The Disturbing History of Coca-Cola

coca-cola spend endless billions on advertising every year but will never once try to sell you on their products they sell an idea happiness harmony togetherness but some would say it's a distraction from the disturbing truth there are a lot of serious accusations against the company that they've caused disease droughts exploitation and much much worse so buckle up we're going on a journey through coke's incredible history spanning three different centuries we'll be examining how coca-cola really became one of the most recognized brands ever and at what cost because one thing is for sure you don't build

an empire selling sugar water by telling people the truth king-size coca-cola gives you that refreshing new feeling there's nothing like ice-cold coca-cola back in the 1880s there was a bit of a backlash against doctors and people started using home remedies instead and a bunch of deceitful entrepreneurs pounced on this opportunity and started creating potions and elixirs that they claimed had a wide variety of medical benefits the truth was that they were mostly dangerous ineffective concoctions of various different chemicals but with no regulation they could claim whatever health benefits they wanted so business was booming one

popular patent medicine was called vin mariani which contained a mix of wine and cocaine that supposedly cured almost any ailment or sickness whatsoever as long as you drank three glasses every day and one person who absolutely loved this drink was a man named john pemberton a war veteran who had been severely injured in battle the doctors had actually thought he was gonna die and dosed him up a morphine to try and mask the pain for his final few hours but john somehow survived however he did develop a serious morphine addiction which is why when he

discovered vim mariani he became hooked on the drink he thought it was helping him overcome his morphine addiction and of course after drinking it he really did feel better but that's not because it was medicinal it's because it contained wine and cocaine but since pemberton loved the drink and he was a chemist himself he decided to create his own version and in 1884 he launched french wine coker which was basically a ripoff of vin mariani with a couple more ingredients added and yeah this knock-off drink would soon become coca-cola now to be fair to pemberton

he wasn't some snake or salesman trying to deliberately rip people off he really believed in his products however pemberton's timing was terrible just a year later prohibition hits with many states banning alcohol pimberton had to take the wine out of his drink and replace it with carbonated water but this left the drink tasting very bitter so he added a huge amount of sugar to counteract that now that the wine was removed he could continue selling french wine coker but they needed a new name luckily pemberton's bookkeeper frank robinson came up with a catchy sounding suggestion

coca-cola now the company would later claim that the name doesn't mean anything and it's just a nice sounding alliteration of course this isn't true the name was a reference to the drink's two main ingredients the colonel which contained caffeine and the coca leaf which contained cocaine to this day coca-cola deny their formula has ever contained cocaine despite the fact it's extremely well documented it contained the coca leaf which contains cocaine eventually by 1929 they would find a way to remove all the active cocaine from the coca leaves once it became clear that cocaine wasn't quite

the magical medicine they'd first thought but back in the 1880s nobody was worried about the cocaine in the drink so now that the wine had been removed coca-cola could continue being sold the only problem is not many people were buying it pemberton was still trying to sell people on the medicinal aspect of the drink early ads for coca-cola described it as a harmless wonderful brain tonic that relieves headaches and upset stomachs but sales were slow because there were countless other patent medicines offering the same thing so cope didn't really stand out meanwhile pemberton was becoming

increasingly ill his pain was worsening his addiction growing stronger and by 1888 john pimperton was dead the tragedy is he had absolutely no idea that his drink would soon become one of the most well-known drinks on the entire planets [Music] right before pemberton died he sold the company for two thousand three hundred dollars to an ambitious workaholic named asa candler candler then began buying out any outstanding shares owned by other people so he could have the company fully under his control later investigations would find that canelo may not have really bought all those shares as

some of the documents contained forged signatures we may never know exactly what happened because kendall even had the early records of the company burned most likely to cover his tracks but all that was irrelevant because by the 1890s asa candler was fully in charge of coca-cola but remember the drink wasn't actually that popular at first so candler started filling the town with coke-branded banners billboards and placards they even painted the logo on barnes and basically plastered the coca-cola logo on anything they could so people started seeing the logo everywhere they went but one of coke's

first strokes of marketing genius was to contact every pharmacy in the area get a list of their top customers and send them a free coupon for coca-cola the logic was that by giving people a free trial they'd become customers for life especially since the drink contained several addictive chemicals however it soon became clear that advertising coca-cola as a medicine was the wrong strategy rather than just market to people who were ill they could market it to everyone by simply positioning it as a tasty relaxing drink that anyone could enjoy this had the added benefit of

disassociating coca-cola from the patent medicine industry which would soon face a lot of scrutiny once people realized that most of their claims were complete lies coca-cola's mass marketing strategy was a huge hit as the sales started to grow rapidly candler reinvested more and more money into advertising and even started paying movie stars and athletes to endorse the drink is that coca-cola yes sir so much of coke success has been about creating such a positive wholesome image in people's minds of what the drink represents and what better way to do that than pay popular celebrities to

recommend the drink they even started heavily featuring santa claus in their ads at christmas always holding a coke to make the connection in young kids minds between coca-cola and the joy of christmas of course none of this marketing may sound particularly special but at the time it was coca-cola pioneered many marketing strategies that soon became commonplace for example sex sells may be an advertising cliche these days but very few mainstream companies exploited this as much as coke did with their use of coca-cola girls attractive women who always had a coke in hand coke even created

a statistical department to analyze car traffic and movement in supermarkets so they could determine the most effective places to put their ads and as new technology was introduced from radios to tv coke was always ready to throw money into advertising on these new mediums to ensure everyone everywhere knew about its products initially though coke was mostly sold in soda fountains this allowed coke to save huge amounts of money because they simply had to distribute the syrup and then it would be mixed with carbonated water by whoever was selling it so the shipping and distribution cost

for coke were much lower but then one day two lawyers named benjamin and joseph came to ace a candler with an idea let's bottle it candler thought this was a really dumb idea bottling was very expensive and complicated but benjamin and joseph said they would take on all the cost and risk themselves so canda agreed and signed a contract granting them full bottling rights for coca-cola for just a nominal fee of one dollar candler figured he had nothing to lose in the unlikely scenario that this bottling idea actually went well it simply meant he would

sell lots more of the coke syrup of course as we now know bottled coke was an unimaginably huge success customers loved bottle coke so at first this was great for candler it meant the bottlers were buying loads and loads of coke syrup from him and this was a great revenue stream for the business but there was one very major problem because canada hadn't believed bottling coke would work he'd put almost no thought into the contract he signed so there was no time frame set on the deal and no mention about changing the price if the

cost to produce the coke syrup increased what this meant is that asa candler had given the bottlers a never-ending contract to supply them with coke syrup at the same low price no matter how much the cost of the raw ingredients went up this would lead to multiple lawsuits between coke and its bottlers over the next few decades the coca-cola company would end up paying countless millions of dollars to buy back some of the rights that candler had sold away for just one dollar but back in the early 1900s this wasn't a worry for candler because

sales of coca-cola were higher than ever and growing every year of course this wasn't really because of the product there were countless very similar drinks out there and remember coca-cola was a knock off of another drink anyway the reason for the rapid growth was marketing every single year coca-cola spent more and more money on advertising and every single year sales of coca-cola grew however arguably coca-cola's biggest successes of all would come from a pretty surprising source once the second world war broke out it was announced sugar would be rationed however coca-cola made the absurd claim

that they should be exempt from the sugar rationing because coke was an essential wartime product and even more absurdly the government agreed this was largely because coca-cola spent huge amounts of money on lobbying the government coke funded countless studies to try and convince the government of koch's benefits and that they claim that coke would keep up morale and provide an energy boost for soldiers eventually the us government agreed to appoint a coca-cola executive onto the rationing board who then gave coca-cola an exemption from sugar rationing whilst every other company had to reduce the quantities of

sugar they used during the war and coca-cola didn't stop there coke's president publicly promised we will see that every man in uniform gets a bottle of coca-cola for five cents wherever he is and whatever it costs our company now by selling at this low price coca-cola would lose money on each drink sold and yet this decision was absolutely genius firstly in the eyes of the public and especially soldiers it created a strong connection between coke and the war effort and helped coke gain huge public support and goodwill in the minds of millions of americans coke

and patriotism became connected coke seized upon this opportunity to run new wartime ads showing soldiers holding coke bottles but not just that behind the scenes coke had made a deal with the government about getting money to help them set up coca-cola bottling plants overseas they claimed it would spread american influence and boost soldier morale but what it really meant is the taxpayer was helping to fund coke's international expansion during the war 64 coke bottling plants were set up around the world on different continents mostly funded by the governments in fact the technicians who installed coca-cola

plants during the war were deemed just as vital as the people who were fixing tanks and planes and because coke was now accessible to soldiers wherever they were in the world they started sharing the drink with the locals helping coke's expansion into even more new countries the soldiers were so thankful for coke sending them a taste of home during the hell of war that they became the drink's biggest advocates the u.s military basically became a coca-cola sales force introducing new people to coke wherever they went so what the war had a devastating impact on most

companies and people coca-cola were expanding faster than ever all over the globe as of today there's only two countries in the world that don't sell coke cuba and north korea and the deals coke made during the war were largely responsible for coke's rapid global expansion across the planets now there's just one tiny little problem with this heartwarming idea of coca-cola as a patriotic company looking out for american soldiers which is that during the war the coca-cola company was supplying nazi germany with coke as well yep whilst in the u.s coke were preaching about supporting the

troops in germany they were busy trying to disassociate themselves from anything american and often showed the coke logo alongside swastikas coke was even distributed at hitler youth rallies and advertised on nazi educational pamphlets coca-cola was literally playing both sides after all germany was a huge market for them however as the war progressed restrictions were introduced that cut off the supply for many goods to germany for most multinational corporations this meant they couldn't sell their products to germans anymore but the head of coke's biggest bottling operation in germany a man named max kaif had an idea

to counteract these restrictions he got local chemists to create a new drink that was vaguely similar to coke but rather than being made with the coke syrup which could no longer be imported it was instead made from the leftover scraps from other food produce like apple fiber this new drink would later be named fanta and since so many other drinks had been banned because of the war fanta became a huge hit in nazi germany some sources even suggest that kaifu's forced labour from concentration camps to help produce it what we know for sure is that

at the end of the war the profits of this new fanta drink all went back to the coca-cola headquarters and max was given a promotion in the coca-cola company and by 1955 coke was selling fanta in many different countries around the world of course like so much of their history hope tried to distance themselves from what really happened however coca-cola would never have been able to expand across the world so rapidly if they didn't have a team of polygons who could speak multiple languages which brings us to our video sponsor lingoda euros biggest online language

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security vault for dramatic effect but the formula isn't that secret it's on wikipedia of course coca-cola's success has very little to do with the formula you could create a clone product but you're never going to be able to compete with them let's look at why one day a teacher at a new school suggested to the headmaster they had some healthier choices to the school vending machines like some fruit juices she was horrified when she was told it wouldn't be possible because the school had an exclusive contract with coca-cola coke paid the score three thousand dollars

a year or around one dollar per student in order to dictate which product the school sold it turns out contracts like this had been struck with countless different schools as part of coke's cradle to grave strategy basically the best way to make someone a coke customer for life is to ensure they drink it from the earliest age possible one coke marketing chief pointed out that it's far easier to get them at a young vulnerable age to become a cult customer for life than try to convert them later on when they're older in some of the

contracts the school could even earn additional money by selling more coca-cola to its kids and since many schools were underfunded and in desperate need of money they would shield poke's products to their children this is just one of many ways kokov managed to circumvent the rules about advertising to children another way is that coke has produced countless collectors items including barbie dolls playing cards board games delivery trucks and other toys that they claim are for adults then of course there's all the christmas ads deliberately tying santa and coca-cola together in the minds of impressionable children

in 1982 coke even bought columbia pictures so they could easily integrate product placement into their films although they later sold the film studio and decided just to pay other companies for coke product placement instead but product placement in family films is a clever loophole that allows them to circumvent rules about targeting children and it works research has shown that even for babies coke is one of the most recognized brands in the world but back in the 80s a problem was emerging for coke more and more data was piling up about the negative health effects coke

was having there'd always been concerns about coke rotting your teeth but new data was showing the serious effects coke was having on obesity diabetes and a string of other health issues for example one study of children found that even just one extra sugary soft drink a day gave them a 60 greater chance of becoming overweight another showed that if babies are exposed to a high intake of sugar they will be conditioned to depend on sugar for the rest of their lives for a brand that is built upon its image of wholesomeness it was a major

setback being so directly connected to such a wide variety of health problems especially since coke was actively pursuing a strategy of offering bigger and bigger portion sizes of its drink it also didn't help that the drink contained caffeine coca-cola claimed that this was purely for taste purposes but in blind taste tests people couldn't tell the difference with a non-caffeinated version this left some people wondering why coke continued to add this addictive caffeine to a drink that's being sold so much to kids however the soda industry had come to a similar realization that the tobacco industry

had come to it's easier to cast doubt on the science than debate on policies because you can always just claim that more research is needed so behind the scenes coke was pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into studies to cast doubts on the connection between soft drinks and obesity and diabetes unsurprisingly the studies paid for by coke generally claimed that coke wasn't causing many health problems however they conveniently didn't mention who'd funded those studies coke also spent endless millions of dollars on lobbying state officials against sugar taxes and stronger dietary guidelines they reportedly made deals

behind closed doors about donating to certain politicians campaigns in favor of special treatment for coke they also continue to throw billions of dollars into sponsoring athletes and major sporting events to try and create the illusion of a connection between great athletic performance and coca-cola however coke good sense they could only stall for so long before the science became too undeniable to dispute so they began expanding into other drinks for example a bottled water brand called dizzani however this immediately backfired when it launched in the uk as it was quickly discovered that this expensive bottled water

had essentially just come out of a local tap now coke tried to defend itself by explaining they run the water through some kind of purification process but this just made things worse because it turns out they'd accidentally added a bad batch of minerals that contaminated the water as a result of half a million bottles in circulation had to be withdrawn from shops over safety fears in other words coke's attempt to produce a healthy drink and ended up with them being accused of selling expensive contaminated tap water however this wasn't the worst of coke's contamination problems

in 1999 in belgium children started becoming ill after drinking coca-cola eventually leading to the recall of all coke products france also reported more than 100 people sick from bad coke and temporarily banned their products as well the company was very slow to respond to any of these issues and was accused of not taking the problem seriously enough then in india coke was accused of contaminating the groundwater with wastewater koch actually admitted they had a wastewater issue but insisted they fixed the problem however later independent tests still found traces of toxic sludge produced at coca-cola's indian

plants which reportedly has made the land barren killed local animals that drank it and destroyed the livelihoods of local farmers the center for science and environment in new delhi also announced it found pesticide in both coke and pepsi that have consumed over a long enough period could cause cancer birth defects and severe disruption to the immune system one woman from a local village told journalists before this company came our lives were comfortable and beautiful after the company came within six months the taste of the water changed another said when we bathe our heads swim it

pains and we scratch all over and coke's environmental record continued to get worse you see the company also runs bottling plants in several drought-plagued areas and officials have blamed coke for a dramatic decline in available water this problem was particularly bad in parts of mexico because between 2000 and 2006 mexico's president was a man who'd formally been the head of coca-cola mexico the president started giving his former company favorable treatment after getting elected and during his presidency he gave coca-cola 27 water concessions which many claim allowed coke to pollute water and even steel water owned

by indigenous people one local resident claimed there used to be a lot of water here now there is a scarcity they are not paying anything and they are just taking our water away during this presidency coke sales increased 50 and became the most popular drink in the country critics claim this is yet another example of coke benefiting from shady deals with politicians of course coca-cola has always had to acquire vast quantities of natural resources in order to succeed in fact it's the largest sugar buyer in the world however as the 90s arrived coke began to

face yet more negative publicity for example in mexico city one shopkeeper said she was told her deliveries of coke would stop unless she removed an alternative cola from her store meanwhile in brazil coke trolled a new type of vending machine that would increase the price of coke depending on how hot it was outside also to further boost sales figures and trick investors coke engaged in channel stuffing forcing distributors to buy more syrup than they needed at the end of quarters to make coke's profits look better than they really were however the backlash against coke reached

its peak when in 2003 a campaign was launched called stop killer coke that claimed the coca-cola company was responsible for the murder of union members who worked in coke bottling plants in colombia now cope deny this and the exact truth remains unclear but what we do know is that since 1989 countless unionized workers employed at the coca-cola bottling plants in colombia have been killed and many more have received death threats in fact in 2001 the international labor rights fund filed a lawsuit against coca-cola butlers claiming they'd openly engaged death squads to intimidate torture kidnap and

even murder union officials in latin america a few years later another lawsuit was brought about by guatemalan workers alleging that they and their families at the cocom bottling plant had been victims of violence after the workers decided to join unions they'd wanted to join a union because some workers were earning just 15 per day for 15 hour shifts however again there were allegations of kidnapped torture and murder of union leaders and their family members now coca-cola argued that the guatemalan plant is independently owned and coke had absolutely no knowledge of these incidents and coke genuinely

may be telling the truth here we don't know if they actually colluded or knew about the violence or if they just indirectly benefited but either way the unions have been decimated by the attacks and threats and in parts of latin america coco has been referred to as the sparkle of death what we do know for sure is that the deeper you look into coke's past the more you chip away at their wholesome image they try to present for example ace asa candler the entrepreneur who incorporated the coca-cola company and played a pivotal role in popularizing

the drink once said the most beautiful sight that we see is the childhood labor the younger the boy began work the more beautiful however before we all get the pitchforks out i think it's important to acknowledge that if you look at any giant company with such a long history you're probably gonna find some ethical disasters in their past that's not an excuse but a reminder that business is brutal many of the same criticisms of coke also apply it to many of their competitors and of course coke has done plenty of good for the world too

we can't come to conclusions from just one side of the story it's never black and white what's ironic though is that some of the worst press coca-cola has ever received was nothing to do with any of these moral or legal issues nope folks biggest backlash of all came from changing the taste of their drink the coca-cola company has been offered the chance to buy pepsi's business multiple times including for only fifty thousand dollars in 1933 but coke turned them down instead coke tried to sue pepsi for using the word cola in their ads claiming that

they were trying to rip off coca-cola's products this backfired when pepsi countersued a coke was using anti-competitive tactics to build a monopoly the courts agreed and ruled that kola was a generic term anyone could use however since coke missed their chance to buy pepsi they ended up getting locked in an ongoing marketing battle with them at one point coke and pepsi both started cutting their prices and offering discounts to try and compete with each other but they soon realized this was hurt in both of them whether they made a secret deal behind closed doors or

not is unknown but soon they both reverted back to their normal pricing and tried to compete on advertising instead but eventually pepsi had the simple but genius idea to actually compete on taste in 1975 pepsi launched the pepsi challenge where they gave people two white cups one containing pepsi and one containing coca-cola people didn't know which was which and were encouraged to taste both to see which they preferred the test results showed that pepsi was preferred by slightly more people and so pepsi started using this stat in all of their advertising and all across america

more people denied this was true but when they conducted their own tests they found that pepsi did indeed score slightly higher in a blind taste test meanwhile coca-cola was slowly but steadily losing market share they tried everything huge marketing campaigns and price promotions but every year coke's market share slightly declined and pepsi slightly increased it started to seem that perhaps the pepsi challenge was right the problem was that more people simply preferred the taste of pepsi and thus coca-cola began an incredibly secret mission they were going to change coke's formula after rigorous testing and trials

they discovered a new cola formula that consistently performed better than both original coke and pepsi over and over they repeated the blind taste test and the data was clear the new formula was more popular and so just short of coca-cola's 100-year anniversary they did the unthinkable they changed the coca-cola formula and replaced it with new coke coca-cola is about to announce what it calls the most significant development in its history pepsi cola says coke is merely trying to match pepsi's success these two products pepsi and coke have been going at it eyeballed eyeball and in

my view the other guy just blinked and immediately the chaos began every single day thousands of phone calls and letters arrived at coke's offices they were a mixture of distraught people begging for the old version of coke mac and people who were downright furious coco had the nerve to take away the original formula coke expected the uproar would soon die down especially once people actually tried the new formula but the outrage simply intensified the media was equally full of outrage reports and at the coke phone lines were constantly jammed with complaints for months when new

coke advertisements were shown on giant screens and stadiums people loudly booged it became popular to hate new coke of course many of the people complaining hadn't even tried the new formula as one coke employee put it we could have introduced the elixir of the gods and it wouldn't have made any difference it was soon very clear that taste hadn't been the issue it didn't matter if new coke technically tasted better in blind taste tests coke success had never been about taste in the first place thanks to its incredible marketing the world viewed coca-cola as an

old friend a piece of everyday life for around 100 years coke had been present never changing no matter what was going on in the world it was an icon and changing something that meant so much to people was considered a betrayal one angry letter commented that changing coke is like making the grass purple another claimed you've taken away my childhood even months later the protests were not dying down and it soon became clear the company had to revert back to the old formula they had made a gigantic mistake there were very few instances in history

of such strong backlash against the company's decision and yet despite that the new coat disaster ended up being one of coke's greatest marketing triumphs you see when coke caved in and brought back the original formula under the name classic coke suddenly all of the anger turned to euphoria and praise suddenly all the letters and phone calls arriving at the company were filled with adoring fans thanking the company and commenting how much it meant to them one coke marketer said you would have thought we'd invented a cure for cancer immediately after reintroducing the old flavor coke

sales dramatically increased business week named the whole thing the marketing blunder of the decade but some skeptical analysts felt the company had staged the entire thing for publicity and to remind customers how much coke means to them if the whole stunt really was planned it would be one of the greatest marketing strategies imaginable but that was not the case at all new coke was a catastrophic misjudgment by coke they really had thought people would prefer new coke in fact even after they reintroduced the classic version they kept new coke available in shops as well because

they thought once people actually had more time to try the new flavor eventually people would convert to the new formula i'm don keogh president of the coca-cola company when we brought you the new taste of coke we knew that millions would prefer it and millions do and we knew that it would beat the taste of our major competitor and it does what we didn't know was how many thousands of you would phone and write asking us to bring back the classic taste of original coca-cola well we read and we listened and you know the rest

they're both yours the new taste of coke and coca-cola classic your right of choice is back but they were wrong again sales of new coke never improved and eventually it was removed from circulation completely however despite being so completely wrong the end result was that new coke had unintentionally made people realize how much they loved original coke the whole thing helped people feel more attached and loyal to coke than ever before which is why new coke was one of the most successful mistakes ever but here is the craziest part of all this it was proven

time and time again that in a test where people didn't know which drink was which people wrote new coke the best pepsi second and original coke third and yet customers had overwhelmingly decided they wanted original coke they wanted the drink they liked the taste of the least and that is the biggest compliment coca-cola's marketing could ever hope to get the image of cochlear created in people's minds is so powerful that it overrides taste logic or data in many ways coke was still operating off the same principle that the patent medicine industry had used all those

years ago it's not about what your product really is it's about what your customer thinks your product is it's about what it represents and that's the reason coke continued to spend billions and billions on advertising every year even though around 94 percent of the world's entire population recognized the coke logo already and over 2 billion servings of coca-cola is drunk every day coke is built on an image that needs to be constantly reinforced because sure you can hear about coke's devastating impact on the health of children their lobbying of governments and countless controversies they've tried

to sweep under the carpet but does it really make any difference because ultimately poke have never tried to sell you on their sugar water they sell you on the good times friends family and happy memories coke positions itself as an old friend and hey what's a little controversy between friends [Music] [Music]