The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [52]
Far from Coke’s glory days in the 1990s, the picture was one of a company willing to do anything, legal or illegal, to sell more soft drinks. Nothing made the company look so bad, however, as its insensitivity on childhood obesity. In one 2003 poll in California, 92 percent of respondents declared obesity a serious problem; 65 percent blamed food and beverage company advertising as an important contributor; and 66 percent felt the best solution was tougher regulation in schools. At the soft drink industry’s year-end meeting, CEO Douglas Daft directly acknowledged the issue, calling obesity the biggest challenge the industry had faced in fifty years. Giving cheer to his fellow executives, however, he assured them “a simplistic piece of government regulation will not solve the problem,” an idea he brushed off as “absurd and outrageous.” But that was exactly what activists were now gearing up to do.
The first anti-soda bill was submitted by longtime health advocate and state senator Deborah Ortiz in California in 2002, shortly after Jackie Domac’s health class booted Coke out of Venice schools. If passed, it would categorically ban all soda in schools K-12. Immediately, Coke’s lobby machine descended upon Sacramento. According to Domac, legislators would slip out the back door while she and her colleagues were waiting to meet them, later emerging in the hall talking with a Coke lobbyist. At the same time, a host of industry-paid experts testified against the bill on nutritional grounds (including one nutritionist representing CCF who did not disclose his affiliation). In the end, the bill passed, but only after being watered down to apply solely to elementary and middle schools, exempting high schools. That effectively gutted the bill, since most soda in California was sold just in high schools anyway.
Over the next few years, the California experience would be repeated over and over in other states, with Coke leading the way to kill anti-soda bills. “When it came to the two major companies, Coca-Cola stood out as the particularly bad actor,” says Michele Simon, head of the Center for Informed Food Choices and author of Appetite for Profit. “They were just nefarious and nasty in their tactics, sending teams of lobbyists to state capitals to lobby hard against the bills.”
The most notorious example of Coke’s lobbying was in Connecticut, where legislators introduced the most sweeping anti-junk food bill to date in 2005, proposing a complete ban on selling anything but water, milk, and juice during school hours. For this battle, Coke and Pepsi spent a combined $250,000 on lobbying, Coke paying $80,000 up front and an additional $8,000 a month to hire Sullivan and LeShane, the most influential lobbyist in the state. Patricia LeShane, in fact, was a large contributor and campaign advisor to Connecticut governor Jodi Rell.
“It’s not a level playing field,” says Simon. “Here we are doing cute things like putting sugar in a bag to show how much is in a can of Coke, and meanwhile, Coke is having these closed-door meetings making deals over campaign contributions. These multinational companies have many times more over the resources than the average mother or teacher or nutrition advocate.” In the debate over the bill, lawyers for Coke, which had the majority of pouring-rights contracts in the state, selectively shared revenue data with legislators in opposition. The debate in the House was the longest in the Connecticut legislature in 2005, stretching for