Hello and welcome to this week's edition of Making Food History. This video is about one of the great
charms of engaging with food in the past namely this ability of certain books to totally change
the way to look at a product this is a video about Coca-Cola and when I talk about Coca-Cola I'm
going to show this can into the camera you think well what else what is that left to say about
Coca-Cola you know everything about it you've been drinking it probably perfectly throughout your
life it is available in most countries around the world an icon of the American way of life
as you see in a famous times cover of 1950 where Coca-Cola was feeding the world you have seen so
many commercials and you know that it's all based on a sacred formula since Coca-Cola came to market
in 1886. well that's the story that you have been told by a very powerful Corporation and so many
commercials there is a different perspective on Coco caller that comes from Bart Elmore's Citizen
Coke a book that we discussed in our reading group last week the book departs from something that is
evident on each and every can of Coke that is out there the list of ingredients because if
you look at the kind of coke you see it's made of water sugar caffeine and coca leaves and
Elmore asks a very simple question where does that stuff come from and by following
the commodity chains that go into a coke more opens a different window on Coca-Cola and its
place in the world for one thing it emerges that Coca-Cola is a beneficiary of one of the great
engineering projects of the Modern Age namely the making of a safe and reliable water supply if you
ever wondered where does the water in Coca-Cola come from well it comes from the same source that
you're using yourself the tap and very often that water comes at a great discount Coca-Cola
is also a major consumer offshore in fact it has been the largest industrial consumer of sugar on
worker markets since the 1910s and that has made Coca-Cola major player in the politics of sugar
and the politics of sugar is a very important field of agricultural subsidies and protectionism
sugar is the second most protected agricultural commodity after rice and
cook a Coca-Cola has played a very significant role in the politics of sugar throughout time
there's the caffeine which has been a source of constant troubles how do Coca-Cola get all the
caffeine that goes into its Coca-Cola well till the 1950s when the coffee industry discovered
that it can sell a lot of decaf coffee decaf coffee became popular in the affluent societies
of the West and if you ever wondered where all that caffeine went that had to be extracted from
the coffee beans well now you know it went into your can of Coca-Cola yes Coca-Cola was also
an outlet for ways because if you reduce decaf coffee you have a lot of caffeine that needs to
go somewhere and there are the coca leaves coca leaves contain cocaine and yes cocaine was in
the original Coca-Cola as it was produced for the first time in 1886. so much for the sacred formula
there is no longer cocaine in your Coca-Cola in case you're wondering because several U.S
states imposed bans on cocaine in the early 1900s Georgia where Coca-Cola is located in
Atlanta Georgia Georgia imposed a ban on cocaine sales In 1902 and Coca-Cola decided that from then
on it would lose cocoa leaves where cocaine has been extracted there is a medical production of
cocaine in the U.S and Coca-Cola has played a major in role in keeping that going and Metro
and making sure that there is a continuous import of Coca loose into the U.S because
it needs those coca leaves for its formula so if you look at Coca-Cola in this way you don't look
at the commercials and all the advertising and the brand protection that is the standard of Coca-Cola
history you see a company that is constrained by a formula there is this list of ingredients
there is a certain recipe that Coca-Cola needs to work with it's not like there have been no
modifications in the composition of Coca-Cola you heard that for cocaine there's also a shift
in the sugar that Coca-Cola uses in the 1980s there's a shift from the traditional sugar
which comes from sugar beets and sugar cane to high fructose corn syrup at least on the U.S
market that is due to costs but even there Coca-Cola proceeds very cautiously less it
violates the sacred formula so you see a company here that is extremely Limited in what it can do
to change and innovate on the resource front this company needs the control over these resource
flow because if it doesn't get these different ingredients in the right quantity it just cannot
produce its product the amazing thing is this is how it has worked for 126 years and counting you
see a company that is strong at the centre of a web of supplies even though it is not under
direct control of its commodities there is a long tradition in the Coca-Cola company that
Coca-Cola has avoided to produce these resources in-house it has traditionally bought them from
other producers because it has reduced Capital out that has a reduced vulnerability and this
deserves recognition because it runs against one of the received wisdoms of business history
there's a long tradition of writing the history of the modern cooperation as the making of large
corporate behemoths that have as many things in-house as possible the key book to point to
is the book The Visible Hand by Alfred Chandler Chandler was professor of business history at
Harvard Business School. The Visible Hand won the Pulitzer Prize in 1978 a really influential book
and well the title is already foreshadowing the argument it's a play on Adam Smith's Invisible
Hand of the Market well Chandler argues that there is a visible hand in play in the making of
modern capitalism and that is the large vertically integrated Corporation so the visible hand is the
hand of management that allows these corporate behemoths to work like clockwork with different
levels of managers who work together and make sure that these large companies can profit from the
economies of scale scope and speed and can process products and commodities as quickly as possible
and can push other producers small producers out of the market and the making of these large
corporations is the story of the making of the U.S capitalism well if you look around with this
lens you do find corporations that have that follow this rationale of vertical integration
one of them is the United Fruit Company the banana producing cup company U.S owned working in Latin
America this company controlled as much of the commodity chain as it could it owned the land
where bananas grew it on the railroads that brought the bananas to the coast it owned the
ships that brought the bananas to U.S consumers and the visible hand of management makes sure
that all these things work together that all these activities complemented each other and
that no other company could produce bananas at the costs that United Fruit could well have you
heard Coca-Cola follows a different path by well Outsourcing avonle letter it pushes the risks of
producing the Commodities to other parties we talked about this in our research group and we
thought well maybe there are different products with different models with their requirements that
come which each individual product when it comes to bananas for instance it's very important to
have this commodity chain as quickly as seamlessly as possible because if you let banana rest in a
harbour without artificial cooling the banana will rot very quickly but there was a sense in the room
that maybe this model of vertical generation is facing limits in the food business that many food
companies pursue the path that Coca-Cola has by and large followed through its history avoid
resource production and try to work with other producers position yourself as at the centre of
a web of flows rather than seek complete control over as many stages of production as possible
the question is why does this work for so long and why does it make Coca-Cola such a profitable
company rather than a puppet of so many commodity streams that it has to work with this is a very
important question and actually a question that is at heart of our research group. The
modern food system is so huge so overwhelming so powerful that it is tempting to take it for
granted but if you look at it more closely you see that they're actually printing a crisis on
multiple fronts that the business of making our food system work is working with so many crisis
and that this system is not so much majestic and hegemonic as stumbling along all the time that is
the history that we plan to write and so it's a very important question to ask how does Coca-Cola
become this company I'll give you three points that allow Coca-Cola to work with limited control
over its or in-house control over its resource flow the first is Coca-Cola grows in the landscape
of abundance and this landscape of about this Land of Plenty is very recent it's very American
it is the kind of situation that you find yourself in in the U.S from the late 19th century onwards
that there is always an abundance of supply you can always expand and you can always find other
companies on the market when Coca-Cola is in the early 50s and looks around for where to get its
caffeine well it gets an offer from Monsanto for synthetic caffeine Coca-Cola doesn't want this
but it doesn't need to buy Monsanto’s caffeine because it can find other sources you will always
find some other suppliers because there's just so much stuff around in the modern world of plenty
the second point there is an alliance with the state and I think that is an alliance that we'll
look at very carefully and very extensively in our research group we cannot understand the making of
the modern food business without a state that is going along and that's supporting these companies
in all sorts of ways and Coca-Cola in a way was very fortunate having the state on its side
from the start there was very little that the Interventional State found with Coca-Cola that
needed guidance or management or control when it came to impurities when it came to quality a key
concern around the turn of the century while Coca-Cola took care of that out of its own
self-interest once you sell bottles of Coca-Cola to an entire country and beyond you need to make
sure out of your own brand protection interests that the quality is right in these bottles so
you have a very cosy relationship between the Coca-Cola company and state authorities
the epitome is probably World War II when the Coca-Cola company pledges to supply Coca-Cola to
each and every soldier out there in the field and the military is very happy to work with Coca-Cola
on this because they like it when soldiers drink non-alcoholic beverages that forges an alliance
that well matters for the globalization of the brand with the U.S soldiers comes not just Liberty
but also Coca-Cola that's as good as a commercial gets but it also forges a friendship that lasts
beyond the day if you have fought a war together that makes for a partnership with the state
that lasts beyond the day so that is the second reason why Coca-Cola
is so successful in the resource business it has the state more or less on its side but there's
something else if you look at Coca-Cola as a web of commodity flows of resource flows of dealers in
this web there is an air of inevitability about Coca-Cola it is the one player that has to be
there the one player that you cannot work around everybody is dispensable in this web of resource
flows except for the Coca-Cola company which has the brand the formula the advertisement and
contracts with all the players that prevent them from going elsewhere so the making of the modern
food system is also about the making of these food companies that make themselves inevitable so which
what you will find when this video prompts you to think well this Coca-Cola thing really has
too much waste recycling for my taste well if you go elsewhere chances are that you will end
up with another inevitable company so looking at these companies closely and really understanding
how they make it how they become resilient if not invincible that is a very big part of a project.