The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [61]
The marketing worked—by 2003, bottled water was the one bright spot in a disastrous year for Coke. Bottled water sales were up to $8.5 billion overall—and Dasani had passed Perrier, Evian, and San Pellegrino to become the second-best-selling brand behind Pepsi’s Aquafina. And Coke had yet to go international with Dasani—the arena where it always out-fought Pepsi. As the company planned to launch Dasani across the Atlantic, it seemed there might actually be life after soda pop after all.
For its big overseas splash, Coke followed the same playbook it had for its soft drinks a century earlier, tackling the English-speaking world first. The launch for the United Kingdom was planned for March 2004, with drives the following month into Belgium and then France, the ultimate prize. The average French person drank more than twice what an American drank in bottled water, some 145 liters a year. Cracking that market would be a sweet victory for the company. Just a couple of decades after France had introduced bottled water to the United States, America would be returning the favor under the banner of the quintessential American brand. For the UK, Coke spared no expense, pouring £7 million ($13 million) into advertising, trumpeting the slogan “The more you live, the more you need Dasani.” For weeks, billboards around London declared, “Prepare to get wet,” and just before the launch, high-divers plummeted ninety feet with flaming capes into tanks of water to draw attention to the brand.
No amount of theatrics, however, could prepare Coke for what happened next. Just weeks after the launch, a British newspaper broke the story that Coke’s “pure” water was actually bottled in the southeast London suburb of Sidcup, which got its water from the River Thames. It was the equivalent of discovering that bottled water served in New York came from the Hudson. Immediately, Coke came under fire from the Food Standards Agency (FSA), the British version of the FDA, for the improper use of the word “pure.”
Of course, Dasani wasn’t exactly tap water. While Coke might not let prying eyes into one of its water rooms, it touts a multistep scouring to turn pedestrian water into the final product. First, there is “ultrafiltration” to remove particles, followed by a carbon filter to remove odors, and a zap of ultraviolent light to kill bacteria. Most important, it passes through a reverse-osmosis filter—a technique, Coke told the skeptical British public, “perfected by NASA to purify fluids on spacecraft” to remove 90 percent of anything still remaining. Only then does Coke add back in its mineral mix, as the company has oxymoronically explained, to “enhance the pure taste.” Finally, the water is given a dose of ozone to get rid of hard-to-kill parasites such as giardia and cryptosporidium. The result, Coke claimed, was “as pure as water gets.”
Despite such assurances, the launch was a disaster. Soon, Dasani was being handed out for free in train stations and supermarkets in a desperate attempt to win customers. But the death blow was what happened next: Two weeks after the Sidcup jokes started, consumers stopped laughing when Coke tersely announced it was voluntarily recalling half a million bottles of Dasani. The water, it explained, had been contaminated with levels of the carcinogen bromate at 22 parts per billion, twice the amount allowed by the FSA (or FDA).
In the ultimate irony, then, Coke’s water was not only no more pure than London tap, but also