The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [57]
Daynard found out about the agreement the way most people did—reading the newspaper. “I think there was considerable bad faith on their part,” he says. “They did not tell us they were simultaneously negotiating with another group.” Daynard now thinks their talks were nothing but a sham to stall litigation. Even so, he puts the best face on the agreement—arguing that if not for the threat of a lawsuit, the companies would never have taken even the more modest measure of getting rid of sugary soda within three years. “When we began, we thought that was impossible,” he says.
Even as they were staging a tactical retreat, Coke and Pepsi were able to save face, stressing at the news conference that soda could be part of a well-rounded diet. In the fall, the ABA rolled out a $10 million ad campaign to “educate” parents about the new policy. They failed to mention that some schools with long-term contracts would not be able to participate, at least not without buying out the companies to amend the contracts. One school in Wisconsin learned it would have to pay $200,000 to remove high-calorie beverages from vending machines. The Portland, Oregon, school district was told it would have to pay back $600,000 to remove diet soda after the district’s wellness policy banned them. Local activists with Oregon’s Community Health Partnership cried foul—pointing out that a contract is something that can be renegotiated at any time if both sides are willing. It took six months, however, for Coke to agree to new terms, under which the school forfeited all commissions from drink sales, though it was allowed to keep the up-front fee for signing the contract.
The very public deal has led to perceptions that the school issue had been dealt with, saving Coke’s image and taking the wind out of a push for stronger legislation. Oregon is one of the few states to move ahead with a binding state law against soda in schools after the Clinton soda agreement—pushing through a law similar to California’s tough standards in 2007. Even so, says the health partnership’s Mary Lou Hennrich, an initial proposal to ban sports drinks and marketing fizzled when legislators, supported by the school administrators, pointed to the Clinton guidelines as the new standard. “Their attitude was that now you’ve crammed this down our throats and we can’t have sugar-sweetened beverages for sale, haven’t you done enough?” A similar phenomenon happened in Utah, when the new state law to ban soda was specifically written with the Clinton guidelines in mind. In Oregon, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, the local affiliates of the American Heart Association told Simon that their national headquarters had requested they stand down in supporting tougher laws. (A past president of the AHA denies this, saying that affiliates weren’t counseled either way.)
By 2008, thirty-four states had some combination of regulation or legislation curtailing soda in schools. Just eleven banned all sugar-sweetened soda; the rest allowed some portion of soda sales for some portion of the day. Only a few go beyond the voluntary guidelines adopted by the Clinton agreement: six ban sports drinks, five set calorie limits, and only one provides any kind of penalties for noncompliance. On a federal level, an effort led by Senator Tom Harkin and Representative Lynn Woolsey to pass a bill to ban soda and sports drinks as foods of “minimal nutritional value” failed in 2007.
In the three years since the first announcement by the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, there’s mixed evidence that the voluntary guidelines pushed by industry have been successful.