The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [71]
Coca-Cola and its trade association, the American Beverage Association, have lobbied hard against such legislation, arguing that they unfairly single out bottles from all other packages and compete with curbside recycling efforts. “If you take away the incentive for curbside recycling, which oftentimes happens when you take away the materials with the highest value, oftentimes you see the system itself disappear,” says Lisa Manley. Of course, nothing of the sort has happened in the states that do have bottle bills, where public support for them averages around 80 percent.
Sometimes, too, the largesse from the company comes with an implicit threat. Coke entered into a recycling partnership with the city of Miami to provide recycling bins in public places—until the mayor of Miami publicly supported the Council of Mayors resolution to ban bottled water from city functions. According to CAI’s Gigi Kellett, Coke then pulled its part of the funding for the program, leaving the city to pay for its own recycling bins and providing another example, as if one was needed, of how CSR efforts provide cover for other company goals.
Despite its efforts to save the bottled water market by emphasizing environmental sustainability, Coke found itself back where it had been only a few years ago—with a consumer backlash driving down sales. And in a larger instance of “coming full circle,” the one area where bottled water was still growing by 2009 was that in which Coke had originated more than one hundred years before: health beverages. Even while Neville Isdell was rallying for a return to soft drinks in 2005, he was making good on his promise that Coke would eventually carry health benefits.
Coke formed a partnership with Nestlé in 2006 to roll out a green-tea drink it called Enviga, which was “proven to burn calories.” The claim hinged on the antioxidant EGCG, the active component of green tea, which had been found in some controlled tests to speed metabolism. A study by Coke and Nestlé claimed that when thirty-one already thin adults drank Enviga for three days, they burned an average of 100 extra calories on the third day. Even to burn that modest amount of calories, you’d have to drink three 12-ounce cans of Enviga, at between $1.29 and $1.49 each. But Coke was bold enough to say the drink had “negative calories.”
That was too much for the “food police.” Still smarting from being double-crossed on the school soda deal, Coke’s old nemesis CSPI filed a class-action lawsuit against the companies. Coke hedged, claiming ridiculously that it had said only that Enviga burned calories, not that it led to weight loss. “You can stop that, it’s about weight loss,” said a judge, swatting down the distinction during a hearing. In the end, the company cut the calorie-burning claims, and eventually Coke and Nestlé pulled Enviga entirely in the face of poor sales.
The same could not be said of VitaminWater, the leader in a new trend of “enhanced beverages,” which Coke had paid an eye-popping $4.1 billion to acquire through its parent company Glaceau in 2007. VitaminWater promised a cocktail of exotic ingredients—guarana, açai, and green tea—that in another era would seem straight out of the carpetbag of a snake oil salesman. But consumers have literally drunk it up, with sales in recent years growing by double digits, comparable to bottled water sales a few years before (or, for that matter, soft drinks two decades ago). It has even found its way quietly into schools, when the American Beverage Association and the Alliance for a Healthier Generation amended their agreement from allowing sports drinks and juices to allow any “other drinks” with fewer than 66 calories per 8-ounce serving into school vending machines. In all of its advertising of vitamins and health additives, however, Coke failed to advertise one ingredient in VitaminWater: a whole