• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1199 0

raised the prices being offered to schools. “In Kansas City they were getting 67 cents a kid before,” he told one reporter, “and now they’re getting $27.” The major beverage companies do not like DeRose and prefer not to deal with him. He views their hostility as a mark of success. He doesn’t think that advertising in the schools will corrupt the nation’s children and has little tolerance for critics of the trend. “There are critics to penicillin,” he told the Fresno Bee. In the three years following his groundbreaking contract for School District 11 in Colorado Springs, Dan DeRose negotiated agreements for seventeen universities and sixty public school systems across the United States, everywhere from Greenville, North Carolina, to Newark, New Jersey. His 1997 deal with a school district in Derby, Kansas, included the commitment to open a Pepsi GeneratioNext Resource Center at an elementary school. Thus far, DeRose has been responsible for school and university beverage deals worth more than $200 million. He typically accepts no money up front, then charges schools a commission that takes between 25 and 35 percent of the deal’s total revenues.

The nation’s three major beverage manufacturers are now spending large sums to increase the amount of soda that American children consume. Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Cadbury-Schweppes (the maker of Dr Pepper) control 90.3 percent of the U.S. market, but have been hurt by declining sales in Asia. Americans already drink soda at an annual rate of about fifty-six gallons per person — that’s nearly six hundred twelve-ounce cans of soda per person. Coca-Cola has set itself the goal of raising consumption of its products in the United States by at least 25 percent a year. The adult market is stagnant; selling more soda to kids has become one of the easiest ways to meet sales projections. “Influencing elementary school students is very important to soft drink marketers,” an article in the January 1999 issue of Beverage Industry explained, “because children are still establishing their tastes and habits.” Eight-year-olds are considered ideal customers; they have about sixty-five years of purchasing in front of them. “Entering the schools makes perfect sense,” the trade journal concluded.

The fast food chains also benefit enormously when children drink more soda. The chicken nuggets, hamburgers, and other main courses sold at fast food restaurants usually have the lowest profit margins. Soda has by far the highest. “We at McDonald’s are thankful,” a top executive once told the New York Times, “that people like drinks with their sandwiches.” Today McDonald’s sells more Coca-Cola than anyone else in the world. The fast food chains purchase Coca-Cola syrup for about $4.25 a gallon. A medium Coke that sells for $1.29 contains roughly 9 cents’ worth of syrup. Buying a large Coke for $1.49 instead, as the cute girl behind the counter always suggests, will add another 3 cents’ worth of syrup — and another 17 cents in pure profit for Mc-Donald’s.

“Liquid Candy,” a 1999 study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, describes who is not benefiting from the beverage industry’s latest marketing efforts: the nation’s children. In 1978, the typical teenage boy in the United States drank about seven ounces of soda every day; today he drinks nearly three times that amount, deriving 9 percent of his daily caloric intake from soft drinks. Soda consumption among teenaged girls has doubled within the same period, reaching an average of twelve ounces a day. A significant number of teenage boys are now drinking five or more cans of soda every day. Each can contains the equivalent of about ten teaspoons of sugar. Coke, Pepsi, Mountain Dew, and Dr Pepper also contain caffeine. These sodas provide empty calories and have replaced far more nutritious beverages in the American diet. Excessive soda consumption in childhood can lead to calcium deficiencies and a greater likelihood of bone fractures. Twenty years ago, teenage boys in the United States drank twice as much milk as soda; now they drink twice as much