Why the Soda Industry Is the Big Tobacco of Our Times

Soft drinks are a multibillion-dollar industry with a health-harming playbook straight from the cigarette companies.

By Marion Nestle.

Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Dr Pepper Snapple are collectively Big Soda. The industry as a whole, however, is a massive enterprise involving thousands of companies and hundreds of thousands of people engaged in manufacturing beverage syrups or concentrates; in bottling, canning, preparing, or distributing finished products; and in selling soda cans, bottles, or fountain drinks to consumers everywhere in the world. Soda companies produce and sell the equivalent of nearly two trillion 12-ounce servings of fountain or packaged beverages every year.

In doing so, the companies engaged in this industry perform one or more of four distinct tasks: producing syrup, bottling or canning the drinks, distributing the syrup or drinks, or selling the drinks, bottles, or cans.

The soda business involves many companies with a vested interest in its success. The stakeholders in the soda business include the soda companies themselves, of course, but also those that supply sugar and other raw ingredients, make syrup, produce carbon dioxide, fabricate the cans and bottles, can and bottle the products, make dispensers and vending machines, deliver ingredients, and supply and service the factories, dispensers, and vending machines.

Sodas help support the restaurants, convenience stores, grocery stores, sports facilities, and movie theaters that sell drinks to customers, as well as the advertising agencies employed to market the products and the media venues in which advertisements appear.

A seemingly infinite number of individuals, nonprofit organizations, educational institutions, health and environmental groups, and business associations benefit from soda company philanthropy, partnerships, and marketing.

Because all of these entities depend on sodas for their livelihoods or function, they constitute an unusually wide-ranging support system for Big Soda. Indeed, one of Coca-Cola’s guiding rules is to ensure that everyone who touches its products along the way to the consumer should make money doing so. This is a business strategy guaranteed to ensure deep and lasting devotion.