The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [49]
Momentum grew after Domac and her students met directly with a representative from Coke’s bottler, who reluctantly agreed to stock half of the slots with juice and other more healthful beverages (but only if the school accepted a 15 percent commission on those items, compared to 36 percent on soft drinks). When Domac triumphantly took a French film crew to show them the vending machines a few weeks later, she found the company had changed virtually nothing. “I had asked them to meet us halfway, and now I just embarrassed myself,” she remembers. “That was it, they were out.” She adopted more confrontational tactics, running for and winning a spot on the parents’ advisory council and bringing students in to raise the issue during meetings.
It was money, however, that eventually did the talking. Domac and her students applied for a state health grant in 2002 to serve as a model school for nutrition. When they received a windfall of $250,000, the administration agreed to cancel the deal with Coke on a trial basis to see if the new strategy could work. “You can scream all you want about how healthy beverages prevent obesity and diabetes, but unless you can show a school that it has enough money to run its programs, that’s going to fall on deaf ears,” Domac says. With the new money, the students worked to get an array of juices and soy beverages into the vending machines at last, along with baked chips and trail mixes. While vending machine sales initially dipped, they eventually rose higher than before—$6,163 in 2002 versus $7,358 in 2003, according to Domac, who still keeps the figures.
Flush with their sense of victory, the student health club took the issue to a higher authority even before those numbers came in—arguing for a ban on soda in the entire Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest school district in the country, with more than 700,000 students. Again, they used creativity to make their point, storming meetings dressed in necklaces of plastic fruits while performing a foot-stomping chant, “Take Back the Snack.” “Facts are great, but they are also quite boring,” says Domac. “Having kids being vivacious and happy with a positive message went a long way.” The students made impassioned speeches about the new health craze at their school, at the same time marshaling data from a new UCLA study showing that 40 percent of students in the Los Angeles district were already obese.
Coke waged a creative campaign of its own, threatening to pull its sponsorship of the district’s Academic Decathlon events at the school in a blunt attempt to silence opposition. But in the end, the grassroots strategy worked: In August 2002, the Los Angeles Unified school board unanimously voted to cut their contract with Coke. Starting with the 2004 school year, the district would sell no soda at all, stocking its vending machines with only milk, water, and drinks with at least 50 percent juice and no added sweeteners.
After three years of struggle, the students had won—an empowering and humbling experience. “I’ve never been part of anything like that where people so young can have so much sway,” says Faisal Saleh, one of the student leaders, who is now majoring in theater arts at Santa Monica State College. “That’s something I take pride in.” The success in Los Angeles, however, was hardly the end of the battle against Coke in schools—in fact, it was only the beginning. Even while Coke was losing ground in California, the company soon roared back, determined