Dominique Reiniche, President, Europe Group
Healthcare Business Association Women of the Year Awards
New York, NY
May 5, 2011
Good evening everybody. Sorry that I'm literally landing from Madrid in your dinner event, without the proper time to mingle and get to know you better.
I feel extremely honoured to be here tonight in such esteemed company, not least because diversity and the empowerment of women are so close to my heart.
The Coca-Cola Company has a number of programs to enhance women in business, for example we recently made public our commitment to empower 5 million business women by 2020 across our supply chain and within the Company our Chairman and CEO Muhtar Kent, has created a Women's Leadership Council, composed only of women, to make sure we 'walk the talk' on women's development and diversity.
But I know that I wasn't invited here tonight to talk about Women's Initiatives, I just can't help it...
If my understanding is correct, I have been invited to talk to you about the role our company plays in health and wellbeing.
You know, whilst I am not a scientist or a doctor, I believe we and our business in non-alcoholic beverages actually have a lot more in common than you might think we do at first sight.
Coca-Cola was invented in a downtown Atlanta pharmacy 125 years ago by Dr. John Pemberton and was sold as a tonic to cure headaches and exhaustion.
It is not a claim we make today, but still the very foundation of our business is built on making people feel better.
As you know as a pharmaceutical industry, you cannot be amateurish with the products that you give people and throughout our history we have maintained these medical roots.
Product quality is the number one measure in our business, it can never be compromised. We are obsessed by it!
And that starts with the recipe itself. Long before it was fashionable our product was preservative free using only natural colorings and flavours. Of course, in 1886 that is all that Dr. Pemberton had available. Natural ingredients. But we have not deviated from that recipe in 125 years.
And, as the best-known consumer brand in the world, we work constantly to protect the integrity of that brand.
As our Chairman recently said, "It has taken us 125 years to build this brand to what it is today, but it can be destroyed in 125 seconds."
So we must have integrity far beyond just the ingredients.
We have to play an active and positive role in society. We have to be responsible. We know that this is how we earn our license to do business and to grow sustainably.
And her again, I have the impression that much of this we have in common with the pharmaceutical industry and the way you do business - as Abbott says, "to help people lead healthier lives" or Johnson & Johnson, "caring for the world, one person at a time."
As far as we are concerned, Our Company's focus areas are health and wellness, environment and community. But today I will focus on what is closest to your hearts - Health & Wellness.
We base our work on Health & Wellness around three key areas: Informed Choice, Responsible Marketing and Active Lifestyles.
Let's start with Choice:
Our consumers now have a lot more choice. They can choose from 500 different brands, from sparkling, to juices, to teas and waters - and for perspective, we have twice as many brands in Europe as we had in 2000.
For example, our favourite brand Coca-Cola is available with all the great taste and none of the sugar as Coca-Cola Zero (and also as Coke light).
When you think about it, in many respects the drinks industry is in a unique position in that we can replace sugar with a zero-calorie option. Other food manufacturers cannot do the same with fats for example.
So as a business, we are doing a lot with low and no calorie options:
Our product innovation and launches have been centered on this area.
Over 70% (71%) of our volume growth has come from lights or low calorie in the last 5 years and they now account for around one-third (29%) of our overall volume in Europe.
Two-thirds of our marketing spend is on light or low-calorie products.
On portion control - consumers can chose from more and more packages from 2L right down to 15cl.
All of this, plus many other programs have allowed us to reduce the average calorie content of our portfolio by 10% over the last five years, and it's not over.
Now, turning to Informed Choice.
We led the industry and pioneered voluntary labeling that gave people clear nutritional information about their drinks.
Today 100% of our products have Guideline Daily Amounts on the labels or packages, going beyond the regulatory requirements. This way, all our consumers can see what percentage of their daily diet they are taking for each nutrient. This allows them to make the right choices depending on the occasion, their needs and their personal circumstances.
It is an important way of educating people on how to maintain a balanced diet without preaching to them... instread... treating them as adults.
It's an area where we also work with nutritionists and dieticians to better understand what is a balanced diet; how our products are part of it and where we also participate in various medical congresses and symposiums on hydration and sweeteners etc.
So after choice and informed choice, let's look at our second H&W area: we are also committed to promoting our drinks responsibly.
For instance, we worked with UNESDA, the European Beverage Industry body to set specific commitments launched in 2007 and updated last year to include responsible digital marketing guidelines.
We committed not to market any of our brands to children younger than 12 years old whether it is on TV, radio, print or now online, because under 12, a child needs the guidance or advice of their parents or guardians to make choices. In fact we were the first company to extend these principles to online advertising.
Now, all the initiatives, I've mentioned so far on choice and informed choice and responsible sales and marketing, are very much about managing the calories that people take in, but we are also focused on calories out.
Clearly this is harder for us to manage as a business, but we are also committed to promoting Active Lifestyles (our third H&W area) through a number of grass roots programmes implemented at local level.
We take it to heart, we have over 200 different lifestyle events across Europe; some major grass root programs around football and the Olympics or just around getting people moving and being physically active and we are looking at how to deliver more.
As part of these programmes we are even beginning to provide nutritional information, delivered with external partners such as the British Nutricio Foundation or EUFIC.
Finally, I kept it to the end because it's a little less academic and more emotional, but we also believe from numerous scientific studies that a happier person is typically a healthier person.
And as Coca-Cola is a brand built on optimism, we have set up Happiness Institutes in places like Spain and France and we ran a Happiness Congress in Barcelona last Fall to explore further the correlation between happiness and wellbeing and to understand what contribution we can make in this area.
We also continue to communicate on happiness and optimism to our consumers, in a lighthearted contemporary way with our new Open Happiness campaigns.
To sum up: we have made real progress in the area of health and wellness, and we need to do more.
We are working every day to refresh more and more European people. And we want to do this, by offering an even wider choice of great-tasting beverages and reducing the average calories at the same time.
We have a hugely powerful brand, the best known in the world, that can, I believe, be a force for good and inspire people to positively change their mindsets and behaviours.
But we cannot do it on our own. We need to work even closer with all the stakeholders - within our industry, with other businesses, with NGOs, with governments and with consumers. Needless to say, that also includes working with you.
Thank you.
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