The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [78]
Goizueta’s mantra was “Think globally, act locally,” a phrase first attributed to him and only later appropriated by social activists. Under his leadership, Coke concerned itself with the minutiae of foreign markets, installing automatic drink dispensers on street corners in Tokyo and slapping thousands of Coke stickers on every available surface in Bordeaux. “Our success,” Goizueta wrote, “will largely depend on the degree to which we can make it impossible for the consumer around the globe to escape Coca-Cola.”
Again, politics took a backseat. When activists threatened a boycott of Coke if it didn’t divest from South Africa’s repressive apartheid regime, Coke brushed them off. It could ill afford to lose the country, which accounted for 70 percent of sales on the continent. When the Atlanta-based Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)—the civil rights group established by Martin Luther King, Jr.—joined the call, however, Coke compromised by moving its concentrate plant supplying the bottlers to black-ruled Swaziland, and establishing a $10 million fund to support African-Americans administered by Nobel Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
That mollified the SCLC, even as Coke—and the apartheid government—continued to profit from its South African bottling franchises. For years after his release from prison, Nelson Mandela denied Coke’s offers of travel aid, and even required hotels to remove Coke products from his sight during his stay. The company assiduously courted the sainted leader, putting its highest-ranking African-American executive on the case. By 1993, Coke was contributing heavily to Mandela’s campaign to be elected president of a new South Africa, and he was flying around on one of Coke’s corporate jets. A year later, Coke returned to South Africa, picking up where it had left off by assuming ownership of the company it had contracted with after it departed.
By 1988, more than three-quarters of Coke’s profits came from outside the United States. That year, it topped $1 billion in profits for the first time in history. While it had taken a hundred years for it to reach that mark, it doubled its profits to $2 billion just five years later, in 1993, when it became the sixth most valuable company in the United States. When new CEO Doug Ivester took over in 1997, he wasted no time exploring ways to scrape more profits from foreign countries—including an attempt to pilot a new vending machine in Brazil that would vary its price based on the temperature. “This is a classic situation of supply and demand,” Ivester told a Brazilian newspaper reporter. In hot weather, “the utility of an ice-cold Coca-cola is very high. So it is fair that it should be more expensive.” The comments resulted in an uproar, not only in Brazil but also in the United States, where they were reprinted and lambasted on late-night talk shows.
Lost in the same interview, however, was a statement at least as outrageous, and with much more lasting implications. Asked about health concerns regarding Coke, Ivester brushed them off. Sugar, he said, was “a good source of energy, of vitality. . . . We have a very healthy product.” If Coke’s contributions to obesity and disease were apparent in the United States, however, they’d become even more of an issue in the developing world, where a balanced diet is hard to come by even on a good day. Nowhere are those negative effects starker than in Mexico, and nowhere in Mexico is it starker than in Chiapas. It’s here, just a few miles from Chamula, that the latest call for a boycott against the company has emerged.
Even though Mexico was one of the first countries to see Coke served outside its homeland, it wasn’t regularly drunk here until the 1950s, when Coke began the ad blitz to wallpaper the country in red and white. Before then, even the poorest farmers ate a relatively healthy diet of corn and beans. A study two decades later found white bread and Coca-Cola were the two food items campesinos bought as soon as they could afford them—and