Business Continuity, Sustainability, Health, Water, and World Investments

Edie Lush: I'm Edie Lush and I'm here in the Hub Pavilion in Davos. I'm very pleased to be joined by Alex Cummings. He's the Chief Administrative Officer of The Coca-Cola Company. Alex, thanks so much for coming along!

Alex Cummings: Great to be here.

Edie Lush: Tell me what you are doing in Davos.

Alex Cummings: Well, this is actually my fourth time to Davos. I come every year to learn, get new ideas, and share some of our learning from Coca-Cola. It's always a wonderful event as it stretches your imagination and thinking. It's a great place to take best practices back to our Coca-Cola system globally.

Edie Lush : (Coca-Cola) is doing an incredible amount on the sustainability agenda. And I spoke to Jeff Seabright (Vice President of Water and Environment) recently, another one of your colleagues at Coca-Cola. I wonder if you could just give me the perspective, your perspective, from an international point of view on why this agenda is so important to you guys.

Alex Cummings: Well, you know we've been in business for about 123 years and we want to be around for another one hundred-plus years or more. And to do that we have to have a sustainable enterprise across the board. We think about sustainability very holistically. We think about it from the perspective of business continuity. We think it's an opportunity. We think about it from an environmental perspective, from a health and wellness perspective. We know in the future we are going to have energy and commodity scarcity and so we have to think about our enterprise from a very holistic perspective. We know we have to invest in all of these areas to make sure our enterprises are successful and viable for the next 123 years.

Edie Lush: So let's take an example -- the health and wellness debate. Is Coke healthy and how are you addressing that?

Alex Cummings: Coke is healthy. Any beverage or any food consumed in moderation is good for you. So Coke is definitely a healthy product. We are addressing the issue from several perspectives. About 25% of what we sell today is low calorie, and we're increasing that percentage. We also believe in balance; it's about calories in and calories out. And so we encourage people to exercise, and we have school programs across the world, including in Switzerland, where we support active living programs. That's a big part of our health and wellness focus. We also make sure we don't advertise to children, so we have a strict policy on that. We are taking a holistic view of obesity. It's a very complicated and people tend to want silver bullets. They tend to want to be simplistic, and single out a particular product or category. That's not the solution. We have to take a very holistic view, and we also believe we have to work in collaboration with NGOs, with government, and with civil society to find solutions to create a healthy world. That's our objective.

Edie Lush: Water is obviously vital to Coca-Cola. It's one of the scarce resources, becoming even more so with the worries about climate change. Can you talk me through some of the projects that Coca-Cola is doing on this?

Alex Cumming: We work on many water projects today. We're focused on reducing our use of water, recycling and replenishing. In all of our manufacturing plants around the world we have very strict water usage targets to reduce water usage over time. In terms of recycling, by the end of 2010 all of our facilities around the world will have water treatment facilities and we will have the ability to treat that water and return it to the environment in a condition that will support aquatic life. In terms of replenishing, we have rain water harvesting projects around the world. We have a very aggressive school-based program with the Gates foundation and USAID to actually put potable clean water in schools around Africa..

Edie Lush: Alex, thank you so much for coming along to the Hub Pavilion here in Davos.