The Coca-Cola Company is an American multinational beverage corporation founded in 1892 by pharmacist Asa Griggs Candler. Many consumers associate the company with its signature soda in a red can or bottle. In truth, however, The Coca-Cola Company owns a plethora of soft drink, juice, tea, coffee, and other beverage brands.
Diet Coke was later introduced in 1982 as a sugar-free derivative. Together, Coke and Diet Coke comprise two of the top five bestselling sparkling non-alcoholic beverages in the world.
Fanta and Sprite
Fanta and Sprite are two of The Coca-Cola company’s oldest brands.
Fanta was first introduced around 1941 and was the result of trade embargoes against Germany on cola syrup. This necessitated that a new drink is invented made from ingredients available within the country at the time.
Sprite, a lemon-lime soft drink, was introduced twenty years later in 1961 to compete with similar beverage 7 Up.
Dasani, Ciel, and Smartwater
In response to shifting consumer preferences for healthier beverage options, The Coca-Cola Company introduced several bottled water options.
These include:
Dasani – a line of filtered bottled water first released in 1999.
Ciel – purified bottled water sold in Mexico, Angola, and Morocco. The company also released a mineral water alternative called Ciel Mineralizada in several markets.
Powerade is a sports drink that rose to prominence after becoming the official drink of the Seoul 1988 Olympics.
In North American and elsewhere, Powerade competes with Gatorade – a sports beverage owned by PepsiCo.
Innocent Drinks
Innocent Drinks is a company producing smoothies and juices for supermarkets, cafés, and various other food and drink outlets. The company sells juice consisting of whole crushed fruit and does not use fruit concentrates. It also sells vegan nut and oat drinks and coconut water.
Though founded in the United Kingdom in 1998, Coca-Cola took a minor stake in the company in 2009. This stake increased to over 90% in 2013.
Minute Maid and Simply Orange
Coca-Cola acquired Minute Maid in 1960, marking its first acquisition of a non-carbonated beverage brand. Minute Maid is perhaps most associated with orange juice, but the company sells over 100 different juices and juice drinks.
In 2001, the Minute Maid division of Coca-Cola then launched the Simply Orange Juice Company. Simply Orange is a more premium orange juice because it uses computer modeling to blend different orange juice sources and maintain a consistent taste year-round.
Key takeaways
The Coca-Cola Company is an American multinational beverage corporation founded in 1892 by pharmacist Asa Griggs Candler. From a single cola beverage, the company now owns over 500 different brands.
Coca-Cola and Diet Coke occupy two of the top five bestselling carbonated drinks worldwide. Two of the oldest brands the company owns are Fanta and Sprite.
In response to the healthier drink trend, Coca-Cola released Dasani, Ciel, and Smartwater bottled water. The company also owns sports drink Powerade, smoothie brand Innocent Drinks, and orange juice brands Minute Maid and Simply Orange.
Coca-Cola follows a business strategy (implemented since 2006) where through its operating arm – the Bottling Investment Group – it invests initially in bottling partners operations. As they take off, Coca-Cola divests its equity stakes, and it establishes a franchisingmodel, as long-term growth and distributionstrategy.
Coca-Cola’s top investors include Warren Buffet’s company, Berkshire Hathaway, with 9.23% of shares, and other mutual funds like The Vanguard Group, holding 7.9% of shares, and BlackRock owning over 6.45% of shares of the company. Other individual investors like Herbert A. Allen, director of The Coca-Cola Company since 1982, and Barry Diller, Chairman of the Coca-Cola board since 2002. And former CEO Muhtar Kent.
Coca-Cola’s Purpose is to “refresh the world. make a difference.” Its vision and mission are to “craft the brands and choice of drinks that people love, to refresh them in body & spirit. And done in ways that create a more sustainable business and better-shared future that makes a difference in people’s lives, communities, and our planet.”
Coca-Cola is the market leader of the soft drink industry. It is also the most widely recognized brand, with a Business Insider study revealing that a staggering 94% of the world population recognizes the red and white logo. However, Coca-Cola faces significant challenges with increasingly health-conscious consumers and less access to water resources.
The Coca-Cola Company is an American multinational beverage corporation founded in 1892 by pharmacist Asa Griggs Candler. Many consumers associate the company with its signature soda in a red can or bottle. In truth, however, The Coca-Cola Company owns a plethora of soft drink, juice, tea, coffee, and other beverage brands.
The Coca-Cola Company has 21 different billion-dollar brands or brands that generate more than $1 billion or more in revenue each year. The company also sells its products in nearly every country in the world, with Cuba and North Korea the only two countries where it is not sold officially. What’s more, the Coca-Cola brand is worth $87.6 billion, making it one of the most valuable among all companies. Though these figures allow Coca-Cola to enjoy market dominance in many countries, the company is nevertheless subject to intense competition.
PepsiCo was founded in 1902 by American pharmacist and businessman Caleb Bradham as the Pepsi-Cola Company. Bradham, who hoped to emulate the success of Coca-Cola, marketed the beverage from his pharmacy and registered a patent for its recipe the following year. Today, Pepsi is a global company with a portfolio of 23 billion-dollar brands, or brands earning more than $1 billion in annual revenue. Sixteen of these brands are beverage-related, while the remaining seven are associated with snacks and other food products.
In 1965, PepsiCo acquired Frito-Lay in what the chairmen of both companies called a “marriage made in heaven”. The resultant company transformed PepsiCo from a soft drink organization and set it on a path to becoming one of the world’s leading food and beverage companies. Today, PepsiCo claims to operate in more than 200 countries and territories around the world with seven distinct divisions and many successful brands.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
