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Business Breakdown Episode 6 – Coca-Cola

By Kieran Kearey 26/12/25 6 min read

Welcome to business breakdown episode six. This series is a longer version of my Instagram series “Business Breakdown In 60 Seconds”, where I provide information about a business, such as who their current CEO is, who founded the company, controversial news or general facts about the business, etc. But here on the blog, I will dive just a little bit deeper into each business.

As the title says, episode six is about Coca-Cola.

*This information is purely an objective view based on information taken from internet research*

Table Of Contents –

*Click on each heading to go to that section*

What is Coca-Cola?

Information from Wikipedia, Coca-Cola Company and Globaldata suggests that Coca-Cola (Coca-Cola Co) is an American company that produces, distributes and markets soft drinks. According to the Coca-Cola Company, Coca-Cola (Coca-Cola Co) is a parent company to several brands including: Vitaminwater, Sprite, Smartwater, Schweppes, Powerade, Innocent, Fanta, Costa Coffee, Dasani, Appletiser, and many more. The Coca-Cola Company was founded in 1886 by Pharmacist Dr. John Pemberton through creation of the Coca-Cola syrup, which was paired with carbonated water and was sold at 5 cents a glass (£0.0058 GBP a glass if you paid that amount today), Coca-Cola Company.

Current CEO

Coca-Cola’s current CEO is James Quincey. Quincey has a long history at the Coca-Cola Company, as conveyed in text from CEOToday, Yale and Coca-Cola, which say that he joined the company in 1996 as a director of learning strategy for the Latin America group and then became:
President of the South Latin division in 2003,
President of the Mexico Division 2005-2008,
President of the Northwest Europe and Nordics business unit 2008-2012,
President of the company’s Europe group 2013-2015,
Chief Operating Officer 2015-2017,
CEO 2017-Current,
Chairman of the board 2019-Current.

James Quincey


Coca-Cola and Artificial Intelligence controversy

According to the NBC and Forbes, Coca-Cola’s last year advertisement on November 16 2024 saw controversy because it was entirely AI-Generated, which “sparked mockery and disgust from social media users”. The sources suggest that Coca-Cola asked three seperate AI studios to create an AI commercial for them. In total, four AI models were used to create three seperate advertisements.

At present, AI has monstrous negative impacts on our environment. A specific example, according to GOV.UK is that a popular AI model (GPT-3) used “700,000 litres of water during its pre-training phase”. Furthermore, this article says that AI’s global water usage is to increase from 1.1bn to 6.6bn cubic metres by 2027, which is the equivalent of 6.6 trillion litres of water.

Another set of statistics come from EESI (in a blog post from June 2025) who say that larger data centres can consume around 5 million gallons of fresh water per day, and with data centres becoming increasingly larger, this number will only increase. In addition to this, an example from Business Energy UK (again from 2025) derived from a study from The Washington Post and the University of California is that ChatGPT-4 uses 519ml of water to generate just a single 100-word email. This number is apparently equivalent to powering “14 LED light bulbs for an hour”. One last example from Business Energy UK on the same post is that ChatGPT supposedly consumes 39.98 Million kWh (Kilowatt Hours) per day, which is the equivalent of charging 8 million phones.

To be clear, the water used in these processes is freshwater, which is safe for human consumption. Only 3% of Earth’s water is freshwater and a significant amount of that small percentage is either not easily accessible, or completely inaccessible. From this information alone, you can see that there will be a very big problem on our hands in the near future.

To conclude, Artificial Intelligence is having devastating effects on the planet. AI will only grow, and our problems with it. This is a topic I’m very passionate about, and I’ll be creating another post solely dedicated to Artificial Intelligence, what it is, how it is destroying our environment, etc, so stay tuned for that.

Anti-Union, threats and murder in Colombia

Going back about 24 years ago, Coca-Cola had been accused of working with “death squads” to kill plant workers and union members, Business & Human Rights Resource Centre. Starting in 2001, information had started to come out about how Colombian trade union (Sinaltrainal) leaders (who represent workers at Coca-Cola’s bottling facilities) had assassination attempts made on them from paramilitary security forces, supposedly contracted by Coca-Cola. This lead to a lawsuit creation by survivors against Coca-Cola.

In 2003, The Guardian published a post that said that trade unions around the world had started a boycott of Coca-Cola, for the same reason that the lawsuit in 2001 was filed for. Furthermore, this post says that in addition to the information in the previous paragraph, 9 union members were murdered at the Colombian bottling plants in the past 13 years.

Here is some further reading for you to check out:

https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/colombian-union-suing-coca-cola-in-death-squad-case/
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/coca-cola-lawsuit-re-colombia/
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/jul/24/marketingandpr.colombia
https://www.tuc.org.uk/sites/default/files/JusColom.pdf
https://socialism.com/fs-article/coca-cola-for-colombian-trade-unionists-its-the-real-deadly-thing/
https://clas.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/publications/winter2006-killercola.pdf
https://www.cetim.ch/human-rights-violations-by-coca-cola-in-colombia/

Droughts and Water Shortages

A Coca-Cola bottling plant was supposedly the reason for drought in Plachimada, Kerala state, India (The Guardian and ThoughtCo.). Additionally, the bottling plant produced a sludge that was high in both lead and cadmium. Lead is very bad for the human body as outlined by a toxicology report from the United Kingdom Government. According to the U.S Centers for disease control and prevention and the United States Environmental Protection Agency, Lead can enter a human body in many ways, including: Gardening, Eating anything grown in contaminated soil, etc. Children are also easily exposed to lead due to playing in contaminated soil and eating it.

Returning to the issue of drought. Plachimada is not the only location of which Coca-Cola has depleted and destroyed water sources. WarOnWant and The Guardian suggest other areas of India, Rajasthan, Latin America and others have also become victims of water depletion by Coca-Cola.

Manipulating science and misleading the public

According to several sources, Union of Concerned Scientists, Slow Food, Down To Earth and the National Library of Medicine, Coca-Cola has been accused of influencing the public to believe that obesity is to do with the inactivity of people, rather than the high sugar content in their drinks. Furthermore, Coca-Cola funded scientific research through “in-house research institutes such as the Beverage Institute for Health and Wellness”, which lead to more misinformation being spread. Specifically, this institute “confused the science” and focused on how their drinks played a role in hydration and energy balance while ignoring their links to obesity and metabolic disease.

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coca-Cola_Company
https://www.coca-colacompany.com/about-us
https://www.coca-colacompany.com/brands
https://www.coca-colacompany.com/about-us/history/the-birth-of-a-refreshing-idea
https://www.ceotodaymagazine.com/top-ceos/ceo-today-top-50-james-quincey/
https://som.yale.edu/story/2024/coca-cola-chairman-and-ceo-james-quincey-recognized-yale-legend-leadership-award
https://www.coca-colacompany.com/about-us/leadership/james-quincey
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/coca-cola-causes-controversy-ai-made-ad-rcna180665
https://www.forbes.com./sites/danidiplacido/2024/11/16/coca-colas-ai-generated-ad-controversy-explained/
https://sustainableict.blog.gov.uk/2025/09/17/ais-thirst-for-water/
https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption
https://www.businessenergyuk.com/knowledge-hub/chatgpt-energy-consumption-visualized/
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/colombian-union-suing-coca-cola-in-death-squad-case/
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/jul/24/marketingandpr.colombia
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/coca-cola-lawsuit-re-colombia/
https://www.tuc.org.uk/sites/default/files/JusColom.pdf
https://socialism.com/fs-article/coca-cola-for-colombian-trade-unionists-its-the-real-deadly-thing/
https://clas.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/publications/winter2006-killercola.pdf
https://www.cetim.ch/human-rights-violations-by-coca-cola-in-colombia/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2003/jul/25/water.india
https://www.thoughtco.com/coca-cola-groundwater-depletion-in-india-1204204
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/lead-properties-incident-management-and-toxicology/lead-toxicological-overview
https://www.cdc.gov/lead-prevention/prevention/soil.html
https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2020-10/documents/lead-in-soil-aug2020.pdf
https://waronwant.org/news-analysis/coca-cola-drinking-world-dry
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2006/mar/19/business.india1
https://www.ucs.org/resources/how-coca-cola-disguised-its-influence-science-about-sugar-and-health
https://www.slowfood.com/blog-and-news/coca-cola-opens-happiness-but-shuts-the-mouths-of-researchers/
https://www.downtoearth.org.in/food/almost-every-middle-income-country-is-being-targeted-by-big-food-and-its-scientific-agents
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10200649/

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