Who actually started the tradition of drinking Cola at the Lunar New Year?

by Posted on

As Chinese New Year draws near, not only is the festive background music returning to supermarkets, but the ‘holiday weight gain’ hashtags are once again flooding social media feeds. In the past, people often assumed that gaining weight during the holidays was due to rich, festive feasts. In recent years, however, more and more research has shown that excessive sugar intake is one of the primary drivers of obesity. The latest evidence comes from a study published in *Nature Medicine* on 7 January 2025, in which scientists modelled data from 184 countries. They found that in 2020, approximately one in ten new cases of type 2 diabetes and one in thirty new cardiovascular diseases worldwide could be attributed to the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages.

● Festive edition drinks are already on the shelves. Down these two bottles, and chronic illness is likely to arrive much sooner than good luck.

‘Sugar control’ has become a social media buzzword, frequently appearing in trending searches and daily consumer discussions. The backlash against high-sugar foods is growing, and sales of various sugar-sweetened beverages have declined to varying degrees. Take soft drink giant Coca-Cola as an example: according to its Q3 2024 financial report, revenue for the quarter was $11.854 billion (approximately 845.1 billion yuan), a year-on-year decrease of 1%. In the Asia-Pacific market, which includes China, sales were $1.349 billion, down 4% year-on-year. Media reports indicate that during field research, several distributors complained to reporters that selling Coke is becoming increasingly difficult.

Is the sky about to fall for Coca-Cola? Hardly. Open *The Coca-Cola Empire: A History of Resource Plunder* by American historian Bart J. Elmore, and you will find that similar crises have occurred before. Coca-Cola’s problem isn’t simply ‘fattening the couch potatoes’. Using Coca-Cola as a case study, the author uses the company’s history to weave together how the food industry moulds consumer dietary preferences, the immoral nature of multinational capital, and the unchanging underlying logic behind the diverse methods of capital plunder.

Behind the junk food lie rubbish corporate values and actual rubbish—non-biodegradable waste that pollutes the planet.

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

I.Three Pillars of Early Success

Coca-Cola originated in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1886, with a well-known origin story: pharmacist Pemberton invented the drink in his own pharmacy as a “brain tonic” that claimed to “cure addiction to morphine, opium, and hallucinogens”. Pemberton touted it heavily, claiming that drinking Coke would make all mental and physical anxiety vanish—as if it were magic in a bottle. This story spread so widely that even in China, an urban legend persists that hot Coke can cure a cold.

Few realise that before building the Coca-Cola empire, founder Pemberton had faced bankruptcy. This failure taught him that the first factor for success was to ride the wave of policy and capitalise on the circumstances. In 1886, the first “ride” Pemberton took was the American temperance movement. He created a new flavour of non-alcoholic soda to replace alcoholic drinks. More accurately, Pemberton produced a concentrated syrup, which he then sold to beverage retailers in Atlanta. And there we have it—the second key to Coca-Cola’s success: outsource every part of production that wasn’t the core concentrated syrup.

The Coca-Cola recipe could be seen as the perfect manifestation of the resource surpluses of the “Gilded Age”: a mixture of water, vast quantities of cane sugar, cheap caffeine, cocaine, and flavourings. The author points out in the book that the Coca-Cola Company acted like a scavenger, using surplus products to accumulate capital and selling cheap goods at a markup to secure marginal profits. Consequently, as a prerequisite for profitability, finding or creating cheap, oversupplied raw materials became the third key factor in Coca-Cola’s success.

These three factors are vividly illustrated in the acquisition of Coca-Cola’s most essential raw materials. Through a combination of timing, location, and active manipulation, they eventually fed a behemoth with a market value exceeding hundreds of billions of dollars.

● In Billy Wilder’s 1961 classic *One, Two, Three*, Coca-Cola’s outsourcing principle for bottling is turned into a political gag, where the general manager of Coke in West Germany refuses to hand over the recipe to a Soviet representative wanting to open a bottling plant. Screenshot: Yifeng Zhi Wuya @ Douban

II. Water from Public Utilities

First is the most prevalent ingredient in Coca-Cola: water. For Pemberton, replacing alcohol with beverages was not merely a necessity driven by the tide of Prohibition, but also a strategic way to reduce costs. In the southern city of Atlanta, water was both cheaper and far more accessible than alcohol. By producing only the concentrated syrup, Coca-Cola not only avoided the expense of transporting finished drinks but also cleverly shifted the costs of sourcing water and bottling onto its distributors. Crucially, the primary raw material—water—was produced neither by Coca-Cola nor by the bottling distributors; it was drawn entirely from public water systems. While public water supplies are hardly an ‘excess’ resource, the federal government bore the entire cost of construction and treatment. From Coca-Cola’s perspective—where public water in Milwaukee cost just 0.005 cents per gallon in 1921—something that is excessively cheap is, for all intents and purposes, in excess.

If the act of ‘packaging public water for private profit’ within the US can be dismissed with a sigh that ‘capital is insatiable’, their actions abroad can almost be described as those of a ‘resource predator’. This is because Coca-Cola frequently invested in overseas regions where water was scarcest, yet the company’s operations consumed vast quantities of it.

Coca-Cola’s brazen predation naturally sparked resistance from local populations across various countries, though most of these efforts ended in failure—except in Kerala, India. Once the production equipment at the local bottling plant became operational, groundwater was nearly depleted, and local rivers and soil were polluted. In 2002, local activists formed a committee to oppose Coca-Cola’s actions, hoping to shut down the processing plant. It was not until 2014 that they finally succeeded in driving the company out—a hard-won victory and one of the very few success stories.

● Local environmental organisations in Kerala protesting in front of the Coca-Cola bottling plant; it took over a decade to successfully force the factory out. Image source: kasuga sho@Flickr

III. Subsidised and Protected Sugar

The second most prevalent ingredient in Coca-Cola is sugar. In the 1890s, the global sugarcane cultivation and refined sugar industry were booming; it was an era of unprecedented supply and incredibly low prices. From the outset, the Coca-Cola Company secured a factor critical to its success: cheap cane sugar. However, this was not the result of Adam Smith’s so-called “invisible hand”. Throughout the 19th century, the US government continued to implement protectionist policies for domestic refineries, causing the wholesale price of refined sugar to drop from 6.2 cents in 1890 to 4.1 cents by 1894. The cost, however, was borne by sugarcane plantation workers through brutal labour exploitation, while a multitude of small refineries were squeezed into bankruptcy by monopolies, epitomised by the sugar trusts. Ironically, when sugar prices rose a few years later, Coca-Cola turned around to attack the US government for maliciously inflating prices, pleading for a return to the previous “free market”.

These volatile prices made Coca-Cola wary of this essential raw material. Fortunately, a more perfect sweetener emerged: high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), derived from corn—another American crop in surplus. Once again, Coca-Cola seized upon a raw material made incredibly cheap through government subsidies. By 1985, Coca-Cola had replaced cane sugar with corn syrup in its US products. This was a massive production shift, yet the company had no need to sell off factories, plantations, or equipment, simply because it owned none. It merely had to switch its suppliers from those producing cane sugar to those producing high fructose syrup. As for the businesses and workers cast out of the supply chain, Woodruff, the “father of Coca-Cola”, responded when severing ties with the chemical company Monsanto: they simply weren’t of much help. As for Monsanto’s transition from selling saccharin and caffeine to Coca-Cola to selling toxic chemicals, pesticides, and GMO seeds to the rest of the world, that is another story entirely.

● Following the author of *Empire of Coca-Cola*, a book on the history of Monsanto titled *Empire of Seeds* was published. In 2024, Foodthink co-hosted several discussions with the publisher.

IV. The Third Cheap Ingredient in Cola: Caffeine

Compared to water and sugar, the caffeine content in Coca-Cola is relatively low, but its stimulating and mildly addictive properties make it indispensable to the formula. Early Coca-Cola contained not only caffeine but also small amounts of the more addictive cocaine, both derived from coca leaf extracts—hence the name “Coca-Cola”. However, as cocaine became increasingly notorious, the cost of coca leaves remained high, and market demand for caffeine continued to climb, leading Coca-Cola on a constant quest for cheaper caffeine sources.

Initially, Coca-Cola procured caffeine extracted from waste tea leaves from Monsanto, and later from cocoa waste via Maywood Chemical Company. Due to factors such as the World Wars and advances in chemical technology, the raw caffeine market remained depressed. Taking advantage of this, the Coca-Cola Company stockpiled caffeine at prices lower than those seen at the turn of the century, becoming the largest buyer in the market. This dominant position further bolstered its bargaining power. For instance, in early 1942, Coca-Cola paid Monsanto $1.61 per pound for caffeine, while PepsiCo had to pay $2.18 per pound.

By the latter half of the 20th century, even as the implicit ecological, economic, and biological costs of caffeine production and consumption began to threaten the product chain, Coca-Cola quickly escaped this predicament—via the anti-caffeine trend of the 1950s. Although Coca-Cola was vilified at the time as the chief culprit in spreading caffeine, the decaffeinated market expanded rapidly. Vast quantities of caffeine were discarded as waste in processing plants worldwide, and Coca-Cola once again secured a massive new source of the ingredient. Paradoxically, the movement to boycott caffeine led to its production reaching unprecedented levels, allowing Coca-Cola’s profits to continue rising for decades to come.

V. The Gaunt Resource Predator

When discussing Coca-Cola’s “transgressions”, the title most familiar to the general Western public is that of the “world’s biggest plastic polluter”. According to brand audit data from the international environmental organisation Break Free From Plastic (BFFP) over the past few years, Coca-Cola has topped the list of the biggest plastic polluters for several consecutive years since 2018. The 2023 audit revealed that the total amount of plastic waste generated by Coca-Cola far exceeds the combined totals of the second and third place companies, Nestlé and Unilever.

● The 2023 plastic pollution rankings published by BFFP. Coca-Cola ranks first, while Pepsi ranks fourth.

In truth, Coca-Cola has not always produced this much packaging waste. In its early years, it was even a pioneer of reusable packaging, using a deposit-return system to encourage consumers to return glass bottles. This model of reuse remains one of the most recommended solutions by environmental organisations today.

However, the temptation to reduce costs and shirk responsibility for waste was too great. On one hand, Coca-Cola rapidly replaced environmentally friendly reusable glass bottles with single-use metal cans or plastic bottles; on the other, it began manipulating public opinion. Together with its partners, it founded “Keep America Beautiful”, using a name that sounded like a grassroots environmentalist movement to lobby the public and government. The goal was to shift the responsibility for packaging waste from the beverage companies to the public: “Protecting the environment is everyone’s responsibility”.

Their propaganda suggested that plastic pollution was caused by consumers littering, without mentioning that these products had already been placed in single-use packaging before the consumer even bought them. The reason for this was simple: Coca-Cola needed to deliver its products to more remote markets at a lower cost.

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

Despite the industry’s lobbying efforts, discerning environmentalists were not fooled and continued to point the finger at the source of the pollution: the corporations. Environmental and legislative bodies also attempted to solve the worsening waste problem through taxes and legal penalties. These were strenuously blocked and opposed by companies led by Coca-Cola, who threatened the government that “thousands of factory workers would face unemployment” and “the entire industry would cease to exist”.

But is the issue of employment truly unsolvable? Not necessarily. When Coca-Cola abandoned glass bottles to save costs, it inevitably caused the unemployment of many workers who cleaned and transported those bottles. If a reusable packaging system were rebuilt in the future, the new jobs created to maintain that system would likely fill the gaps left by the production of single-use packaging. If Coca-Cola truly felt a responsibility to protect the public, it would not have left a trail of depleted resources across the globe.

Recently, Coca-Cola has once again come under fire for greenwashing. In early December 2024, Coca-Cola disclosed an adjustment to its “voluntary environmental goals”. The new target is to use 35% to 40% recyclable materials in its packaging by 2035—a precipitous drop from the previous goal of 50% by 2030. A representative from the environmental organisation Oceana stated: “Coca-Cola’s new commitment has almost no practical impact on its total plastic use.”

Whether the value created by the Coca-Cola Company can compensate for the costs borne by society as a whole remains a matter of significant debate.

● In 2012, a New York-based company launched ‘Unbottle the World Day’. By collecting and exhibiting the volume of bottles a single person consumes over two years, they urged the public and corporations to acknowledge the pollution caused by beverage packaging and to improve recycling efforts. Fearing that consumers would become aware of the scale of plastic waste they generate—and that this would damage its sales and brand image—Coca-Cola sent a cease-and-desist letter to the organisers, demanding that the campaign be stopped immediately.

VII. One of the Culprits of Obesity

To return to the beginning of the article, research published in *Nature Medicine* found that in 2020, approximately one in ten new cases of type 2 diabetes and one in thirty new cases of cardiovascular disease globally could be attributed to the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages—and Coca-Cola undoubtedly played its part. In fact, the book *The Coca-Cola Empire* mentions a 2004 study in the *Journal of the American Medical Association* (JAMA) which showed that increasing per capita consumption had made high-calorie sweeteners the “single largest source of calories in the American diet” for the year. Even earlier, Coca-Cola had sensed the consumer demand for zero-calorie drinks and replaced sugar with saccharin and cyclamates. However, saccharin, a coal tar derivative, carried a significant risk of carcinogenicity and was swiftly banned by the government. Coca-Cola immediately established the Calorie Control Board to oppose this ban, arguing that “such interference violates the citizen’s right to free choice.” How familiar a scene! Once again, the obesity tax failed.

By the 1990s, obesity in the United States was rising rather than falling, and some cities began introducing “obesity taxes” on junk food. In response, beverage companies continued to use threats, claiming they would “withdraw investment projects from bottling plants in the region.” In the early 21st century, New York State again proposed a tax on junk food, and consumer freedom organisations supported by Coca-Cola launched a lobbying campaign against it, arguing that “the government should not decide what people eat or drink.” Coca-Cola’s PR strategy teaches us that “old tricks still work as long as they deliver results.”

But no matter how Coca-Cola struggles in its final throes, more and more of the public have come to understand that sugary drinks, epitomised by Coca-Cola, are the culprits of obesity. Furthermore, the consumer preference for sweetness has long since exceeded the bounds of nature. Some researchers state: “The sweetness of carbonated drinks sends a message to children that all food should be this sweet.” Even so-called zero-calorie sugar substitutes have been proven by research to increase appetite and interfere with the body’s basic self-balancing mechanisms, contributing to the burden of obesity. Consequently, in recent years, an increasing number of countries have joined the ranks of those restricting sugar-sweetened beverages.

● In the beverage health grading systems of Singapore and Shanghai, Coca-Cola unsurprisingly sits in the least healthy ‘D’ tier. Image: You Diao Testing @Xiaohongshu
As the author notes, for Coca-Cola, even the “sacrosanct secret formula” has evolved alongside the changing world; the only thing that has remained constant is the system and mechanism by which it extracts profit. The cornerstone of this endless profit stream is a plentiful supply chain fueled by surplus, cheap raw materials; thus, Coca-Cola is essentially a product of depletion. Even though Coca-Cola has consistently attempted to escape the shackles of natural laws, its declining performance, deteriorating brand image, and the precarious health of its consumers all clearly indicate that this path of resource plunder is nearing its end.

Yet, the future of Coca-Cola is not the future of humanity. While we sometimes suffer the illusion that “the capitalists live longer than I do,” as more consumers recognise the health, environmental, and social costs behind these drinks and choose to drink a few fewer bottles of Coke, the company will be left in a state of perpetual anxiety. We, in turn, will gain a steadier blood glucose 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 exceeds expectations; CEO states long-term goals in China remain 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: Moving away from bottled water, doubling down on 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 Ltd[OL].http://www.chinafoodsltd.com/.

[7]Aiqicha – COFCO Coca-Cola Beverage (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 abandons environmental commitments; 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 Consumption. Today’s youth are abandoning “sugar-sweetened beverages”[OL].https://36kr.com/p/2864886416018052,2024-7-16.

Foodthink Author

Doudou

Sustainable living practitioner with a passion for researching non-consumptive lifestyles.

 

 

 

 

Editor: Tianle

Published by Foodthink