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Food and drink: More than your average soft drink

Coca-Cola is ‘The Real Thing’ behind a cultural movement

News about the economy got your gears spinning? Need a lift after hearing about the $1.68 billion Intrawest debt? Got a thirst for some kind of relief? Then, hey, reach for the “Pause That Refreshes” here and just about everywhere — a Coke.

Apparently, The Coca-Cola Company — which is how the official corporate name is designated — and Intrawest have renewed their deal to ensure that Coke continues as the official provider of soft drinks and the like at all 10 of Intrawest’s resorts in North America.

Clink, clink, clink…   I can hear the bottles in the backs of the trucks now. They’ll be delivering everything from the many forms of Coke as well as Sprite, Evian and Dasani waters plus their Minute Maid juices to the many restaurants, bars, etc. that dot Intrawest resorts from here to Florida.

Coke is far more than the Red Bull of previous generations. In fact, long before the red bull, and long before the golden arches and just about every other logo you can think of, there was Coca-Cola, emblazoned in that distinctive, cursive white script on a red background, which was based on the handwriting of the inventor’s bookkeeper, Frank. M. Robinson. It remains one powerful brand, selling optimism, hope, and the American dream as culture in corners of the world one could barely imagine even wanting it.

A couple of years back, Constance L. Hays dissected the corporate world of Coca-Cola in her book, The Real Thing: Truth and Power at the Coca-Cola Company. It opens with a scene from the 1994 company presidency of Douglas Ivester in the midst of making a film for Coke’s employees and potential investors. He’s driving to Rome, Georgia, which lies about an hour-and-a-half northwest of Coke’s headquarters in Atlanta, where the product was first invented by pharmacist Dr. John Stith Pemberton in 1886.

Rome, Georgia, never ever to be confused with Rome, Italy, has held the dubious distinction for some time of being the Coke capital of the world.   Residents there consume more of the bubbly brown soft drink per capita than any other place on Earth. Brandchannel.com puts it at 941 eight-ounce servings a year for each average citizen. One can only hope that that figure does not include babies and infants of a certain age.

The average person in the resort town of Phuket, Thailand, by comparison, drinks only about a dozen cokes a year. Hmmm, the salt in those fresh Thai lime drinks must be the competition’s secret. Still, while you are reading this sentence some 128,000 Cokes are being downed around the world.

The point of the Coke road-trip promoter film, at least to people like Ivester and most of his successors and predecessors, was that even though it seems that Coca-Cola was and is everywhere (it was selling over 300 billion bottles a year at the time the film was made back in the early ’90s, Coke’s hey-day), there were still places along the road of Ivester’s cinematic journey that, mysteriously and, one might assume, almost defiantly did not sell Coke.

So much to sell, so many places to saturate seems to have been Coke’s corporate mantra from the get-go. According to Hays, Asa Candler, the Atlanta businessman who eventually bought out all the company shares from old Doc Pemberton, was not content just with selling Coke in “the sugar-craving South”; he wanted to expand it all across America. The next logical step: the world.

The Pepsi-Coke war, she says, was not so much about vanquishing Pepsi-Cola as it was about supplanting every form of beverage   — coffee, tea, milk, even water in some dusty corner of Iran or Malaysia — with The Real Thing. It was all part of the battle between Those Who Drink Coke and Those Who Don’t.

It’s kind of ironic that against the backdrop of the current world economic mess that is raising eyebrows and the issue that perhaps unlimited growth only increases many divides and, realistically, is impossible, implausible and unsustainable, Intrawest has just renewed its deal with a company that has been so driven to grow it’s become a global icon, in terms of branding, growth and cultural influence, comparable to Microsoft.

Let me think about that as I sip my glass of tap water.

 

THE FACES OF COCA-COLA

For better or worse, I’ve pretty much been in the group of Those Who Don’t Drink Coke.

As kids, my parents made us all terrified of the stuff, ascribing to the popular ’50s urban myth that overnight it would dissolve a child’s tooth dropped into a glass of it. Maybe once a year they would buy a family-sized bottle of Coke, and judiciously pour equal amounts into three tiny glasses for each of us kids.

We loved it.

But we vacillated between feeling like we were drinking some kind of illicit contraband, like bootlegged liquor, and a syrupy ambrosia fit for kings and queens. By the time we finished sipping our tiny glasses, we were satisfied.

Ironically, the only certain occasion of our Coke indulgence was at Christmas. I say “ironically” because it’s only now that I realize that the iconic image of a jolly fat Santa Claus that filled our home and all the others in Edmonton, Alberta and Canada back in the 1950s was created and distributed by none other than The Coca-Cola Company.

Since childhood, I confess that I’ve since usually steered clear of the drink and its caffeine — a real challenge that no doubt keeps Coke marketers and focus group analysts awake at night. There was one exception, however, in China years ago when a couple of Danish travelers taught us that a half-can of Coke was very useful for settling the perpetually unsettled traveller’s stomach. Lord knows why, but it worked.

Even my father, not one prone to crazy trends or impulses, swore by it during my parents’ early forays to Cuba in the 1970s. They couldn’t get over all the oil used in cooking and canning, something China was once addicted to, too. Must have had something to do with Communism and adding cheap calories easily.

Even the tinned pineapple was made with oil, my dad grumbled. But a quick hit of Coke would put his troubled innards right again, proving that some things do go better with Coke.

 

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who remembers pulling bottles of Orange Crush out of those pop machines filled with water to keep the contents cool. You can reach her at www.glendabartosh.ca