The Coca-Cola System
The Coca-Cola Company
Established in 1886, The Coca-Cola Company operates in
more than 200 countries and markets more than 2,800 beverage products.
These include sparkling and still beverages, such as waters, juices
and juice drinks, teas, coffees, sports drinks and energy drinks. Four
of the world's top five sparkling beverage brands are ours: Coca-Cola®,
Diet Coke®, Sprite® and Fanta®.
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.
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