The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [62]
That explanation might have held more water if the tendency to create bromate through ozonation wasn’t already well known in the industry. Just two years before, the FDA had warned manufacturers to use care in ozonation and test finished products for the presence of the chemical. An industry trade publication at the time went so far as to provide a formula for how much bromate can be formed given the amount of bromide in the source water. As a result of the warnings, Nestlé stopped using ozonation for Perrier in June 2001, even as Coke and Pepsi continued the process.
Whether through carelessness or arrogance, Coke had turned a public relations hiccup into a disaster, as Britons now vocalized their anger at the American company. “Should I Really Despise Coca-Cola?” read a typical headline, and there were plays on Coke’s own branding, such as “Things Get Worse with Coke” and “Dasani: It’s a Real Disaster.” In the face of such criticism, Coke declared an end to its European conquest, swallowing a cost of more than $45 million and giving up dreams of converting the French.
For the Europeans, it was the perfect opportunity to stick it in America’s eye during a time when the continent was chafing under George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and anti-American sentiment was at an all-time high. Any Coke exec tempted to write off the fiasco as the cranky proclivities of another continent, however, was due for a rude awakening back on American shores.
It’s a blustery spring day in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where sets of four blue Dixie cups are arranged on a folding table in the middle of a city square. Three of the cups contain bottled water from the country’s most popular brands—Dasani, Aquafina, and Nestlé’s Poland Spring. The fourth cup is full of tap water from a café up the street. One by one, passersby stop by to sample them and guess which is which. If you think it’d be easy to tell the difference between the bottled water and the tap, you’d be wrong. The success rate of folks is only slightly better than random. Typical is Joe Marsden, a Cambridge resident, who stares in sullen disbelief at the table after identifying tap water as Dasani. “I thought I would have at least gotten Dasani or Aquafina right because I drink them the most,” he says. “I couldn’t tell the difference at all.”
Dubbed the “Tap Water Challenge,” the update of the Pepsi Challenge is run nationally by young activists belonging to the group Corporate Accountability International (CAI), which has made bottled water the latest front in what it sees as the excesses of corporate power. Like anti-soda lawyer Dick Daynard, CAI cut its teeth in the fight against Big Tobacco in the 1990s, when it waged a boycott against Kraft, parent company of Philip Morris. However, the group dates back to two decades before, when it was originally founded as the Infant Formula Action Coalition (INFACT) to attack Nestlé for its promotion of baby formula over breast milk overseas. After a bitterly fought campaign, Nestlé eventually agreed to stop pushing its formula in 1984. Now, twenty years later, Nestlé was profiting off another product that the activists thought should be distributed for free, as one of the four largest bottled water producers along with European giant Danone (parent company of Evian), PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola.
If it seems a stretch to brand soft drinks as the next tobacco, then bottled water seems an even more unlikely villain. Here’s a product with no harmful tar or sugar, no addictive nicotine or caffeine. Yet CAI was affronted by the way in which the