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Coke In Your Faucet? - Douglas Daft, executive - Interview
Progressive, The, August, 2001 by Sonia Shah
Bringing new meaning to the term "leaky faucet," Coca-Cola recently announced the development of a system to bring Coke into consumers' homes via a tap on the kitchen sink. This would fulfill former CEO Roberto Goizueta's dream that the "C" on the cold tap would come to stand for "Coke."
In an exclusive interview with London's Sunday Times in March, current CEO Douglas Daft said the company's innovations unit in New York had developed a prototype for the home Coke-on-tap system.
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"You would have water mixing automatically with the concentrate and then connect it all up so that when you turn on your tap, you have Coke at home," explained Daft. Local water would be pumped through a purifier to remove regional differences in flavor, then carbonated and mixed with syrup right at the tap. "There's a lot more to it than that to ensure quality, and it has to be a sealed unit so people can't alter the formula to destroy the value of the brand," Daft added.
Coke has no current plans to sell the units and refused to provide me with more details. Rival drink companies criticized the idea as unrealistic and unnecessary, but Coke is undeterred.
Coca-Cola has long had aspirations to replace water with its sugary beverages. Goizueta, who was CEO from 1981 to 1997, proclaimed in 1986 that "right now, the United States, people consume more soft drinks than any other liquid--including ordinary tap water. If we take full advantage of our opportunities, someday, not too many years into our second century, we will see the same wave catching on in market after market, until, eventually, the number one beverage on Earth will be soft drinks--our soft drinks," according to Mark Pendergrast's For God, Country, and Coca-Cola (Basic Books, 2000).
Or, as the company's 2000 annual report notes, "We're redefining how consumers get hydrated."
With its latest idea, Coca-Cola would more than ever be pitting what Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest has called "liquid candy" against drinking water. But that would be just an extension of the battle Coke has been waging to slake humanity's thirst.
Coca-Cola dominates almost half of the global soft drink market and makes more than three-quarters of its income from overseas sales, according to Coke spokesperson Rob Baskin. Last year, sales growth of its flagship cola in Asia outstripped the company's overall growth. In the first quarter of 2001, Coke sales grew ten times faster in Asia and Africa than in North America, the company said.
There is a huge "potential for significant expansion" in non-Western markets, Daft said in an April 18 company press release.
"Our universe is infinite," wrote Goizueta in the company's 1995 annual report. "We, ourselves, are the key variable in just how much of it we capture."
Pendergrast cites numerous examples of Coke officials pining over the "sweat belt," which they define as those hot, poor countries where Islam and other religions forbid the consumption of alcoholic drinks. But to increase its sales in the Third World market, Coke will have to seize large amounts of what governments around the world have yet to secure--clean, safe, drinking water. According to a November 2000 report on the global water supply by the World Health Organization and UNICEF, more than one billion people around the world don't have access to safe drinking water. To remedy this global dessication, the World Bank has taken steps to lure for-profit corporations into buying the world's ailing water supply systems, much to the chagrin of anti-globalization and human rights activists.
"It is to the benefit of companies like Coca-Cola to allow the quality of water to decline," says Maude Barlow, author of Blue Gold: The Global Water Crisis and the Commodification of the World's Water Supply (International Forum on Globalization, 1999). The company has the bucks to buy water licenses and thus can turn much-needed "blue gold" into its nutritionally valueless soda. "Then the only real alternative for many people are their products," Barlow says.
As the World Bank insists that countries privatize their water distribution, the price of water skyrockets. The ill-fated 1999 privatization of the water supply in Cochabamba, Bolivia, for instance, resulted in water prices that would have absorbed more than half the annual income of local residents. In many parts of the developing world today, says Barlow, people are spending from one-third to one-half of their incomes on obtaining water.
The price of a soft drink--always available, always Coca-Cola--may not look so bad under such circumstances. The vast majority of soft drinks in India are consumed by middle and low income people in small towns and villages, not by richer urbanites, according to a recent study by the New Delhi-based National Council for Applied Economic Research entitled "Economic Contributions of the Soft Drink Industry." These people have widespread access to soft drinks and perceive them to serve "functional needs of thirst-quenching, rehydration, safety, and hygiene," reported the Hindustan Times.
