The Coca-Cola System

The Coca-Cola Company is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, and is structured across seven operating groups, in addition to Corporate. As of January 2007, our Company had approximately 90,500 associates and our operating structure consisted of Africa; Eurasia; European Union; Latin America; North America; Pacific; and Bottling Investments. For more details on our operating groups, see pages 28-39 of our 2006 Corporate Responsibility Review.

The Coca-Cola System
One of our greatest strengths is our ability to conduct business on a worldwide scale while maintaining a local approach. At the heart of this approach is the Coca-Cola bottling system. The Coca-Cola system comprises our Company and our bottling partners -- more than 300 worldwide. Many consumers do not realize this, but there is a distinction between our Company and our bottling partners. Our Company manufactures and sells concentrates, beverage bases and syrups to bottling operations, which then produce a wide array of Coca-Cola beverages. Our Company owns the brands and is responsible for consumer brand marketing initiatives. Our bottling partners, in addition to manufacturing the final branded beverages, also handle merchandising and distribution.

Bottlers work closely with customers -- grocery stores, restaurants, street vendors, convenience stores, movie theaters and amusement parks, among many others -- to execute localized strategies developed in partnership with the Company. Customers then sell our products to consumers at a rate of 1.5 billion servings a day.

The Coca-Cola system is not a single entity from a legal or managerial perspective, and the Company does not own or control most of our bottlers. In 2006, bottling partners in which our Company had no ownership interest or a noncontrolling equity interest produced and distributed approximately 83 percent of our worldwide unit case volume. In January 2006, our Company owned bottling operations were brought together to form the Bottling Investments operating group, now the second-largest bottler in the Coca-Cola system in terms of unit case volume.

Coca-Cola Systemwide Performance
In April 2007, associates from The Coca-Cola Company and several of our largest bottling partners met for the first time to discuss the development of a core set of performance indicators for the Coca-Cola system. Working groups of Company associates and representatives from our bottling partners have been formed to determine the feasibility -- due to the legal and management complexity of the Coca-Cola system -- of collecting and consolidating economic and social data in addition to the environmental data already collected. Many of our bottling partners produce their own corporate responsibility reports which can be viewed in the Bottling Partner Reports section.