Coca-Cola may not generalise to other segments of food and beverage industries. However, the contractual agreements appear to be commonly employed between private actors and public researchers. Second, several recipients of USRTK’s FOI requests returned or did not respond to them, or, in some cases, they redacted material submitted. It is possible that we have been unable to detect contracts, which may have existed but were not obtainable through FOI, thus creating an omission bias in our analysis. The direction of such bias, however, would likely be to hide particularly egregious contracts. Third, despite a large document set, we only identified five research contracts. There may be heterogeneity in Coca-Cola’s contracts with researchers given our observations that researchers could negotiate their terms. That said, there was relatively limited variation across the five agreements.

Our research reveals a need to improve reporting of COIs. Many declarations of funding and routinely employed COI statements fail to specify the true amount of input and influence Coca-Cola has (irrespective of whether it chooses to exercise it). While it is beyond the scope of our study to review all Coca-Cola funded research, we note that concerns have been raised elsewhere about the completeness of COIs in studies funded by Coca-Cola on topics of nutrition and physical inactivity [ 21 ]. Examples include publications arising from the Energy Balance grant at USC state “ Supported by an unrestricted research grant from The Coca - Cola Company” [ 22 ]. Stephen Blair, one of the leads at USC, records that he has received funding from Coca-Cola, amongst others, in the preceding 5 years, as does co-author Gregory Hand. However, nowhere in the article is there a statement setting out the nature and amount of input Coca-Cola had, only that the funding was “unrestricted”, which, as the email discussions between Coggins and Chandler indicate, was not how the grant was understood by USC. Coggins, as Director of Sponsored Award Management and Research Compliance at USC, makes clear the “ the Energy Flux and Balance studies were conducted under the terms of Research Agreement with SCRF… [and] are not “un - restricted” …” [ 17 ]. Such attributions of funding are similarly made with regards to the results of Timothy Church’s APEX study, and are a reflective example of the agreement provisions regarding funding statements across the agreements we received and resultant publications [ 23 , 24 ].

Our research points to particular concerns about early termination provisions. The termination provisions in some of the agreements that allow Coca-Cola to discontinue the studies it funds if results are unfavourable, in contrast to the assurances it makes on its website about not being able to prevent publication, should be cause of concern. Although not all agreements we reviewed allow for full recall of research documents and materials, we identified several agreements that in effect allow Coca-Cola to terminate a study, if the findings are unfavourable to Coca-Cola. We observed push-back by researchers receiving unrestricted grants regarding restrictive provisions, revealing that the researchers were aware that there could be a problem. Coca-Cola was receptive to requested revision, but this may be due to the ongoing relationship the Company had with this particular researcher. Certainly, some of the agreements allow for unfavourable developments or findings to be quashed prior to publication. Future research will be needed to identify when and the extent to which funded studies were not published. This is but one source of potential ‘publication bias’, whereby only positive results are made publicly visible. Given the hidden nature of unpublished, funded studies, this is an extremely challenging area of research as there is no way for researchers to ascertain who produced the studies, why they remain unpublished and what their results may be.

We acknowledge that many provisions in Coca-Cola’s research funding agreements are standard, including its early termination provisions. While recent termination of a non-industry-funded United Kingdom study due to findings of bullying by a primary investigator evidences how these provisions may be exercised to encourage positive research environments [ 25 ], we note that early termination may be used to discontinue studies in a less positive way. We found evidence that in at least one study Coca-Cola discontinued funding, seemingly without reason given to those involved, but found no evidence that this related to unfavourable findings or prospective publications. We did find evidence suggesting that Coca-Cola exerts influence on the design, conduct and write-up of studies, retaining rights to comment and have input throughout the research process.

Turning to implications for COIs, this study adds to a growing body of literature of their limited usefulness. Qualitative studies with researchers reveal diverse interpretations of what COIs and influence mean [ 26 ]. It is also easy for COIs to be inadequately reported. Most of what is detected comes to us through journalistic exposés [ 27 ]. Our study adds to these insights, showing that such general (and notably brief) declarations may fail to capture Coca-Cola’s full involvement in the studies they fund, from design through to publication.

To remedy these weaknesses, we propose far more ‘hard’ information about funding, rather than relying on self-reports. Specifically, we call for journals to require authors receiving Coca-Cola or other industry financial support to provide more robust COI and funding statements, including declaring the specifics of input allowed in the study’s research agreements. In addition, journals should require authors of funded research to upload the research agreements for studies as appendices to any peer-reviewed publication, allowing these to be published with ease and at little expense on the existing electronic platforms where supplemental information is commonly provided. A reader’s appraisal of a study’s scientific objectivity would best be supported by knowledge that Coca-Cola has input at various stages of the research and publication processes, an understanding facilitated by access to the research agreement governing the study.

For medical and public health professionals, the lack of robust information on the details of input by industry and on studies terminated before results enter the public realm makes it impossible to know how much of the research that enters the public realm reflects industry positions and content, as opposed to fully unbiased and uninfluenced research results. It is critical that professionals and scholars be able to appraise influence. We know that people trust studies with an industry partner less and approach these studies with greater suspicion about bias [ 28 ]. Greater information is needed to appraise influence.

Where studies are terminated without having been registered in advance, as should be the case with clinical trials, it may be that termination acts as suppression of critical health information. We therefore call for industry funders to publish complete lists of terminated studies as part of their commitment to act with integrity, and for clear declarations of involvement as standard publication practice.

Data availability

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Steele, S., Ruskin, G., McKee, M. et al. “Always read the small print”: a case study of commercial research funding, disclosure and agreements with Coca-Cola. J Public Health Pol 40 , 273–285 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41271-019-00170-9

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How Coca-Cola Disguised Its Influence on Science about Sugar and Health

Published Oct 11, 2017

Coca-Cola quietly funded a research institute out of the University of Colorado designed to persuade people to focus on exercise, not calorie intake, for weight loss strategies.

The Disinformation Playbook

What happened.

A growing body of scientific evidence shows that too much sugar is bad for our health. And Coca-Cola has a history of pouring money into misinformation campaigns aimed at casting doubt on that evidence. One of the company’s tactics has been to fund its own scientific research through in-house research institutes such as the “Beverage Institute for Health and Wellness” established in 2004. The Beverage Institute featured misleading content on its website, confusing the science about sugar consumption and ill-health by focusing on the role of sugar-sweetened beverages in ‘hydration’ and ‘energy balance’ while ignoring these beverages’ links to obesity and metabolic disease. This institute is no longer active as of 2016 , but the tactic lives on in an even more secretive fashion: Coca-Cola and other companies spread disinformation by funding questionable research programs hosted by academic institutions—and then use the names of those reputable establishments and scientists to promote their agenda.

In 2015, the Coca-Cola company gave $1 million to the University of Colorado Foundation, a revenue stream that feeds into the university itself, to fund a research institute called the Global Energy Balance Network. The stated goal of the institute was to provide “a forum for scientists around the globe to come together and generate the knowledge and evidence-based pathways needed to end obesity.” But Coca-Cola’s real goal was to persuade people that they were focusing too much on calories and portion size and not enough on exercise. And the list of contributors to this effort—including University of Colorado faculty and other academic scientists—was riddled with conflicts of interest.

First, as part of the funding arrangement, Coca-Cola was allowed to choose the Global Energy Balance Network’s executives, draft its mission statement, and design its website and even compared their scientific project as “akin to a political campaign.” The company hired academics who had received funding from Coca-Cola and other food companies in the past. James O’Hill co-founded the Global Energy Balance Network and served as president. According to the  Integrity in Science  database, maintained by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Dr. Hill has ties to PepsiCo, McDonald’s, and the Sugar Association. He has also previously received consulting fees from Coca-Cola and other food companies. Before the organization was founded, Coca-Cola had also provided $4 million in research funds to two of its founding members: Dr. Steven N. Blair, exercise scientist at the University of South Carolina, and Gregory A. Hand, dean of the West Virginia University School of Public Health between 2008 and 2015.

The new, Coca-Cola-funded research institute used studies funded by the company to argue that there was “strong evidence” that weight gain can be prevented, not by reducing calorie consumption, “but maintaining an active lifestyle and eating more calories.”

Coca-Cola sought to use the institute to shift the dialogue on obesity away from calorie consumption and toward exercise by funding industry-friendly science. But when the institute’s motives and funding stream were exposed, Coca-Cola announced it would halt operations due to “resource limitations.”

Why it Matters

Research funding by the private sector does not necessarily compromise the scientific work or suggest  that any impropriety has occurred. In this case, however, Coca-Cola’s influence managed to override sensible transparency and safeguards meant to ensure the integrity and independence of research.

Independent assessment is vital to the practice of science, which is why scientists go to such lengths to conduct peer reviews and design “double blind” studies. They know that even their own knowledge of possible outcomes in a research study can unwittingly skew the results. Independent science is too important to achieving good policy outcomes—in this case tackling issues like childhood obesity and diabetes—to allow it to be tainted by even the appearance of a conflict of interest. And public confidence in this kind of work is also vital to its continuance at academic and research institutions that are often publicly funded.

Transparency is the vital first step toward ensuring that purportedly independent research and scientific bodies are truly as advertised—independent and not co-opted by vested interests. The disclosure that Coca-Cola eventually made about its Global Energy Balance Network illuminates this fact. The case illustrates why full disclosure is so important and why we need to work harder to insist that our scientists, medical professionals, and politicians acknowledge who’s backing them and with what kinds of terms so we can more fully assess the independence and integrity of their work.

Further Reading

• “The Coke Side of Life”—More Sugar, Less Science
• Coca-Cola Breaks Pledge Not to Advertise to Kids (Again)
• USDA Nominee Perdue’s Connection to Coca-Cola is Deeper Than Georgia Roots

Related resources

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A Democracy, If You Can Keep It

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Improving Election Data Transparency

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Coca-Cola funds health research—and can kill the studies it doesn’t like

By Nicole Wetsman

Posted on May 10, 2019 4:00 PM EDT

Coca-Cola has spent millions of dollars on scientific research in the past decade, and the funds they provide have led to hundreds of scientific studies. In 2016, the company released a list of principals for research that it funds after criticism of their practices, which include mention that scientists have “full control over the design, execution, analysis and interpretation of research.”

However, despite that list, research agreements between Coca-Cola and academic researchers often includes provisions that allow the company to review and exert varying amounts of control over the results of the studies they fund, according to an analysis published this week in the Journal of Public Health Policy.

A team of researchers submitted requests under freedom of information laws in the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Denmark to obtain documents around Coca-Cola’s work with academic institutions. Those requests pulled back over 87,000 pages of documents, including five research agreements made between the company and universities.

“It’s rare to see these kind of contracts unless you are a party to them,” wrote lead author Sarah Steele, a policy researcher in the department of politics and international studies at Cambridge, in an email to Popular Science . “What they show is that Coke has been specifying how its funding is acknowledged and holding influence across studies at various stages.”

The agreements showed that Coca-Cola could terminate studies at any time, and could review, comment, and ask for revisions on papers prior to publication.

Scientists receiving funding from Coca-Cola were able to negotiate on the terms of the contract, according to the analysis, and the authors did not find any evidence in the documents they compiled that the company actually halted any studies that appeared unfavorable.

For Michael Siegel, a professor of Community Health Sciences at the Boston University School of Public Health, the language in these contracts goes against standard research ethics. “Saying the company has the right to interfere with presentation of research, that they can change things, to me, that’s a violation of research ethics,” he says. “A lot of universities would not allow that. My university would not allow me to sign such a contract.”

The language in the contracts obtained by the study are a concrete and extreme example of how industry funding can shape research, Siegel says. But there are other, subtler ways, he notes, that companies use science to their advantage—and they likely all are reasons why research shows that industry-funded studies are more likely to provide favorable evidence for that industry than comparable studies funded by other means.

Funding research can be a public relations move, and can also give companies ammunition to push back on studies or policies that might be bad for them. “You’re contributing towards marketing of those products even though it’s not your intention,” he says.

Companies can also use research funding to skew the types of research questions that are asked, wrote Lisa Bero, chair of medicines use and health outcomes at the University of Sydney, in an email to Popular Science .

“We have found that funders can influence entire bodies of evidence by supporting research that distracts from the harms of their products (eg, Coca-cola funding research on physical activity rather than sugar),” she said. “While it may seem logical that corporate interests would fund research that will favour their products, this can produce an imbalanced evidence base and may not be in the interest of public health,” Bero said.

In 2015, Coca-Cola was criticized for funding studies that were thought to downplay the effects sugary drinks have on the rise in obesity rates. Just last year, a large National Institutes of Health study meant to understand if a serving of alcohol a day provides any health benefits was shuttered after The New York Times reported that the majority of the money that funded the study came directly from the alcoholic beverage companies.

In their paper, Steele and her colleagues called for researchers to provide the research agreements with companies along with their published research. “Without seeing the contract and the rights corporate funders retain, it’s hard to judge influence, so we call for journals to require authors to disclosure research agreements so that readers can assess their influence on researchers and their work,” she said. The authors also call for a registry of industry-funded studies that were terminated before they were completed.

Siegel, though, says he’d like to see it go a step further. “I don’t think it’s enough to kind of have better reporting. I think there should be policies that preclude this type of thing,” he says. “Where if there’s any stipulation by which companies can interfere, you can’t do that.”

The strategies used by companies to skew and obfuscate nutrition research to their benefit are well established, Siegel says, and similar to those used by tobacco companies. “It’s a really good analogy too why and how they’re able to control the research agenda,” he says. That control is one way they try and prevent laws and regulations—like a soda tax , for example—from affecting their business.

“That, ultimately, is the purpose,” Siegel says. “To fend off policies that would be detrimental.”

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• Conclusions:

Supplementary material

Evaluating coca-cola’s attempts to influence public health ‘in their own words’: analysis of coca-cola emails with public health academics leading the global energy balance network.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 August 2020

• Supplementary materials

We evaluate the extent to which Coca-Cola tried to influence research in the Global Energy Balance Network, as revealed by correspondence between the company and leading public health academics obtained through Freedom-of-Information (FOI) requests.

US state FOI requests were made in the years 2015–2016 by US Right to Know, a non-profit consumer and public health group, obtaining 18 030 pages of emails covering correspondence between The Coca-Cola Company and public health academics at West Virginia University and University of Colorado, leading institutions of the Global Energy Balance Network. We performed a narrative, thematic content analysis of 18 036 pages of Coca-Cola Company’s emails, coded between May and December 2016, against a taxonomy of political influence strategies.

Emails identified two main strategies, regarding information and messaging and constituency building, associated with a series of practices and mechanisms that could influence public health nutrition. Despite publications claiming independence, we found evidence that Coca-Cola made significant efforts to divert attention from its role as a funding source through diversifying funding partners and, in some cases, withholding information on the funding involved. We also found documentation that Coca-Cola supported a network of academics, as an ‘email family’ that promoted messages associated with its public relations strategy, and sought to support those academics in advancing their careers and building their affiliated public health and medical institutions.

Coca-Cola sought to obscure its relationship with researchers, minimise the public perception of its role and use these researchers to promote industry-friendly messaging. More robust approaches for managing conflicts of interest are needed to address diffuse and obscured patterns of industry influence.

In 2015, the New York Times revealed that Coca-Cola funded a global network of scientists, the Global Energy Balance Network (GEBN), ostensibly to divert attention from the contribution of sugar-sweetened beverages to obesity epidemic, instead blaming inadequate exercise ( Reference O’Connor 1 ) . A year later, a senior official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was found to have communicated with a former Coca-Cola executive, strategising how to convince the WHO to collaborate with the food industry to promote the same message ( Reference Gillam 2 ) .

These revelations raised concerns that Coca-Cola seeks to influence public health researchers to promote its interests, consistent with other evidence that the food industry has sought to influence public policy ( Reference Brownell and Warner 3 – Reference Nestle 5 ) . Recent concerns focus on industry funding of science on sugar-sweetened beverages ( 6 ) , with evidence that studies funded by industry are more likely to report conclusions favourable to the industry’s position ( Reference Bes-Rastrollo, Schulze and Ruiz-Canela 7 , Reference Lesser, Ebbeling and Goozner 8 ) . Such findings contrast with extensive evidence that sugar-sweetened beverages increase childhood obesity ( Reference Ludwig, Peterson and Gortmaker 9 – Reference Ebbeling, Feldman and Chomitz 14 ) .

Apart from a few leaked sources ( Reference Pfister 15 ) , there is little access to Coca-Cola’s internal documents, in contrast to tobacco industry documents ( 16 , Reference Capewell and Lloyd-Williams 17 ) . A series of recent studies have begun analysing emails identified through Freedom-of-Information (FOI) requests. One recent study found that the Principal Investigator of the Coca-Cola funded International Study of Childhood Obesity, Lifestyle and the Environment may not have accurately declared conflicts-of-interest ( Reference Stuckler, Ruskin and McKee 18 ) . Another found that Coca-Cola believed it to be in a ‘war’ with the public health community ( Reference Barlow, Serôdio and Ruskin 19 ) . Finally, a more recent investigation of one exchange among former senior executives of Coca-Cola revealed they advocated for a deliberate and coordinated approach to influence scientific evidence and expert opinion ( Reference Sacks, Swinburn and Cameron 20 ) .

Here, we identified public health researchers funded by Coca-Cola who played leading roles in the GEBN at two public institutions, West Virginia University and University of Colorado (UC), identified in Coca-Cola’s ‘Transparency List’ of grantees ( 21 , Reference Serôdio, McKee and Stuckler 22 ) and a New York Times investigation ( Reference O’Connor 1 ) , and performed state FOI requests for their communications with The Coca-Cola Company. We evaluate these documents to assess how Coca-Cola sought to portray its relationship with those researchers it funded against a taxonomy of food industry activities to influence politics as identified by Mialon and colleagues ( Reference Mialon, Swinburn and Sacks 23 ) .

Source of data

Following publication of the New York Times investigation, we asked whether Coca-Cola sought to influence the research it funded. We examined the list of who Coca-Cola funds in the GEBN ( Reference Morse, Barrett and Mayan 24 ) looking for public institutions that would be required to release information under FOI laws. James Hill (UC) was president and Steven Blair (University of South Carolina) was Vice-President of the GEBN, co-Vice-Presidents were Gregory Hand, at West Virginia University, and John Peters from UC. Thus, during 2015 and 2016, US Right to Know (USRTK) made FOI requests to assess potential links between Coca-Cola and public health academics (i.e., FOI). An online screening tool from the United Kingdom National Institute for Health Research indicated that ethics approval was not required, as the study involved secondary data.

Specifically, two main FOI requests were filed by USRTK, a non-profit consumer and public health organisation that aims to increase transparency and accountability in the US food system. A full list of donors is available here: http://usrtk.org/donors/ , and the executive director of USRTK is a co-author of the paper.

First, on 17 July 2015 USRTK filed a request with the UC for emails sent or received by John Peters, professor at UC Anschutz Health and Wellness Center, regarding Coca-Cola, the GEBN and individuals affiliated with it. Eleven thousand seven hundred and fourteen pages of correspondence were received on 24 March 2016. USRTK also filed to UC on 15 July 2016 for emails sent or received by James Hill, Founding Executive Director of the UC Anschutz Health and Wellness Center, from staff or employees of Coca-Cola. One thousand three hundred and thirty-four pages were received on 28 October 2016. However, responses have, as of September 2018, yet to be received from University of South Carolina. Second, USRTK filed request on 14 August 2015 to West Virginia University for emails sent or received by Gregory Hand, then Founding Dean of the West Virginia University School of Public Health, seeking exchanges regarding Coca-Cola, the GEBN and individuals affiliated with it. Responses were received as blocks of email exchanges of varying lengths and responses, rather than discrete, individual email messages. USRTK received 4982 pages on 26 January 2016.

Taken together, this yielded 18 030 pages which reflect, at the time of writing, to our knowledge the largest publicly available source of data of Coca-Cola’s interaction with academics. We undertook iterative searches of documents between May 2016 and December 2016. Emails were manually read in date order, interpreted and thematically coded by an experienced, qualitative researcher (PS). A second researcher (DS) independently reviewed and validated the coding. No differences were found, as the themes were straightforward. These were subsequently presented, where applicable, according to the strategies, practices and themes identified in Mialon et al., including ‘information and messaging’, ‘financial incentive’, ‘constituency building’, ‘legal’, ‘policy substitution’ and ‘opposition’.

We sought to achieve validity and reliability in several ways ( Reference Morse, Barrett and Mayan 24 ) . We discussed selection and interpretation of the material within the research team, seeking to minimise personal biases that may have influenced our findings, with interpretation of all documents checked by at least one other researcher. Following best practices in qualitative research, we report all source material cited in the main text (not all correspondence received) directly and in full in online Appendices so that our interpretations are reproducible and accessible. Second, we note potential bias in sampling, which results from some FOI requests being unfulfilled and from some documents having been destroyed. Third, we created a clear decision trail to ensure that interpretations were consistent and transparent.

As far as possible, given space constraints, we provide specific dates of email exchanges, positions of persons involved and quote directly. To enable reproducibility, all source material cited in the main text (not all correspondence received) is available in a series of Web Appendices, numbered below as A1-42. Fourth, we actively sought to refute our findings to the extent possible. Emails that were not included reflected those containing no substantive content relevant to the research question or were those repetitive of existing points. Box 1 summarises names and affiliations of those included.

Box 1. List of names and affiliations (applicable at the time of reference)

David Allison, Professor and Associate Dean, University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Public Health,

Rhona Applebaum, Vice President and Chief Health & Science Officer, The Coca-Cola Company

Edward Archer, Obesity Theorist, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Nutritional Obesity Research Center

Steven Blair, Professor, University of South Carolina and Vice-President of the Global Energy Balance Network

Celeste Bottorff, Vice-President of Global Health & Wellbeing Initiatives, The Coca-Cola Company

Karen Galentine, Director of Development, West Virginia University School of Public Health

Yoni Freedhoff, Assistant professor of family medicine, University of Ottawa

Gregory Hand, Founding Dean, West Virginia University School of Public Health and Vice-President of the Global Energy Balance Network

James Hill, Professor of Pediatrics & Medicine, University of Colorado Anschutz Health and Wellness Center, Director of the Center for Human Nutrition

Kathleen Jaynes, Director of Development, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

Bill Layden, co-founder and partner, FoodMinds, a public relations firm specialising in food and nutrition, consulting for the Global Energy Balance Network

Stacia Lupberger, registered dietitian and GEBN Project Manager, University of Colorado Anschutz

Teresa Nass, public relations, West Virginia University School of Public Health

John Peters, Professor, University of Colorado Anschutz Health and Wellness Center and Vice-President of the Global Energy Balance Network

Joanna Price, Director of Public Affairs & Communications, The Coca-Cola Company

Amelia Quint, Director of Communications, Global Energy Balance Network

Clyde Tuggle, Chief of Public Affairs and Communications Officer, The Coca-Cola Company

Stacey Stevens, Senior Vice-President, FoodMinds

Two main overarching strategies of the framework by Mialon and colleagues were identified, involving ‘information and messaging’ to shape the research agenda and evidence and ‘constituency building’ to establish a network of researchers and key opinion leaders. Following this framework, we observed that each overarching strategy was in turn associated with several specific practices, such as the transparency of Coca-Cola as a funding source and the existence of an informal but potentially influential network of researchers with links to the company. This section now explores these mechanisms in detail, discussing Coca-Cola’s interests in the work of academic researchers and the key individuals and organisations involved.

Strategy 1. Information and messaging

Obscuring coca-cola as the funding source.

Email correspondence appeared to indicate efforts to minimise the role of Coca-Cola as a funding source. This included mechanisms such as diversifying the number of partners and institutions as well as seeking ways to avoid disclosing the magnitude of Coca-Cola financing. In February 2015, Yoni Freedhoff (assistant professor of family medicine at University of Ottawa and obesity expert) emailed Amelia Quint (GEBN communications director) asking about the GEBN’s funding source. On 26 February 2015, Quint emailed a group of scholars and industry representatives (Steven Blair; Gregory Hand; John Peters; James Hill, then Founding Executive Director of the UC Anschutz Health and Wellness Center; Rhona Applebaum, then VP and Chief Health & Science officer at Coca-Cola; and Celeste Bottorff, then Vice-President of Global Health & Wellbeing Initiatives at Coca-Cola), requesting permission to issue a statement drafted by Bill Layden, co-Founder and Partner at FoodMinds (a public relations firm specialising in food and nutrition that consulted for the GEBN) and an expert in nutrition science and policy. John Peters responds to the email with advice on the best course of action (A1):

We are certainly going to have to disclose this [Coca-Cola funding] at some point. Our preference would be to have other funders on board first (…). Right now, we have two funders…Coca Cola and an anonymous individual donor. (…) Jim [Hill] and Steve [Blair], does including the Universities as funders/supporters pass the red face test? (A2)

Emails also identified an apparent reluctance to reveal the scale of Coca-Cola’s funding. John Peters emailed Kathleen Jaynes (Director of Development at UC Anschutz Medical Campus) on 6 February 2015 asking whether the UC Foundation had a policy ‘about disclosing the amount of any gift’. He explains the reason for his question:

We are managing some GEBN inquiries and while we disclose Coke as a sponsor we don’t want to disclose how much they gave. Some foundations have policies on this. (A4)

There were other concerns about how to acknowledge Coca-Cola’s funding publicly. In correspondence between Applebaum, Peters, Blair, Hand, Hill, Quint and Bottorff, on 6 February 2015, the group debates alternative phrasings for disclosing funding on GEBN’s website. These include the terms ‘gift’, ‘grant’, ‘unrestricted grant’ and ‘unrestricted education gift.’ Peters concluded: ‘I am not sure about the use of Grant v . Gift. Might Grant imply there is agenda attached vs. gift seems less tethered?’ (A5).

Emails also reflect on disclosure of Coca-Cola’s role and its impact on public perception. In preparing for the launch, the Steering Committee had to decide whether or not to disclose the funding amount received from the company. Describing the events to Bill Layden (FoodMinds public relations firm), in an email sent on 3 March 2015:

TCCC [The Coca-Cola Company] was pretty adamant re the downside [of acknowledging Coca-Cola funding in the press release of the GEBN]. (…) This was about making sure the story started with what we are about and not just a funding story…which will happen soon anyway. (A7)

John Peters, Stacey Stevens (Senior Vice-President of FoodMinds) and Bill Layden (FoodMinds) seem to have anticipated that this might raise questions and drafted a ‘Spokesperson Q&A’ with answers to challenging questions that the group anticipated. The document was amended by James Hill and Steven Blair, reviewed by Applebaum, vetted by Coca-Cola’s communications’ team and emailed to all aforementioned persons on 8 February 2015 (A8). In response to the question ‘How much money did The Coca-Cola Company put into the initiative?’, a ‘Spokesperson Q&A’ for the GEBN suggests:

As a matter of Colorado state law, we cannot disclose specifics about donations without the express permission of the donor. We do routinely disclose when industry funding is accepted to fund an initiative or a research project. In this case, the gifts from food and beverage companies are unrestricted which means, unequivocally, that the funders neither influence nor control the way the funding is used. (A9)

Shaping the evidence base on diet and public health-related issues

Emails suggest efforts ‘to shape the evidence base on diet and public health-related issues’, a practice associated with the strategy of information and messaging in Mialon and colleagues’ framework. Emails from Applebaum (VP Coca-Cola) to the research group referred to particular lines of research. On 9 October 2013, in response to a BMC Health study on the lack of evidence for weight loss interventions, Applebaum emails James Hill, Steve Blair, John Peters, Gregory Hand, David Allison, Associate Dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Alabama and Edward Archer, from the Nutritional Obesity Research Center, at the University of Alabama:

[we] need to get ahead of this in order not to lose the focus on En Bal--it’s not a simple mass balance--but this is why folks are getting confused – some intentionally… (A19) [note: En Bal refers to energy balance]

One mechanism associated with this practice is to ‘participate in and host scientific events.’ Emails found that senior officials from Coca-Cola offered to coordinate meetings on the GEBN. On 29 June 2015, Stacia Lupberger, a registered dietitian and GEBN Project Manager at the UC, emailed Peters, Blair, Hand, Hill and other supporting staff that she had a productive meeting with Clyde Tuggle (Coca-Cola’s Chief of Public Affairs and Communications Officer) and Joanna Price (Coca-Cola’s Public Affairs & Communications Director), who offered to ‘facilitate meetings with their contacts (& Coca-Cola staff) in various countries (…) to discuss GEBN. (…) Coca-Cola will reach out to their contacts and try to arrange a coffee, lunch or dinner’ (A21).

Strategy 2. Coalition building

Establishing coca-cola’s network of researchers.

The emails between Applebaum (then VP of Coca-Cola) and the academics involved in Coca-Cola-funded research suggest a coalition-building strategy of establishing a close-knit group discussing topics such as recent publications, academic accolades, conferences and keynote speeches, media, basketball and other mundane topics, with a strong spirit of camaraderie and pride in their scientific collaboration and research endeavours. For example, on 26 June 2015, following the news that the West Virginia University School of Public Health had received a Council of Education accreditation, under the leadership of Gregory Hand, Applebaum congratulated Hand and asked whether she could share the news with ‘our [hers and Hand’s) email family’. Hand agreed and, on June 28, she addressed a large group of researchers, presumably the ‘email family’, to share the announcement of the Council of Education accreditation (see appendix for original email) (A14). It was the second time Applebaum used the expression ‘email family’ when addressing these researchers (A15). And on 17 October 2014, Gregory Hand asked Applebaum by email ‘are things going well at my favorite company?’ (A16).

Coca-Cola appeared willing to strengthen the public health institutions concerned. For example, in an email Hand sent to Celeste Bottorff (then Vice-President of Global Health & Wellbeing Initiatives at Coca-Cola) and Teresa Nass (a public relations specialist, which helps create and maintain a favourable public image as well as writing press releases and fund-raising, at the West Virginia University School of Public Health), on 21 December 2014, Gregory Hand (at the time Dean), thanks Bottorff for Coca-Cola’s pledge to support his effort to develop a communication plan to put the School of Public Health ‘on the map and educate the state as to what public health is’ and why the school is important: ‘I can’t tell you how much we appreciate your willingness to extend your expertise to help us out. (…) I know how much you have to offer us, and we do appreciate it.’ (A49).

Hand also emails Applebaum on 11 June 2015 explaining how Applebaum would receive an invitation to become a member of the Visiting Committee of the School of Public Health at West Virginia University from the Vice President of Health Sciences, and how Dean Hand regarded her as a great asset who could ‘offer a unique perspective’ in ‘teaching the next generation of public health leaders’. In discussing this affiliation with colleagues at West Virginia University, Hand appears to reflect on the intentions of Coca-Cola. He writes to Karen Galentine, the Director of Development at West Virginia University’s School of Public Health, forwarding correspondence with Applebaum about the invitation to join the School, and writes about Applebaum: ‘And yes, she has an agenda ☺’ (A50).

Establish relationships with policymakers

Emails contained evidence of practices associated with ‘coalition-building’, including to establish relationships with key opinion leaders and health organisations and to establish relationships with policymakers. In some cases, these two practices appeared conjoined, as the academe–Coca-Cola partnership facilitated contacts with other entities, including politicians, industry and community groups and researchers.

For example, Hand’s role as Founding Dean of West Virginia University School of Public Health may have involved political engagement. In an email sent to Alison Patient, Senior Director of Corporate Affairs at Coca-Cola and former Chief Counsel for the House Finance Committee of West Virginia Legislature, in January 2015:

Thank you Rhona for the introduction. As usual, ‘I owe you.’…Hello Alison [Patient]…I look forward to your insights into West Virginia. While I’m very new here, my role has immediately put me into the political arena (already dozens of emails and phone calls and the governor hasn’t even published his budget yet) (A22).

In turn, Applebaum offered to introduce Dean Hand to influential individuals and organisations, such as the CEO of the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, linked to The Physical Activity Council. Steve Blair asked Applebaum whether she knew anyone at The Physical Activity Council, a potentially ‘great group for GEBN to work with’. Other groups were also identified as useful contacts in Applebaum’s response to Blair:

Also op[portunity] via Anne Flannery who’s now President/CEO of Boys and Girls Clubs of Northwest Indiana – Let me know to connect. Last – can try a call into Tom Cove directly at SFIA [Sports & Fitness Industry Association] (…). He’s the CEO (A23).

Academics could also broker contacts with other medical and public health organisations. On 14 October 2014, Applebaum emailed Hill and Blair commissioning a review on public–private partnerships for the US and European Endocrinology journals. She proposed a collaboration with several external organisations, including the GEBN, which she suggested could help insulate against potential criticisms:

Then [after the partnership is established] the # of experts and reputable orgs is too large for any naysayers to cull the pack and attack. (A42)

In summary, these interactions seemed to provide mutual benefit to Coca-Cola and researchers that went beyond individual research projects.

Our analysis reveals a series of strategies, practices and mechanisms employed by Coca-Cola to influence the academic community and general public to promote its interests. Specifically, we observed two overarching strategies contained in the framework of Mialon and colleagues. First, we found evidence of ‘Information and Messaging’ strategies and associated practices. These practices included an attempt to divert attention from The Coca-Cola Company’s role as a funding source in research; diversifying funding partners; and, in some cases, downplaying the amount of funds it donated. Second, there was evidence of a ‘coalition-building’ strategy, through which Coca-Cola supported a network of academics that could promote messages associated with its public relations strategy and sought to support those academics in advancing their careers and building their affiliated public health and medical institutions.

As with any content analysis of email documents obtained through FOI, our research has several limitations. First, our analysis cannot be comprehensive because it draws on FOI requests, rather than documents discovered through court proceedings which may be more comprehensive. Second, our analysis investigated Coca-Cola documents involving two public institutions. Thus, our findings pertaining to a small set of institutions cannot generalise to all segments of the industry. Future research is needed to investigate the role of other partners in the GEBN, including PepsiCo, and other institutions which fund researchers and may have vested interests. Third, we make no judgement on whether any influence led to bias. That would be much more complex, requiring assessment of questions not asked and measures not used, and goes far beyond the scope of this research. Finally, to address the potential criticism that these quotes are taken out of context, we have reproduced the email exchanges in full in an online appendix to facilitate reanalysis by others. We also searched for evidence that would falsify our interpretations and support an alternative hypothesis. For example, we sought to find emails in which Coca-Cola was open and transparent about sources of funding, their quantity and its associated roles in the GEBN but we were unable identify such evidence in the document set.

Our findings regarding Coca-Cola’s relationship with two public institutions are consistent with other anecdotal findings of industry efforts to influence and support research which promotes its interests. In South Africa, Coca-Cola funded the Institute for Race Relations to conduct research on a proposed sugar tax ( Reference Ismail 25 ) . The resulting policy paper opposed sugar-sweetened beverage taxes, but the conflict of interest was not disclosed ( Reference Roussea 26 ) . Recently, in December 2016, the Annals of Internal Medicine published a review of sugar-related research funded by the International Life Science Institute claiming that dietary sugar guidelines are not ‘trustworthy recommendations’ ( Reference Erickson, Sadeghirad and Lytvyn 27 ) , partly in response to the publication of the WHO’s sugar guideline revision ( Reference Stuckler, Reeves and Loopstra 28 ) . This review attracted criticism based on scientific flaws and conflict-of-interest statements ( Reference Schillinger, Tran and Mangurian 29 , Reference Schillinger and Kearns 30 ) . The International Life Sciences Institute was funded by food and beverage companies, including Coca-Cola, Dr Pepper Snapple Group, PepsiCo and Nestle, and, despite claims that the study was conducted ‘independently’, the study notes that the protocol was ‘reviewed for scope clarifications and approved by ILSI [International Life Sciences Institute]’. In 2015, Rhona Applebaum stepped down as Coca-Cola’s chief scientific officer after revelations in the New York Times that under her leadership Coca-Cola initiated research funding to downplay the role of sugar-sweetened beverages in obesity ( Reference O’Connor 31 ) .

One strength of our analysis is that it goes into greater detail than was possible in earlier news stories and places the findings within the broader context of corporate influences on health. However, this activity fits a pattern that has been seen in recent activities in attempting to combat sugar taxes, creating close ties and networks with scientists and seeking to exert ‘soft power’ on politicians and civil servants to undermine public health policy initiatives ( 32 ) . Such efforts to influence public health research policy are not unique and have been observed in tobacco and alcohol industries as well as multiple global health actors, including international financial institutions and philanthropic foundations ( Reference Geneau, Stuckler and Stachenko 33 – Reference Stuckler, Basu and McKee 36 ) .

One notable observation was what appeared to be attempts to obscure the source and amount of funding, as well as its role. Coca-Cola’s official public relations response to inquiries about funding sources was to claim that they could not disclose specifics about funding. However, to our knowledge there are no restrictions on releasing information about Coca-Cola’s contribution to the funding of the GEBN or the size of the contribution; the Colorado Revised Statutes specifically exempt only ‘institutionally related foundations’ from disclosure as part of the Colorado Open Records Act process.

Taken together, our research has important implications for managing potential competing interests in health research. First, the nuanced discussion we reveal about acknowledging funding shows that conflict-of-interest statements may not capture the full scope of conflicts and may be subject to misinterpretation. Analogous to the growing practice of data sharing, there is a case for requiring funding contracts to be made available on request or including them in an online appendix. Second, Coca-Cola appears to seek out and support researchers who hold views favourable to its position, rather than to pressure researchers to change their views. This enabled a ‘meta-narrative’ about the causes of obesity that downplays the role of Coca-Cola products and emphasises alternative intervention strategies such as to increase physical activity which are favourable to the industry’s position. Taken together, these efforts appear to form a ‘public information campaign’ ( Reference Rennie 37 ) to persuade the public, launched by Coca-Cola, and they are consistent with a search for credibility from drawing on researchers’ scientific capital. With the GEBN, the emails demonstrate a network of scientists whose research focused on ‘physical inactivity’ as a major, if not the main cause of obesity ( Reference Katzmarzyk, Barreira and Broyles 38 ) . More immediately, our findings, and those of others ( Reference Kearns, Schmidt and Glantz 39 ) , highlight the importance of examining the source of funding of individual studies and when combining studies, as in meta-analyses.

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements: None. Financial support: D.S. and P.S. are funded by a European Research Council Grant: 313590-HRES. D.S. is also funded by the Wellcome Trust. P.S. is funded by the Independent Social Research Foundation. G.R. is funded by the non-profit organisation US Right to Know, engaged in advocacy and research, with grants from the Organic Consumers Association ($807 500), Dr Bronner’s Family Foundation ($500 000), Laura and John Arnold Foundation ($392 600), Westreich Foundation ($60 000), US Small Business Administration (loan) ($57 731), Schmidt Family Foundation ($50 000), CrossFit Foundation ($50 000), Thousand Currents ($42 500), Panta Rhea Foundation ($20 000), Community Foundation of Western North Carolina ($15 000), ImpactAssets ReGen Fund ($10 000), Janet Buck ($5000). Conflicts of interest: None to declare. Authorship: D.S. and G.R. conceived of the study. G.R. performed the FOI requests. P.S. led the analysis and created the first draft. All authors contributing to the analysis, interpretation and writing of the paper. Ethics of human subject participation: Not applicable.

For supplementary material accompanying this paper visit https://doi.org/10.1017/S1368980020002098

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• Volume 23, Issue 14
• Paulo Serodio (a1) , Gary Ruskin (a2) , Martin McKee (a3) and David Stuckler (a3) (a4)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1368980020002098

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Digital Innovation and Transformation

Mba student perspectives.

• Assignments
• Assignment: Competing with Data and…

COCA COLA LEVERAGES DATA ANALYTICS TO DRIVE INNOVATION

Given the size of its operations, Coca Cola generates a substantial amount of data across its value chain – including sourcing, production, distribution, sales and customer feedback. Over the years, the company has embraced Big Data to drive its business strategic decisions.

Coca Cola is the world’s largest beverage company, with over 500 soft drink brands sold in more than 200 countries. Every day, the world drinks more than 1.9 billion servings of their beverages including Coke, Diet Coke, Fanta, Sprite, Dasani, Powerade, Schweppes, Minute Maid and more. [i]

According to a Forbes article, Coca Cola was one of the first globally recognized brands, outside of the tech sector, to embrace Big Data. In 2012, its chief big data officer, Esat Sezer, said “Social media, mobile applications, cloud computing and e-commerce are combining to give companies like Coca-Cola an unprecedented toolset to change the way they approach IT. Behind all this, big data gives you the intelligence to cap it all off.”

More recently, Greg Chambers, global director of digital innovation, has said “AI is the foundation for everything we do. We create intelligent experiences. AI is the kernel that powers that experience.” [ii] It is quite clear that data analytics and AI have been woven into the fabric of Coca Cola.

In a world that is increasingly dynamic, with changing customer behavior, Coca Cola is betting on Big Data to remain relevant.

Pathways to a Just Digital Future

How Coca-Cola uses Big Data

Coca Cola has been investing extensively in research and development, especially in artificial intelligence, to better leverage the mountain of data it collects from customers all around the world. This effort has helped the firm better understand consumer trends in terms of flavors, and customer’s preference for healthier options in certain regions.

In addition, given Coca Cola presence in 200 plus countries with varying customer trends and the rise of innovative brand, it has become increasingly important for the beverage company to understand and track the evolving taste of its customers and introduce a social consciousness to its product offerings.

Product development using data analytics and innovative channels

In 2008, Coca Cola unveiled a new fountain drink machine, which allowed customers to prepare drinks, mixing a variety of flavors, from their smart phone. With smart phones, people can order exact percentages of different mixtures and flavor additions and save them for next time. Based on monitoring data collected from this self-service soft drinks’ fountains, Coca Cola launched Cherry Spirite as a new flavor.

Given the prevalence of smart phones and how it has been woven into the fabric of our daily lives, Coca Cola sort to leverage this platform to connect and engage with customers in a deeper way.

These freestyle fountain machines, which generated invaluable insights into customer preference, led to launch new brands and flavors. “We discovered that there were a lot of people that really preferred Cherry Sprite. This channel has become a powerful outlet for the introduction of new brands or flavors.” Thomas Stubbs, VP/Engineering and Innovation at Coca Cola. [iii]

Coca Cola also uses data to inform how its sources for raw materials. For example, the company accesses data about weather, crop yields, pricing, and taste, combined with satellite imagery, to inform when and how they source oranges for juices. [iv] This data informs an algorithm that matches products to local customer tastes and ingredient availability. [v]

Social data mining

Coca Cola has over 100 million followers on Facebook and 35 million on Twitter. Their vast reach has expanded even further thanks to AI, as they’re able to analyze the web for mentions of their brand across the Internet.

In 2015, for example, they were able to determine that Coca Cola products were mentioned online once every two seconds. Having access to this information helps them understand who their customers are, where they live, and what prompts them to discuss the brand. They could also use AI image technology to identify when photos of their products were uploaded to social media, and then serve people ads based on the images they uploaded. According to company representatives, such targeted ads are four times more likely to be clicked on than other methods of targeted advertising. These techniques might lead to original advertising created by AI technologies, such as “automated narratives” according to a Coca Cola marketing executive. [vi]

Coca Cola is increasingly betting on data analytics and AI to drive its strategic business decisions. From its innovative free style fountain machine to find new ways to engage with customers in a meaningful way, Coca Cola appears to be well-equipped to remain relevant in the future.

[i] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/09/18/the-amazing-ways-coca-cola-uses-artificial-intelligence-ai-and-big-data-to-drive-success/#57347fe578d2

[ii] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/09/18/the-amazing-ways-coca-cola-uses-artificial-intelligence-ai-and-big-data-to-drive-success/#57347fe578d2

[iii] https://www.warc.com/newsandopinion/news/coke_taps_insight_from_freestyle_machines/40312

[iv] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/09/18/the-amazing-ways-coca-cola-uses-artificial-intelligence-ai-and-big-data-to-drive-success/#57347fe578d2

[v] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/09/18/the-amazing-ways-coca-cola-uses-artificial-intelligence-ai-and-big-data-to-drive-success/#57347fe578d2

[vi] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/09/18/the-amazing-ways-coca-cola-uses-artificial-intelligence-ai-and-big-data-to-drive-success/#57347fe578d2

Student comments on COCA COLA LEVERAGES DATA ANALYTICS TO DRIVE INNOVATION

Great sharing. Interesting to know that Coco cola is using AI in customer analysis and detecting cola photoes. I am wondering for a CPG company with cost constrain, how much would Coco cola willing to spend in Tech(AI) investment?

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Is It Worth Investing in Coca-Cola (KO) Based on Wall Street's Bullish Views?

Investors often turn to recommendations made by Wall Street analysts before making a Buy, Sell, or Hold decision about a stock. While media reports about rating changes by these brokerage-firm employed (or sell-side) analysts often affect a stock's price, do they really matter?

Let's take a look at what these Wall Street heavyweights have to say about Coca-Cola ( KO Quick Quote KO - Free Report ) before we discuss the reliability of brokerage recommendations and how to use them to your advantage.

Coca-Cola currently has an average brokerage recommendation (ABR) of 1.52, on a scale of 1 to 5 (Strong Buy to Strong Sell), calculated based on the actual recommendations (Buy, Hold, Sell, etc.) made by 21 brokerage firms. An ABR of 1.52 approximates between Strong Buy and Buy.

Of the 21 recommendations that derive the current ABR, 15 are Strong Buy and one is Buy. Strong Buy and Buy respectively account for 71.4% and 4.8% of all recommendations.

Brokerage Recommendation Trends for KO

This means that the interests of these institutions are not always aligned with those of retail investors, giving little insight into the direction of a stock's future price movement. It would therefore be best to use this information to validate your own analysis or a tool that has proven to be highly effective at predicting stock price movements.

With an impressive externally audited track record, our proprietary stock rating tool, the Zacks Rank, which classifies stocks into five groups, ranging from Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) to Zacks Rank #5 (Strong Sell), is a reliable indicator of a stock's near -term price performance. So, validating the Zacks Rank with ABR could go a long way in making a profitable investment decision.

Zacks Rank Should Not Be Confused With ABR

Although both Zacks Rank and ABR are displayed in a range of 1-5, they are different measures altogether.

The ABR is calculated solely based on brokerage recommendations and is typically displayed with decimals (example: 1.28). In contrast, the Zacks Rank is a quantitative model allowing investors to harness the power of earnings estimate revisions. It is displayed in whole numbers -- 1 to 5.

It has been and continues to be the case that analysts employed by brokerage firms are overly optimistic with their recommendations. Because of their employers' vested interests, these analysts issue more favorable ratings than their research would support, misguiding investors far more often than helping them.

In contrast, the Zacks Rank is driven by earnings estimate revisions. And near-term stock price movements are strongly correlated with trends in earnings estimate revisions, according to empirical research.

In addition, the different Zacks Rank grades are applied proportionately to all stocks for which brokerage analysts provide current-year earnings estimates. In other words, this tool always maintains a balance among its five ranks.

There is also a key difference between the ABR and Zacks Rank when it comes to freshness. When you look at the ABR, it may not be up-to-date. Nonetheless, since brokerage analysts constantly revise their earnings estimates to reflect changing business trends, and their actions get reflected in the Zacks Rank quickly enough, it is always timely in predicting future stock prices.

Is KO Worth Investing In?

Looking at the earnings estimate revisions for Coca-Cola, the Zacks Consensus Estimate for the current year has increased 0% over the past month to $2.85.

Analysts' growing optimism over the company's earnings prospects, as indicated by strong agreement among them in revising EPS estimates higher, could be a legitimate reason for the stock to soar in the near term.

The size of the recent change in the consensus estimate, along with three other factors related to earnings estimates, has resulted in a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) for Coca-Cola. You can see the complete list of today's Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) stocks here >>>>

Therefore, the Buy-equivalent ABR for Coca-Cola may serve as a useful guide for investors.

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years of refreshing the world

The Coca‑Cola Company has been refreshing the world and making a difference for over 138 years. Explore our Purpose & Vision, History and more.

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We've established a portfolio of drinks that are best positioned to grow in an ever-changing marketplace.

From trademark Coca‑Cola to Sports, Juice & Dairy Drinks, Alcohol Ready-to-Drink Beverages and more, discover some of our most popular brands in North America and from around the world.

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OUR PLANET MATTERS

Our purpose is to refresh the world and make a difference. See how our company and system employees make this possible every day and learn more about our areas of focus in sustainability.

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We aim to improve people's lives, from our employees to those who touch our business to the many communities we call home.

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Catch up on the latest Coca‑Cola news from around the globe - from exciting brand innovation to the latest sustainability projects.

• WHAT OTHERS ARE READING
• Taste the Transformation: Coca‑Cola and Grammy-Award Winning Artist Rosalía Break Boundaries With Limited-Edition Coke Creation
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How Coca‑Cola is Rethinking Disruptive Innovation to Anticipate Tomorrow’s Tastes

A team of technical experts is helping Coca‑Cola North America launch breakthrough beverages in emerging categories – from kombuchas, to cultured ciders, to keto-friendly smoothies, to cold-brew coffees – in record time.

The Transformational Innovation Team partners with brands and business units to take new drinks in unfamiliar spaces to commercialization in a handful of months. A rotating group of specialists from Research and Development (R&D), Quality, Safety & Environmental Sustainability, Technical Commercialization and Scientific and Regulatory Affairs (SRA) is helping the company navigate uncharted territory by challenging existing approaches to innovation – from sourcing and seeking approval on new ingredients, to producing beverages in emerging categories, to bringing new brands to market – through an agile, test-and-learn launch model.

“We combine the best of what entrepreneurs do and the best of what Coca‑Cola does,” explains team lead Susan Zaripheh. “Entrepreneurs dream of having the power of our brands and scale of our distribution network, and large global companies like Coke want to be able to innovate quickly, iteratively and stay competitive in emerging spaces.”

Inspiring a Mindset Shift

This means challenging organizational processes and breaking down boundaries. “Capability isn’t an issue at Coca‑Cola,” Zaripheh says. “Our talent and people are top notch. What we’re trying to do is inspire a mindset shift and push the company into new or emerging segments consumers want us to explore.” 

The Transformational Innovation Team has partnered with the Minute Maid Business Unit – which manages Coca‑Cola North America’s juice and plant-based beverage portfolio – to develop several breakthrough products in 2019, including Cidewinder, which boasts similar digestive health benefits as kombucha but with less sugar. The cultured juice brand, which leveraged a novel ingredient and process from a third-party company, is being tested in select grocery and convenience store outlets.

“Cidewinder is an example of how we’re moving quickly, but deliberately, by running small market tests before investing significant time or resources,” Zaripheh said. “Some of the brands we’re helping to launch will not reach scale, but that’s the point of what we’re doing. We’re pushing the company to move faster than ever and to use real-time market data to make informed decisions and gain important learnings for the future.”

Following the Consumer

Odwalla, meanwhile, tapped Zaripheh’s team to help develop a zero-sugar, keto-friendly smoothie using trending ingredients like MCT oil and coconut cream – bringing the first-of-its-kind offering in the Coca‑Cola portfolio to life in less than six months.

“Our partnership with the Transformational Innovation Team has added tremendous value to our decision making,” said John Hackett, president, Minute Maid Business Unit. “With their support, we’ve been able to test emerging spaces quickly and gain real-world learnings. Direct guidance from the market enables us to focus our investments on ideas and innovations that strongly resonate with consumers.”

The team also partnered with Honest to launch two category-crossing innovations – Honest Kombucha and Honest Cold Brew Coffee . Honest is building a master brand beyond its core tea business and, as part of that strategy, decided in 2019 to enter the fast-growing – and complex – kombucha segment. “Part of the Honest brand’s strategy is to ‘own the fridge’ of the Millennial family by offering lower- sugar, organic beverages for all occasions,” said Rafael Acevedo, vice president, Tea Portfolio, Coca‑Cola North America. “Given the rising popularity of kombucha, it made sense for a brand known for making tea to enter this space.”

The Transformational Innovation Team helped Honest enter this space by end of the year in a limited test, then quickly aligned on a brand proposition and execution strategy. 

‘Being Nimble Doesn’t Mean Cutting Corners’

The teams also partnered to secure all required approvals in time to produce and ship samples of Honest Cold Brew Coffee to the Natural Products Expo East tradeshow in only 10 weeks. The brand received great feedback from attendees.

Acevedo called the collaboration “a great example of how the company is approaching innovation differently and prioritizing agility to achieve efficient results.”

However, Zaripheh insists, the team takes steps to move quickly without compromising safety or quality, or taking due-diligence shortcuts. “Being nimble doesn’t mean cutting corners... it means approaching challenges from different angles and finding ways to parallel-path and operate with flexibility,” she added. “We hear a lot about speed to market these days. But speed by itself isn’t a competitive advantage – anyone can go fast. The key is identifying potential big bets, starting small and learning before making significant investments and launching at scale. That’s what we do.”

Creating a Ripple Effect

‘power is not having one team dedicated to transformational innovation, but seamlessly implementing learnings and frameworks across the organization and fueling new capability to drive growth. our goal is to get the system to move faster and deliver more disruptive innovation… to take on meatier projects and platform-able ideas and bring them to life.’.

This group of “intrapreneurs” is on a mission to create a ripple effect by sharing learnings with Coca‑Cola North America teams leading innovation projects across the system.

“Power is not having one team dedicated to transformational innovation, but seamlessly implementing learnings and frameworks across the organization and fueling new capability to drive growth,” said Simon Yeung, SVP, Innovation and Stewardship, Coca‑Cola North America, noting that the team consulted and shared learnings with the sparkling water team spearheading the AHA brand launch . “Our goal is to get the system to move faster and deliver more disruptive innovation… to take on meatier projects and platform-able ideas and bring them to life.” 

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