Comment by rob74
6 hours ago
Since "Cola" is listed in the "popular alternatives" box, I think it's important to mention that most European Coca-Cola bottlers operate as franchises, i.e. they license the Coca-Cola brand and get the syrup for the drinks they bottle from the Atlanta-based HQ, but other than that they are locally-owned companies. So if you boycott Coca-Cola brands, maybe 20% of the impact goes to Coca-Cola US, while 80% is felt by the local company and its employees.
That just means they have all the infrastructure they need to bottle syrup from another source and start selling that instead - no capex needed, just maybe need to get together with other franchisees and figure out how to spend some opex on marketing and getting it onto store shelves. Coca-cola has a moat, but it's hardly protective of franchisees here.
There must be thousands of soda manufacturers in Europe. I can buy dozens of sodas where I live. But they are not Coca Cola.
From a recent hn discussion there's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDkH3EbWTYc
They are bottled at the same places that bottle Coca-Cola. If those places stop paying for their Coca-Cola brand license because nobody is buying it... then okay? so what?
Or, now that someone's reverse-engineered the Coca-Cola formula and everyone's saying we need to stop pandering to USA IP rights, governments have the opportunity to do the funniest thing ever. I think Russia already did.
Someone just used gas chromatography to develop a seemingly passable knock off of the unpatented Coca Cola formula and posted it online. https://youtu.be/TDkH3EbWTYc
I always assumed this to be marketing, as reversing the formula has been easy since the '90s. I know someone with acces to a university lab, and he reverses and recreates popular tastes as a hobby. Also, in double blind taste tests, pepsi tends to win from Coca.
Their real genius was always marketing, associating sugar water with freedom, free time, summer AND christmas, ... Not to look down on them, good marketing is both very hard and very powerfull.
I firmly believe that such thing is already know by companies...
In the niche perfumes hobby, you have small brands doing that or people paying for gcms analysis on perfumes, i guess that companies have already done that on coke for decades
It's arguably unhealthy that one company has such global dominance over any market, even a trivial one like soft drinks.
> So if you boycott Coca-Cola brands, maybe 20% of the impact goes to Coca-Cola US, while 80% is felt by the local company and its employees.
Assuming the person burns the money they would've spent on Cola in the first place. But they aren't, they'll probably just redirect that money to an alternative soft drink, probably a more local one.
exactly idk. about other EU Countries but at least in Germany outside of small country side stores you tend to have a very wide variety of "alternative" soft drinks. Some trying to emulate some big brand (e.g. Coca Cola) but also many keeping the concept (Cola) and putting their own twist on it. Most importantly most of them seem to be EU based (and often Germany based and sometimes local to your region).
The main drawback of them is that due to them operating on a (way) smaller scale and need to have a factor to differentiate themself, so most of them are more expensive. (but there are cheap no-brand clones, too).
A much bigger problem is that Nestle and co. try to either buy up any new innovative successful German food/drink companies. Sure after being bought up they tend to continue operate like before so technically they aren't dependent on the US, but they have been bought up anyway.
Nestle is Swiss, not American, so that seems like a very strange example to use.
If you totally remove Coke from the market, sure, but no one wants to drink a knockoff Coke, they want the actual thing.
actual, that is de-facto wrong
many alternative Colas don't try to imitate Coca Cola but give Cola their own twist, and IMHO multiple of them taste noticeable better then Coca Cola
and for people with little money getting cheaper knock-off is pretty common and people get used to it
at the same time Coca Colas brand isn't seen as "fancy"/"high quality"/"well regarded" enough anymore. So many restaurants for which cola isn't just a "default fallback they don't care about" but a drink commonly combined with their meals, started serving other Cola brand like e.g. Fritz Cola, Mio Mio Cola or Afri Cola. Also some of the more beer/alk. focused companies have started to branch out to soft drinks as Alkohole consume is going down with some surprise successes (e.g. Paulana Spezi) but also with existing distribution contracts with Restaurants and Food Chains, so their stuff is popping up increasingly more often.
And I mean we are still speaking about the kind of soft drink with the most dominant brand control (Cola/Coca Cola), for all other soft drinks the US companies have a far less strong hold on them.
And sure some pople like I guess you will insist on drinking Coca Cola.
But also if the US continues to paint themself as the new big evil (while Russia looks increasingly weak, and China is clever enough to move mostly behind the scene) then it's just a matter of time until people will start ostracizing people for buying (unnecessary) products which are "well known US" and haven't somehow separated their company image from the US. Like seriously how did the US became so incompetent in politics that you find people all over the EU which think joining with China against the US would be a good idea and long term better for their quality of live... like wtf.
We are talking about individuals here. People are absolutely capable of not drinking Coke because they want to avoid American products.
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Only if knockoff are not of the same quality, which is the case because competing on price is a race to the bottom. But if it becomes a brand issue, and some serious investment can be justified, then consumer adoption can be engineered.
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Good thing that locally we produce other sugary drinks that we can buy instead!