Drinking Coke over Chinese New Year – Who Invented This, Exactly?

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As Spring Festival approaches, not only have the festive songs started playing again in supermarkets up and down the country, but the seasonal tag “gaining three jin (about 1.5 kg) with every festival” has also cropped up on the homepages of social media feeds far and wide. People used to blame all the rich holiday feasts for festive weight gain, but in recent years, a growing body of research has identified excessive sugar intake as one of the leading causes of obesity. The latest evidence comes from a study published on 7 January 2025 in Nature Medicine. After running modelled estimates across 184 countries, scientists found that in 2020, approximately one in ten new cases of Type 2 diabetes and one in thirty new cases of cardiovascular disease worldwide could be attributed to the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages.

● Festive bottles are already on the shelves. Down these two and chronic disease is bound to show up before good fortune does.

“Sugar control” has become a social-media buzzword, cropping up constantly in trending topics and everyday consumer conversations. The chorus of condemnation against high-sugar foods grows ever louder, and sales of sugar-sweetened beverages across the board have slipped to varying degrees. Take soft drinks giant Coca-Cola: according to its Q3 2024 earnings, quarterly revenue came in at $11.854 billion (approximately RMB 84.51 billion), a year-on-year decline of 1%, while sales in the Asia-Pacific market—which includes China—stood at $1.349 billion, down 4% year on year. Media reports note that during in-store surveys, multiple distributors complained to journalists that selling Coke is getting harder by the day.

Is Coca-Cola’s “sky” about to come crashing down? I’m afraid that is unlikely. Pick up The Coca-Cola Empire: A History of Resource Plunder by American historian Bart J. Elmore, and you will find that a similar crisis is by no means the first of its kind—and that Coca-Cola’s problems go far beyond “making couch potatoes even fatter.” Using Coca-Cola as a case study, the author weaves together a corporate history that traces how the food industry shapes consumers’ tastes, lays bare the amoral face of transnational capital, and reveals the unchanging logic behind capital’s ever-shifting methods of plunder.

Behind junk food lie equally worthless corporate values and, quite literally, un-decomposable waste polluting our planet.

● The Chinese-language edition of The Coca-Cola Empire was published by People’s Literature Publishing House in 2018. Click the image to read another book review Foodthink published that year.

I. Three Moves That Built an Empire

Coca-Cola originated in Atlanta, USA, in 1886, with a founding story that is widely known: pharmacist Pemberton invented Coca-Cola in his own pharmacy, marketing it as a “brain tonic” drink that purported to “cure addiction to morphine, opium, and hallucinogens.” Pemberton promoted it with great fanfare, claiming that drinking Coke would make all psychological and physiological anxiety vanish without a trace, like magic in a bottle. The story spread so far and wide that even in China there is an urban legend about “hot cola curing a cold.”\n\nFew people know that founder Pemberton suffered a bankruptcy before successfully building the Coca-Cola empire. That failure taught him the first key to success: seize on policy and ride its coattails. In 1886, the first policy Pemberton latched on to was America’s Prohibition. He produced a new-flavoured non-alcoholic soda as a substitute for alcoholic drinks. More precisely, Pemberton produced a concentrated syrup and sold it on to fountain operators in Atlanta. Ding! The second key to Coca-Cola’s success emerged: outsource all non-core production beyond the concentrated syrup.\n\nCoca-Cola’s recipe could be described as the perfect embodiment of the resource surplus of the Gilded Age: a mixture of water, generous quantities of sucrose, cheap caffeine, cocaine and spices. As the author points out in the book, Coca-Cola Company—like a scavenger—exploited surplus products to accumulate capital, selling cheap goods at cost-plus prices to capture marginal profit. Therefore, as a prerequisite for profit, finding or manufacturing “surplus” cheap raw materials became Coca-Cola’s third key to success.\n\nThese three factors are vividly illustrated in the way Coca-Cola acquires its most essential raw materials—a combination of favourable timing and location, and Coca-Cola’s own deliberate manipulation—that ultimately fed a behemoth with a market capitalisation exceeding $100 billion.\n\n

● In Billy Wilder’s classic 1961 comedy One, Two, Three, Coca-Cola’s bottling-outsourcing principle is turned into a political gag: the Coca-Cola general manager in West Germany refuses to hand over the formula to a Soviet representative who wants to open a Cola plant. Screenshot: Yifengzhi Wuya@Douban

II. Water from the Public Utility

The first ingredient—and the most abundant of all in Coca-Cola—is water. Pemberton’s decision to sell a drink in place of alcohol was not merely a reluctant concession to the Prohibition tide but also a shrewd cost-saving move. In the southern city of Atlanta, water was cheaper and far more readily available than alcohol. By producing only the concentrated syrup, Coca-Cola not only spared itself the expense of shipping finished beverages but also cleverly shifted the costs of sourcing water and bottling on to its bottlers. The cunning part is this: the primary ingredient—water—is produced neither by Coca-Cola nor by the bottlers; it comes entirely from the public water supply. While public water can hardly be called a surplus, the federal government willingly bore the full cost of building and operating the treatment infrastructure, so from Coca-Cola’s vantage point—in 1921, public water in Milwaukee cost a mere 0.005 cents per gallon—excessively cheap is surplus.

If Coca-Cola’s habit of “bottling public water to line its own pockets” can draw nothing stronger than a weary “Capital is truly insatiable” when it happens on American soil, its conduct overseas can barely be described by anything less than outright resource plunder—for the places where Coca-Cola invests abroad are often among the most water-scarce regions on Earth, yet its operations consume enormous volumes of water.

Coca-Cola’s brazen plundering has naturally provoked resistance from communities around the world, though most such struggles have ended in defeat—except in the Indian state of Kerala. Once the local bottling plant’s production equipment was up and running, groundwater nearly ran dry, and nearby rivers and land were contaminated. In 2002, local activists formed the Committee Against Coca-Cola’s Violation of Samara, demanding the closure of Coca-Cola’s processing plant. It was not until 2014 that they finally drove the company out—a rare and hard-won “success” among a long list of failures.

● Local environmental groups in Kerala protest outside the cola bottling plant, finally succeeding in driving the factory away after more than a decade. Image source: kasuga sho@Flickr

III. Government-Subsidised and Protected Sugar

The second most abundant ingredient in Coca-Cola is sugar. In the 1890s, sugarcane cultivation and the refined-sugar industry were booming around the world—an era in which sucrose was extraordinarily cheap and available in unprecedented abundance. Coca-Cola Company secured from the very outset a factor critical to its success: cheap sucrose. But this was no product of what Adam Smith called the “invisible hand.” Throughout the nineteenth century, the US government maintained protective tariffs for domestic refineries, and the wholesale price of refined sugar fell from 6.2 cents in 1890 to 4.1 cents in 1894. The cost, however, was brutal labour exploitation of sugarcane plantation farmers, while large numbers of small sugar refineries were squeezed into bankruptcy by monopolies such as the sugar trust. Ironically, when sucrose prices rose a few years later, Coca-Cola turned around and accused the US government of maliciously inflating sugar prices, pleading for a return to the previous “free market.”

Fluctuating sugar prices soured Coca-Cola on this vital ingredient. Fortunately, an even more perfect sweetener emerged—high-fructose corn syrup, sourced from corn, another crop the United States produced in surplus. Coca-Cola once again seized on a raw material made extraordinarily cheap by government subsidies. In 1985, Coca-Cola stopped adding sucrose in the United States and switched to corn syrup. This was a massive production shift, yet the company did not need to sell off any factories, plantations, or equipment—because it owned none. All it had to do was swap its suppliers from sucrose producers to high-fructose corn syrup producers. As for the businesses and the workers behind them swept out of the supply chain, the answer is the same one the “Father of Coca-Cola,” Woodruff, had given when he dropped Monsanto Chemical Company: “We really can’t be of much help.” What became of Monsanto—once a purveyor of saccharin and caffeine to Coca-Cola, as it pivoted to selling toxic chemicals, pesticides, and genetically modified seeds to the rest of the world—is another story altogether.

● The author of The Coca-Cola Empire subsequently published Seed Empire, a history of Monsanto’s rise. Foodthink co-hosted several discussion events with the publisher in 2024.

IV. The Third Cheap Ingredient in Coca-Cola—Caffeine

Compared with water and sugar, the caffeine content in Coca-Cola is relatively modest, yet its ability to sharpen the mind and its mildly addictive properties make it indispensable to the formula. Early Coca-Cola contained not only caffeine but also traces of cocaine, a far more addictive substance. Both were derived from coca leaf extract—the very origin of Coca-Cola’s name. But as cocaine grew ever more notorious, coca leaf costs remained stubbornly high, and market demand for caffeine kept climbing, leaving Coca-Cola perpetually on the hunt for cheaper sources of caffeine.

Initially, Coca-Cola bought its caffeine from Monsanto, extracted from spent tea leaves, and then sourced it from the Maywood Chemical Company, extracted from cocoa waste. Shaped by world wars, advances in chemical technology, and other factors, the raw-caffeine market languished for extended periods. Benefiting from this, Coca-Cola stockpiled caffeine at prices below those at the turn of the century, becoming the market’s largest buyer. Its dominance as the biggest purchaser, in turn, reinforced its bargaining power over caffeine prices. In early 1942, for instance, Coca-Cola paid $1.61 per pound for caffeine from Monsanto, while Pepsi had to pay $2.18 per pound.

By the second half of the twentieth century, even as the mounting hidden ecological, economic, and biological costs of caffeine production and consumption began to threaten the viability of Coca-Cola’s product chain, the company swiftly escaped the predicament—by riding the wave of the 1950s anti-caffeine craze. Though Coca-Cola, cast as the chief propagator of caffeine, bore the brunt of public condemnation at the time, the decaffeination market was steadily expanding. Large quantities of caffeine were discarded as waste in caffeine processing plants around the world, and Coca-Cola once again gained access to vast new supplies. The anti-caffeine movement had, ironically, driven caffeine production to unprecedented volumes. Coca-Cola’s profits continued to climb for decades to come.

V. The Emaciated Resource Plunderer

When it comes to Coca-Cola’s “crimes,” what is far better known among ordinary Western publics is its reputation as the world’s largest plastic polluter. According to the brand audit data published in recent years by Break Free From Plastic (BFFP), an international environmental organisation, Coca-Cola has topped the list of the world’s largest plastic polluters every year since 2018. The 2023 audit revealed that the total volume of plastic waste generated by Coca-Cola far exceeded the combined output of the second-placed company (Nestlé) and the third (Unilever).

● BFFP’s 2023 plastic polluter ranking. Coca-Cola first, Pepsi fourth.

Coca-Cola has not always generated such an enormous volume of packaging waste. In its early days, it was even a pioneer of reusable packaging, using a deposit return scheme to encourage consumers to return glass beverage bottles. This reuse model remains one of the solutions most strongly recommended by environmental groups to this day.

But the temptation to cut costs and shift the blame for waste proved irresistible. On the one hand, Coca-Cola swiftly replaced its eco-friendly reusable glass bottles with single-use metal cans or plastic bottles; on the other, it began manipulating public opinion, co-founding “Keep America Beautiful” with its partners—a name that sounded like a grassroots environmental initiative but was in fact a vehicle for lobbying both the public and the government. The goal: to transfer the responsibility for beverage companies’ packaging waste on to the public—”Protecting the environment is everyone’s responsibility.”

In their messaging, the plastic pollution crisis was made to look as though it were caused by consumers littering, without ever mentioning that by the time a shopper picks up a product, it is already sealed in disposable packaging. And the reason for this was simple: Coca-Cola needed to deliver its products to ever more remote markets at lower cost.

● A Coca-Cola delivery driver in 1936 distributing crates of drinks to retail outlets. Photography: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Despite the soft drinks industry’s lobbying efforts, clear-eyed environmentalists refused to be taken in and continued to point the finger at the source of the pollution—the corporations themselves. Environmental and legislative bodies also sought to address the mounting waste problem through taxation and statutory penalties. These efforts were fiercely obstructed and opposed by companies led by Coca-Cola, who warned the government that “thousands of factory workers would face unemployment” and that “the entire industry would cease to exist.”

But is the employment problem truly unsolvable? Not necessarily. When Coca-Cola dropped glass bottles to save costs, it inevitably put large numbers of workers who washed and transported those bottles out of a job. If a reusable packaging system were rebuilt in the future, the new roles created to maintain it would surely be enough to fill the vacancies left by single-use packaging production. And if Coca-Cola genuinely felt a sense of responsibility to protect the public, it would not have left a trail of depleted resources across the globe.

Most recently, Coca-Cola has found itself at the centre of a firestorm over greenwashing. In early December 2024, the company announced it had revised its “voluntary environmental targets.” The new target is to use 35 to 40 per cent recyclable materials in its packaging by 2035; the previous target had been 50 per cent by 2030—a cliff-edge downgrade. A representative of the environmental group Oceana stated: “Coca-Cola’s new commitment has virtually no real impact on its total plastic use.”

Whether the value Coca-Cola creates can offset the costs borne by society as a whole remains very much open to question.

● In 2012, a company in New York launched Unbottle the World Day, collecting and displaying all the packaging bottles a single person used over two years to call on the public and businesses to pay attention to beverage packaging pollution and improve recycling. Worried that consumers, once confronted with the sheer volume of plastic waste they were generating, would turn against its sales and image, Coca-Cola sent a cease-and-desist letter to the organisers demanding an immediate end to the campaign.

VII. One of Obesity’s Chief Culprits

Returning to the opening of this article, the Nature Medicine study found that in 2020, approximately one in ten new cases of Type 2 diabetes and one in thirty new cases of cardiovascular disease worldwide may be attributable to the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages—and Coca-Cola must surely claim no small part of that distinction. The Coca-Cola Empire also notes that a 2004 survey published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that rising per-capita consumption had made high-calorie sweeteners the “single largest source of calories in the American diet.” Well before that, Coca-Cola had spotted consumer demand for zero-calorie drinks and replaced sugar with saccharin and cyclamate. But saccharin, a coal tar derivative, carried enormous carcinogenic risk and was soon banned by the government. Coca-Cola promptly established the Calorie Control Council to oppose the ban, on the grounds that “this intervention violates citizens’ right of free choice.” How familiar the scene! Once again, the “obesity tax” fell flat.

By the 1990s, obesity in America had only worsened rather than improved, and some cities began levying an “obesity tax” on junk food. Beverage companies continued to threaten: “We will pull our investment in the regional bottling plant.” At the start of the twenty-first century, New York State once again proposed taxing junk food, and a consumer freedom organisation backed by Coca-Cola launched a lobbying campaign against the premise that “government should not decide what people eat or drink.” Coca-Cola’s PR playbook is a textbook case of “Don’t fear an old bridge—what matters is crossing it” (in other words, the method may be old-fashioned, but if it works, that is all that counts).

Yet however Coca-Cola thrashes in its death throes, ever more people understand that sugary drinks—of which Coca-Cola is the prime exemplar—are a chief culprit behind obesity. What is more, consumers’ craving for sweetness has long since strayed beyond the bounds of nature. As one researcher observes, “The sweetness of carbonated drinks sends children a message that all food should be this sweet.” Even so-called zero-calorie artificial sweetener drinks have been shown by research to increase appetite, disrupt the body’s basic homeostasis, and bring about the scourge of obesity. As a result, in recent years a growing number of countries have joined the movement to restrict sugar-sweetened beverages.

● Under the Nutri-Grade beverage health ratings in Singapore and Shanghai, Coca-Cola unsurprisingly sits in the least healthy D tier. Image: Youdiao Pingce@Xiaohongshu
As the author puts it, for Coca-Cola even the “sacrosanct secret formula” has always evolved alongside the changing world; only its system and mechanisms for generating profit have never changed. And the bedrock of its ceaseless profit-making is a well-stocked supply chain built on raw materials rendered cheap by surplus—so Coca-Cola is, in essence, a product of depletion. For all the company’s attempts to defy the laws of nature, declining performance, a steadily deteriorating brand image, and consumers’ increasingly precarious health all signal one thing: this road of resource plunder is approaching its end.

But Coca-Cola’s future is not humanity’s future. We may sometimes harbour the illusion that “the capitalist’s lifespan outlasts ours,” yet so long as more consumers recognise the health, environmental and social costs behind their drinks, simply drinking a few fewer colas will have them wringing their hands day in, day out. And we, in turn, get a steadier blood sugar curve.

Notes and References

[1] Lara-Castor, L., O’Hearn, M., Cudhea, F. et al. Burdens of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease attributable to sugar-sweetened beverages in 184 countries. Nat Med (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-024-03345-4

[2] Coca-Cola China Official Website [OL]. https://www.coca-cola.com/cn/zh

[3] Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola Company Q3 2024 Report: Revenue Beats Expectations, CEO Says Long-Term China Goals Unchanged [OL]. https://www.coca-cola.com/cn/zh/media-center/q3-2024-financial-report,2024-10-23. [4] 21st Century Business Herald. Coca-Cola Sales Decline in China: Divesting from Water, Doubling Down on Carbonated Drinks [OL]. https://m.21jingji.com/article/20241025/321e2a57981f9c7d1a54b525bee0b791.html,2024-10-25. [5] Wilipedia. The Coca-Cola Company [OL]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coca-Cola_Company,2023. [6] China Foods Limited [OL]. http://www.chinafoodsltd.com/.

[7] aiqicha – COFCO Coca-Cola Beverages (China) Investment Company [OL]. https://aiqicha.baidu.com/company_detail_28672433808726?p_type=2&p_tk=6540HVJ2znYhUzPGqUSHdsgVsFJCkOT7EHJDy3r%2BZqkrjraVucdxs3nJDfbaEaaHhdNoRPA6w5w6Jge5awN9GU91pO%2F1v%2BKZpMZhdMxkFKFvgqc5PWIP0BEbVSeM5QPSXunW1bo8JYr%2Bra2SOAJguOytJh%2B3VRfG5NaGwYNkwe3g4Ck%3D&p_timestamp=1737717947&p_sign=03d1383f7bcdf77b4954fbc74fe3fe22&p_signature=c67845b7ca55bff8937d6114d434aea4&__pc2ps_ab=6540HVJ2znYhUzPGqUSHdsgVsFJCkOT7EHJDy3r%2BZqkrjraVucdxs3nJDfbaEaaHhdNoRPA6w5w6Jge5awN9GU91pO%2F1v%2BKZpMZhdMxkFKFvgqc5PWIP0BEbVSeM5QPSXunW1bo8JYr%2Bra2SOAJguOytJh%2B3VRfG5NaGwYNkwe3g4Ck%3D|1737717947|c67845b7ca55bff8937d6114d434aea4|03d1383f7bcdf77b4954fbc74fe3fe22. [8] BFFP. The Brand Audit Report 2023 [R]. 2024. https://brandaudit.breakfreefromplastic.org/brand-audit-2023/.

[9] Coca-Cola Abandons Environmental Pledges as Plastic Pollution Crisis Escalates [OL]. https://www.cenews.com.cn/news.html?aid=1179912, 2024-12-07.

[10] Michael Moss. Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us [M]. CITIC Press. 2015-11.

[11] Hydrogen Consumer. This Generation of Young People Is Ditching Sugar-Sweetened Beverages [OL]. https://36kr.com/p/2864886416018052,2024-7-16.

Foodthink Author

Doudou

A practitioner of sustainable living, passionate about exploring a lifestyle of zero consumption.

 

 

 

 

Editor: Tianle

Published by Foodthink