Drinking Cola at Chinese New Year: Who Invented the Tradition?
With the Spring Festival drawing near, supermarkets are not only slowly filling the air with their festive playlists, but the familiar ‘holiday weight gain’ adage is also dominating social media feeds. In the past, many assumed festive weight gain was simply down to indulging in rich, meat-heavy meals. In recent years, however, a growing body of research has pointed to excessive sugar intake as a primary driver of obesity. The latest evidence comes from a study published in *Nature Medicine* on 7 January 2025. After modelling data across 184 countries, researchers found that in 2020, globally, around one in ten new cases of type 2 diabetes and one in thirty new cases of cardiovascular disease could be attributed to drinking sugar-sweetened beverages.
“Cutting back on sugar” has become a buzzword on social media, frequently surfacing in trending topics and everyday consumer conversations. Backlash against high-sugar foods is intensifying, and sales of sugary drinks across the board are sliding to varying degrees. Take soft drinks giant Coca-Cola, for instance. According to its third-quarter 2024 financial report, Coca-Cola’s revenue for the quarter was US$11.854 billion (approximately RMB 84.51 billion), down 1% year-on-year. Sales in the Asia-Pacific region, which includes China, amounted to US$1.349 billion, a 4% year-on-year drop. Media outlets report that during offline surveys, several distributors complained to journalists that moving Coke is becoming increasingly difficult.
Is the sky really falling on Coca-Cola? Probably not. A look at *Empire of Coca-Cola: A History of Resource Plunder* by American historian Bart J. Elmore reveals that crises like this are far from unprecedented, and Coca-Cola’s predicament runs much deeper than simply “making couch potatoes fatter.” Using Coca-Cola as a case study, the author weaves a corporate history that illustrates how the food industry shapes consumer eating habits, exposes the amoral face of transnational capital, and uncovers the unchanging underlying logic behind the ever-shifting tactics of capital extraction.
Behind junk food lie toxic corporate values and actual, non-biodegradable waste that pollutes the planet.
I. Three Strategies for Building an Empire
Few realise that before successfully building the Coca-Cola empire, its founder experienced a bankruptcy. This failure taught him the first key to success: seize policy shifts and piggyback on them. In 1886, Pemberton first rode the coattails of policy during the rise of prohibitionist sentiment in the US. He formulated a new flavoured non-alcoholic soda to replace alcoholic beverages. More precisely, Pemberton produced a concentrated syrup, which he then sold to iced drink vendors in Atlanta. And with that, Coca-Cola’s second critical success factor emerged: outsource all non-core production beyond the concentrate syrup.
The Coca-Cola formula stands as a perfect illustration of the resource gluts of the “Gilded Age”: a blend of water, copious amounts of sugar, inexpensive caffeine, cocaine and spices. The author notes that Coca-Cola, much like a scavenger, accumulated capital by exploiting surpluses, selling cheap commodities with a markup to secure marginal profits. Consequently, as a prerequisite for profitability, seeking out or engineering a glut of cheap raw materials became the third critical pillar of Coca-Cola’s success.
These three critical factors are vividly reflected in how Coca-Cola secured its most essential raw materials. The outcome was a blend of fortuitous timing, geographical advantage and deliberate corporate strategising, which ultimately nurtured a corporate behemoth valued at more than a hundred billion dollars.
II. Water from Public Utilities
If Coca-Cola’s practice of ‘bottling public water for profit’ in the United States still only elicits a relatively restrained rebuke that ‘capital is truly insatiable’, its overseas conduct is better described as outright ‘resource plundering’. This is because the company’s foreign investments frequently target regions where water is already critically scarce, even as the business consumes it in vast quantities.
Such brazen extraction naturally provoked local resistance worldwide, though most campaigns ended in defeat. Kerala in India stands as a rare exception. Once the local Coca-Cola bottling plant began operations, groundwater was nearly depleted, and local rivers and soil fell victim to contamination. In 2002, local activists formed the ‘Coca-Cola Samara Committee’ with the aim of shutting down the plant. It took until 2014 to finally succeed in driving them out, marking a rare and hard-fought ‘victory’.
III. Government-Subsidised and Protected Sugar
Volatile sugar prices made Coca-Cola wary of this essential ingredient. Fortunately, a more ideal sweetener emerged: high-fructose corn syrup, derived from another American crop that was producing a surplus—corn. Coca-Cola once again capitalised on this extremely cheap raw material, kept artificially low by government subsidies. In 1985, the company replaced sugar with corn syrup in its US formula. This was a massive production shift, but the company faced no need to sell off factories, plantations, or equipment, simply because it owned none. It merely had to swap sugar suppliers for high-fructose syrup producers. As for the companies and workers subsequently cast aside from the supply chain, the attitude mirrored the reply given by “the father of Coca-Cola,” Woodruff, when he severed ties with Monsanto Chemical Company: “I’m afraid I can’t be of much help.” What unfolded next for Monsanto, as it pivoted from selling saccharin and caffeine to Coca-Cola to distributing toxic chemicals, pesticides, and GM seeds worldwide, is another story altogether.
IV. The Third Cheap Ingredient in Cola – Caffeine
At first, Coca-Cola sourced caffeine extracted from spent tea leaves from Monsanto, before switching to caffeine extracted from cocoa by-products supplied by Maywood Chemical. The raw caffeine market languished under the weight of global conflict and advances in chemical manufacturing. Capitalising on this downturn, Coca-Cola accumulated vast reserves of caffeine at prices below those seen at the turn of the century, swiftly establishing itself as the market’s largest purchaser. This dominant buying position significantly bolstered its negotiating leverage. By way of example, in early 1942, Coca-Cola secured caffeine from Monsanto at $1.61 a pound, whereas its rival Pepsi paid $2.18 for the same measure.
By the latter half of the twentieth century, the rising hidden ecological, economic and biological costs associated with producing and consuming caffeine began to threaten the viability of Coca-Cola’s supply chain. Yet the company quickly navigated out of this predicament, aided ironically by the anti-caffeine fervour of the 1950s. While Coca-Cola bore the brunt of public scorn as the chief purveyor of the substance, the decaffeination movement gathered pace. Consequently, processing plants across the globe were left discarding vast quantities of caffeine as waste, handing Coca-Cola yet another abundant supply. Ironically, the very campaign to rid the public of caffeine drove its production to unprecedented heights, fuelling the company’s steadily climbing profits over the ensuing decades.
V. The Grotesquely Gaunt Resource Predator
In truth, Coca-Cola has not always produced such vast quantities of packaging waste. In its early years, it was actually a pioneer in reusable packaging, employing a deposit return scheme to encourage consumers to hand back their glass beverage bottles. This circular approach remains one of the top recommendations from environmental organisations to this day.
Yet, the lure of cutting costs and deflecting responsibility for waste proved far too compelling. Coca-Cola swiftly abandoned environmentally sound reusable glass bottles in favour of single-use metal cans and plastic bottles. Simultaneously, it began shaping public discourse by partnering with others to launch “Keep America Beautiful”. Under the guise of a grassroots environmental initiative, the group lobbied both the public and government officials with the explicit goal of transferring the burden of packaging waste management from beverage manufacturers to citizens: “Environmental protection is everyone’s responsibility.”
In their messaging, plastic pollution is framed as the direct result of consumer littering, completely glossing over the reality that these items were already sealed in single-use packaging before they even reached shoppers. The underlying motive for this shift was straightforward: Coca-Cola needed to reach more remote markets at a significantly lower cost.
Despite the beverage industry’s lobbying efforts, clear-eyed environmentalists remain unswayed and continue to point the finger at the true source of pollution—the corporations themselves. Environmental and legislative authorities have also sought to tackle the mounting waste crisis through taxation and statutory penalties. These initiatives have met with fierce resistance from companies such as Coca-Cola, which have threatened the government that “tens of thousands of factory workers will face job losses” and “the entire industry will disappear.”
Yet is the employment dilemma truly intractable? Hardly. When Coca-Cola originally ditched glass bottles to slash costs, it inevitably rendered countless bottle-cleaning and transport workers redundant. Should a refillable packaging system be reinstated, the new roles created to maintain it would surely offset the jobs lost to single-use packaging manufacturing. Were Coca-Cola genuinely committed to the public interest, it would not have left a wake of resource-stripped landscapes across the world.
Recently, Coca-Cola has found itself in the firing line once again, this time over allegations of greenwashing. In early December 2024, the company announced it was scaling back its “voluntary environmental targets.” The revised target aims to incorporate 35% to 40% recycled materials into its packaging by 2035, a drastic drop from the previous ambition of reaching 50% by 2030. A representative for the environmental organisation Oceana stated: “Coca-Cola’s new pledge will have almost no meaningful impact on its overall plastic consumption.”
Whether the value generated by Coca-Cola can genuinely offset the wider costs borne by society remains open to debate.
VII. One of the Main Culprits Behind Obesity
By the 1990s, obesity rates in the US were rising rather than falling, prompting some cities to introduce an “obesity tax” on junk food. Beverage companies retaliated with threats to “withdraw investment in local bottling plants.” In the early 2000s, New York State once again proposed taxes on junk food, and consumer freedom groups backed by Coca-Cola launched lobbying campaigns against the notion that “the government should not dictate what people eat or drink.” Coca-Cola’s public relations strategy perfectly illustrates a Cantonese proverb: “An old bridge may creak, but it still holds”—in other words, old methods are perfectly fine as long as they work.
Yet, no matter how desperately Coca-Cola clings to its legacy, a growing number of people now recognise that sweetened drinks, exemplified by their products, are a primary driver of obesity. Moreover, consumers’ craving for sweetness has long surpassed natural bounds. As one researcher noted: “The sweetness of carbonated drinks sends a message to children that all food should be this sweet.” Even diet drinks marketed as zero-calorie have been shown to increase appetite, disrupt the body’s fundamental self-regulatory mechanisms, and contribute to weight gain. Consequently, in recent years, an increasing number of countries have joined the ranks of those restricting sugary beverages.
But Coca-Cola’s future is not humanity’s future. Though we may occasionally harbour the illusion that “capitalists will outlive us,” the moment more consumers recognise the health, environmental, and social costs concealed behind these beverages and choose to cut back on a few bottles of Coke, the corporations will find themselves in a state of perpetual anxiety. Meanwhile, we gain the benefit of stable blood sugar levels.
Notes and References
[2] Coca-Cola China Official Website [OL].https://www.coca-cola.com/cn/zh
[3] The Coca-Cola Company. Coca-Cola Q3 2024 Earnings Report: Revenue Beats Expectations; CEO Reaffirms Unchanged Long-Term Goals in China [OL].https://www.coca-cola.com/cn/zh/media-center/q3-2024-financial-report,2024-10-23.
[4] 21st Century Business Herald. Coca-Cola’s Sales Slump in China: Pivoting from Still Water to Carbonated Drinks [OL].https://m.21jingji.com/article/20241025/321e2a57981f9c7d1a54b525bee0b791.html,2024-10-25.
[5] Wikipedia. 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 Co., Ltd. [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 Retreats from Environmental Commitments; Plastic Pollution Crisis Intensifies [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 Corporation. 2015-11.
[11] Qing Xiaofei. This Generation of Young People Is Ditching “Sugar-Sweetened Drinks” [OL].https://36kr.com/p/2864886416018052,2024-7-16.
