by James Walvin
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the soft-drinks companies were key lobbyists on all matters to do with US sugar policy and, in the same period, one company – Coca-Cola – established itself as the dominant soft-drinks manufacturer. The company took off through a string of clever commercial decisions and via persuasive advertising, as well as the help offered by federal health experts’ approval for their main drink. Their success was also linked to the massive interwar expansion of US road transport. Coca-Cola located new dispensing machines at 500,000 petrol stations, while travellers by bus were served by machines in the nation’s bus terminals. The company also began to expand its overseas operations, developing outlets in twenty-eight countries, from Burma to South Africa.8
The volumes of sugar involved in this expansion were huge. At around the outbreak of the Second World War, Coca-Cola alone devoured 200 million pounds of sugar annually, and clearly needed protection for its vital sugar supplies – at low cost. When war returned, the US Federal Government once again stepped in to stabilise sugar prices, although the drinks companies baulked at sugar rationing, as they had during the First World War. Coca-Cola returned to its tactics of the earlier war, of persuading the public – and especially the Government – that Coca-Cola was a patriotic company, and that its drinks provided a vital wartime boost; it was a reviver and refresher for hard-pressed, war-time workers, and was especially important for men in uniform. In what proved to be the transformation of the product and the company, Coca-Cola became a wartime necessity, not a trivial luxury.
Alongside cigarettes, Coca-Cola was heavily promoted as vital for the war effort, both at home and abroad. Specially commissioned reports and adverts promoted the same idea. Even the US Surgeon General was recruited to the task:
In this time of stress and strain, Americans turn to their sparkling beverage as the British of all classes turn to their cup of tea and the Brazilians to their coffee. From that moment of relaxation, they go back to their task cheered and strengthened with no aftermath of gastric repentance.
The master stroke, however – a move of incalculable commercial value – was securing military backing for Coca-Cola. The US Army persuaded the Government to exempt Coca-Cola from sugar rationing and to allow the drink to be sent to US bases across the USA, and to all theatres of war. In January 1942, General Eisenhower ordered monthly supplies of Coca-Cola for the US military. Thus, the company bought its sugar at a Government-pegged level, then had exclusive access to the vast market that was the US at war – in Europe and Asia. Company profits soared to $25 million in 1944 alone.9 It was a serious blow to Pepsi-Cola (only recently recovered from bank-ruptcy), in that it was not allowed access to the wartime military machine. Coca-Cola’s privileged position enabled it to race far ahead of all its commercial rivals. In the course of the Second World War, Coca-Cola sold an estimated 10 billion bottles at military bases and supply (PX) stores, providing 95 per cent of all the soft drinks sold to the US military.10
This global reach was attained by the company piggy-backing their wares on the vast US military machine. After Pearl Harbor, Robert Woodruff, chairman of the company, had patriotically declared, ‘We will see that every man in uniform gets a bottle of Coca-Cola for five cents, wherever he is and whatever it costs our company.’
The unquenchable thirst of US servicemen for Coca-Cola spread the taste to all corners of the globe. Staff from the Coca-Cola company (nicknamed the Coca-Cola Colonels’) travelled in the wake of the military, setting up bottling plants and distribution systems to reach the troops. No less important, senior US military figures – Paton, MacArthur, Omar Bradley and, above all, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, Eisenhower – effectively endorsed Coca-Cola. Eisenhower and General Marshall signed orders authorising the shipping and installation of Coke plants from the USA to the European theatre – and all this at a time of scarce shipping capacity for vital military equipment.11
From the start of the US involvement in the Second World War, senior military figures had appreciated that Coca-Cola was good for morale. Eisenhower was the most prominent figure who believed that the drink kept his men happy and fighting fit, and his commanders echoed that belief, signing requisitions for Coke from one corner of the world to another. More surprising, perhaps, the military actually paid for the transportation and erection of Coke-making machinery in all theatres of war, and the labour behind all this activity was military-based. Although the company dispatched 248 of its employees to supervise those operations, it was army and navy engineers who provided the muscle and skills. By the end of the war, the US military had constructed sixty-four bottling plants for Coca-Cola, many of them employing GIs as workers. The impact of all this was sensational. Between 1941 and 1945, the US military bought 10 billion bottles of soft drinks from Coca-Cola.
No one doubted for a second that Coca-Cola was vital. For the millions of Americans in uniform, it was a reminder of home. In the USA itself, Coke’s advertising told Americans that the drink was patriotic. It was the American way of life in a bottle. That same image became global and people the world over came to regard Coca-Cola as quintessentially American: ‘a symbol of our way of living’.12 Throughout the wartime advertising campaign, the company traded relentlessly on this theme, in print, on radio and via a host of educational publications. Above all, however, it was the homesick young American serviceman – in New Guinea or North Africa – who most valued Coca-Cola. Extracts from the many thousands of letters they sent home are testament to that:
. . . I always thought it was a wonderful drink, but on an island where few white men have ever set foot, it is a Godsend . . .
. . . But the other day, three of us guys walked ten miles to buy a case of Coca-Cola, then carried it back. You will never know how good it tasted . . .
. . . The crowning touch to your Christmas packages was the bottled Coca-Cola. How did you ever think of sending them!
. . . To have this drink is just like having home brought nearer to you . . .
. . . If anyone were to ask us what we are fighting for, we think half of us would answer, the right to buy Coca-Cola again . . .13
The phrase, ‘Coca-Cola’, was even coined as a military password when the Allies crossed the Rhine into Germany. Nor was the power of that drink lost on the Axis powers, although they used it to denigrate the USA. In the words of one Nazi propagandist, America never contributed anything to world civilization but chewing gum and Coca-Cola.’ In fact, the war confirmed that when Coca-Cola passed into the hands of friend and foe as a gift from an American GI, they liked what they tasted. Here was the seedbed for a remarkable commercial phenomenon – the global spread of post-war taste and demand for Coca-Cola.From Africa to Fiji, from India to Iceland, locals got their first taste of Coca-Cola from the American military in wartime.
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Alongside this military-assisted commercial coup, the Coca-Cola company appealed aggressively to influential and moneyed people around the world, inviting their investment in new plants for Coca-Cola, arguing that the drink was good for local business and development. Magnates from India to Brazil secured contracts to bottle and distribute Coca-Cola. The company failed, however, to persuade the US Government that the company should be part of the Marshall Plan for Europe’s reconstruction, and despite Coca-Cola’s immense wartime global reach, its immediate post-war fortunes flagged. Pepsi-Cola, on the other hand, revived, courtesy of dynamic new management and aggressive advertising. But this changed, once again, in the 1960s under fresh management, and with the massive expansion of Coca-Cola outside the USA; more than forty new plants opened in 1960 alone.14
What transformed Coca-Cola within the USA was the postwar rise of a new dining phenomenon: McDonald’s and the other fast-food chains – Taco Bell (1946), Burger King (1954) and Kentucky Fried Chicken (1952). All of them proliferated along the highways constructed under President Eisenhower’s stewardship. Following Coca-Cola’s earlier model, McDonald’s franchised their restaurants and, by 19
60, there were 250; in 1970, 3,000. The founder, Ray Kroc, was also a huge fan of Coca-Cola and made that company the exclusive supplier of soft drinks to McDonald’s expanding chain. By 2000, McDonald’s had become the largest customer for Coca-Cola. It was a perfect deal for the soft-drinks giant – throughout this expansion, they could satisfy the enormous appetite for their drinks with very little investment in infrastructure, because bottling and distribution was licensed out to local companies. As we have seen before, there are few who have come close to creating alchemy – but now Coca-Cola were as close commercially as it is possible to be, transforming a humble soft drink into unimaginable, golden profits.
The man who led Coca-Cola to its pre-eminence in the postwar world was Robert Woodruff, whose wartime success was the introduction of Coke to all corners of the world on the back of the US military. Like the manufacturers of breakfast cereals, Woodruff also appreciated the importance of securing the loyalty and the taste of the young. American children were introduced to Coca-Cola in their early years – at those formative moments when habits developed in the heart of the family, with playmates and the local neighbourhood – and those habits would endure for ever. Coca-Colas post-war triumph was to establish consumer loyalty on a scale that other companies could only marvel at. And while other drinks companies were also becoming enormously profitable, Coca-Cola established a presence like no other. Its name and logo began to appear in all the major locations where Americans enjoyed themselves, and it was sponsored by the sports and movie stars idolised by children and young people. The association was established between the drink and enjoyment, between a bottle or can of Coke and a happy childhood experience.
The world at large was also fast becoming Coca-Cola’s market. By 1971, more than one half of the company’s profits were generated outside the USA, although some locations proved resistant. In some regions – the Middle East, Africa and South-East Asia – the company had to invest in new water facilities for the bottling plants. Branching into costly desalination and hydrological ventures cost the company dear. Despite this, the profits reached dizzying heights: profits of $137 million in 1954 rose to $2.58 billion thirty years later.15
Throughout these years of massive expansion, Coca-Cola benefitted from US aid programmes which funded overseas projects, receiving assistance to grow sugar and citrus fruits and to establish new bottling plants. Millions of dollars came the way of the Coca-Cola Company to develop projects in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. In order to improve poor local water supplies, Coca-Cola persuaded the US Government to support the company’s drive to create bottling facilities worldwide. Federal money and guarantees, allied to a new generation of ambitious corporate executives zealous about selling soft drinks around the world, proved a potent mix. Despite failures and imperfections, the resulting water schemes brought clean water to many poor regions for the first time, but the schemes also proved a huge advantage to the soft-drinks industry.
In places troubled by water shortages, though, the Coca-Cola company found itself embroiled in political and legal conflict. Bottling Coca-Cola required massive volumes of water and local objectors sometimes even managed to disrupt and halt production. In a world increasingly alert to the need to garner and preserve global water reserves, the soft-drinks industry had become embroiled in one of the world’s major environmental struggles. In a curious twist to this story, it was water that came to their commercial rescue.16
Beginning in the 1980s, soft-drinks companies benefitted from the astonishing new demand for bottled water in the USA. Odd as it sounds, the growth of the bottled water economy also boosted the sale of soft drinks. In part, this was related to the decline of old civic amenities. Traditional US civic and urban amenities, especially water supplies, were crumbling, and a number of major scandals surrounding polluted and poisoned water supplies played into the hands of the drinks companies. Their products – new bottled water or fizzy drinks – seemed safer and better than tap water. As the average US per capita consumption of tap water dropped, people began to turn to the products of the major drinks companies.17
After a great deal of hesitation (and prompted by the example of Pepsi-Cola), Coca-Cola finally launched its own brand of bottled water in 1999. It was an immediate, dazzling success which almost defies belief. Soft-drinks companies bought water from municipalities at a tiny cost per gallon, bottled it while adding a degree of mineral salts, and sold it at $4.35. Not surprisingly, those same companies also campaigned against tap water, disparaging it in the mass media.18
This was the origin of a massive global industry. An endless variety of bottled waters have transformed the way many of us drink. By 2013, the global market for bottled water was $157 billion, and is expected to reach $280 billion by 2020. In the UK alone, the retail value in 2015 was $2.5 billion. And all for a substance that simply falls from the sky.19
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Though millions of people around the world have turned to American soft drinks since the Second World War, the most dramatic success of those drinks is to be found where they first began – in the USA. There, for more than a century, the softdrinks business had been built around a plentiful supply of cheap sugar. Sugar had been the central ingredient in the popularity of fizzy drinks but, by the late twentieth century, it was clear that people’s consumption of ever more fizzy drinks, in league with changing food and eating habits, was having a disastrous effect on their physical well-being. In the USA, sweetened soft drinks had been transformed from an infrequent treat to a persistent daily habit. In the 1950s, the annual per capita consumption of highly calorific soft drinks had been 11 gallons; fifty years later, that had risen to an astonishing 36 gallons. In the process, Americans were consuming 35lb of sweeteners each year from soft drinks alone.
Sugar had become a major problem. Throughout much of the twentieth century, sugar had been a matter of political and economic dispute in the USA and, in 1974, the old sugar quota system, designed to protect US sugar interests and control sugar prices, was ended by Congress. The drinks and confectionary lobby hoped this would give them access to still cheaper sugar, but the opposite happened. At first, sugar prices increased dramatically, then fluctuated up and down wildly. By the late 1970s, the US sugar industry was keen on a return to the stability provided by federal protection. For their part, the soft-drinks companies were tired of their reliance on volatile world sugar prices and supplies, and began to look for alternative sweeteners. The answer was close to hand.20
The search for artificial sweeteners had begun in the late nineteenth century, driven by pharmacists experimenting in their labs. Saccharin, for instance, had been discovered in 1879, and was sold commercially after 1914, having thrived in the years of wartime sugar shortages. Another major sweetener – cyclamate – emerged after 1945, and various combinations of these products appealed to the soft-drinks companies, especially from the 1950s onwards, in their early efforts to produce a reduced-calorie version of their main products. However, health concerns about artificial sweeteners in the 1960s and ’70s – and an increased scrutiny by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) into such products – lent a new urgency to the search for safe, new sweeteners. The solution seemed to be NutraSweet (aspartame). The makers of NutraSweet realised that the product’s future was linked to the soft-drinks market. Profits boomed and the makers became part of the massive Monsanto conglomerate.
By the end of the twentieth century, with a rising crescendo of concern about artificial sweeteners and health, and about the impact of sugar on global obesity, the corporate and legal in-fighting about artificial sweeteners became fierce – not surprisingly, perhaps, given the value of the global market for sweeteners. The annual sales for the market-leader – aspartame – stood at $ 3 billion; the next twelve leading products brought the total value to $3.5 billion.21 The revolution in American sweeteners came, however, from an unlikely corner of American agriculture.
Like the US sugar industry, US corn was highly protected, regulated and
subsidised, with the origins of federal intervention lying in the Depression era of the 1930s. Farmers in the American Midwest produced more and more corn, partly by using new, scientifically developed strains, and partly by innovative, highly mechanised farming systems and equipment. The end result, by the late twentieth century, was that US granaries were full to overflowing. The nation’s farmers had produced much more corn than the US could possibly consume.
Extracting a sweetener from corn had long been familiar to agricultural scientists and, even by the late nineteenth century, a number of corn-based sweeteners were available on the US market, and a number of companies specialised in corn syrup. But the taste was never quite right. Then, in 1957, scientists hit upon a process for making high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). At first, it was more expensive than sugar, but all that changed thanks to US legislation. The 1973 Farm Bill devised a payment for farmers allowing them to grow as much corn as they wanted, while guaranteeing them a profit via federal subsidies. HFCS then became cheap, and a new process made it even sweeter than cane sugar. First the USA, and then the global demand for market sweeteners was utterly transformed.
Coca-Cola, ever cautious about tinkering with its major product, experimented with corn sweeteners in some of its lower-profile drinks. They discovered that customers did not complain and, in 1980, the company switched from cane sugar to HFCS. In 1985, corn syrup became the sweetener for all the company’s major drinks in the USA. As usual, the country’s wider confectionary industry followed their lead, and corn syrup quickly became the dominant sweetener in the USA. By the mid-1980s, most manufacturers of soft drinks had switched completely to HFCS, and it is only recently that researchers have exposed its possible dangers to health. That sweetener soon infiltrated the wider confectionary and food market, and was being used in a wide range of products, from ketchups to cookies, from cakes to candies.22 The impact was astonishing.