Coca-Cola’s Inspector

At the Coke museum (The World of Coca-Cola) on Baker st. in Atlanta, Georgia, they show a replica of the process of producing their beverages, which number 3,500 under 500 brands.

What I found fascinating was the “Bottle Inspector”. All the empty bottles pass through the Inspector that takes a picture of the inside of every bottle. Any bottle not meeting the quality standard of Coca-Cola is taken out of the assembly line.

This process not only ensures the high quality of every single product put out by Coca-Cola in the market but also protects them from scammers who claim of finding foreign objects inside Coca-Cola’s bottle of softdrinks, hoping for a hefty settlement fee. In their dreams!

Coca-Cola last week celebrated it’s 125th year anniversary in festivities that intelligently combined fun, business and social relevance.

In a talk with about a hundred journalists from 26 countries that gathered at the Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta, officials of Coca-Cola Company underscored the importance of consumers’ trust that brought the country to its premier position in the beverages business quenching the thirst of people even in the remotest parts of the world except in Cuba, Myanmar and North Korea.

“We have to earn that moral contract every single day,” Coca-Cola’s Chairman and chief executive officer Muhtar Kent said.

Clyde Tuggle, Coca-Cola’s senior vice president, Global Public Affairs and Communications, said it is the company’s policy to be “responsive, transparent, ethical and helpful.”

Kent said, “A brand is a promise. A good brand is a promise kept.”

He said the officials are conscious that they are “stewards of a great institution” which had its humble beginnings at the Jacob’s Pharmacy, a corner store on Marietta St., just a few blocks away from where the Coca-Cola headquarters is located today.

It was at Jacob’s Pharmacy where a chemist John Pemberton, served his concoction of a “delicious and refreshing’ drink. In the first year of his business, Pemberton was selling nine glasses per day. Today, the red softdrink which now comes in several choices, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Cherry Coke, etc.) is a $67 billion brand.

It was his company accountant, Frank Robinson, who thought of the name Coca-Cola thinking that the two Cs would look well in advertising. The famous logo was also Robinson’s handwriting.

There are several milestones in Coca-Cola’s history but one that distinguished Coke from other beverages was the contour bottle which some use to describe a voluptuous woman’s body.

Phil Mooney, vice president for Coca-Cola’s Heritage Communications, said the success of Coke encouraged imitation from their competitors. They thought of a bottle that was “so distinctive that it could be recognized by feel in the dark or identified lying broken on the ground.”

The design that got the company’s nod was by Alexander Samuelson of the Root Glass Company.

Coca-Cola officials underscored social responsibility in the company’s growth mentioning their projects in alleviating poverty in underdeveloped countries as well as water conservation. Rightly so because Coca-Cola products are 90 per cent water.

Amidst allegations that Coke is contributory to obesity, Coca-Cola officials are at pains assuring the public that their product “is not unhealthy” and “there’s nothing that we put in our products that is harmful.”

Interesting tidbits:

Today, 1.7 billion servings of Coca-Cola products are consumed daily. That means every second, 19,400 people are drinking any one of Coca-Cola’s more than 3,500 products.

If Coca-Cola ever produced were to cascade down Niagara Falls at its normal rate of 1.6 million gallons per second, it would flow for nearly 83 hours.

If all the Coca-Cola ever produced were in 8-ounce contour bottles, and these bottles were distributed to each person in the world, there would be 1,104 bottles per person.

Amazing.