Pop Quiz I: what widely consumed high-calorie,
high-sugar beverage, often cited
as a major contributor to childhood obesity,
is probably sitting around in your kid’s school
vending machine, even after the announcement
of last year’s “Clinton Agreement?”
If you said fruit juice, go to the head of
the class.
Pop quiz II: what “good for you” beverage,
another staple of childhood, is likely to cause
an allergic reaction among a large percentage of
its target consumers?
If you said milk, go to the head of the class
and shake hands with the juice guy.
I bring up these two examples to point out
the hypocrisy that can accompany any major
scare in consumer products. Yes, CSD companies
are victims of their own bad decisions
right now, but they certainly don’t deserve all
the blame for the fact that we are fast turning
into Fatso Nation.
So what can the industry do to mitigate things
before retailers look up and see a gaping hole in
the coolers that Coke and Pepsi once dominated?
Already, C-Stores are dropping their space
allotment for CSD’s, and, while the fridge-pack
will always be a grocery store staple, water (note
the water report on page 28) remains the hot
pick to eclipse soda in the next decade when it
comes to sales numbers in that channel.
Well, we could all start by tossing the playbook-
to-world-domination that got beverage
companies into trouble with the whole school
vending debacle to begin with. It was misguided.
It’s a tiny part of the business, it didn’t involve
killing off sponsorship deals (where the real marketing
takes place) and it was a losing battle – if
freaked-out social forces can try to keep Judy
Blume and Harry Potter out of the school libraries,
guys, you don’t have a chance. Someday,
we’ll know why it was such a sticky wicket for
the CSD companies to stay, but today, it’s all
about rebuilding a product once regarded with
the best of reputations.
And again, that’s why I bring up juice and
milk – because anyone ready to bash those
products for their negative qualities (juice: lots
of sugar, milk: lots of lactose-intolerant African-
American children) – knows that a lot of people
drink them because there are positive, healthy
traits associated with both of them. Both have
vitamins, and both are natural (big farming’s
own industrial machinery notwithstanding) and
therefore avoid many layers of the processing
that go into other products.
CSD’s just don’t have that advantage. In cooler-
headed times, that wasn’t much of a problem.
No one drank them for their health properties.
They drank them because they tasted good. And
retailers need to help beverage companies recognize
that once again. They need them to reorient
sodas as a product class that has its own
strength (they can taste great!) rather than an
ersatz claim to be something it’s not (healthy).
Does that signal some kind of retreat? Sure. But
a retreat from what? From Doug Ivester’s calculated
attempts to increase Coke consumption
into an ever-growing spiral, or from a mostlikely-
profitable effort to spread sweetness and
smiles? The latter is, in the end, a much more
easily achieved business plan than the former.
But instead, many companies have gone with
an offense-oriented playbook, one that has put
them in a precarious place that transcends any
piece of the compromise present in the school
vending deal. There’s been a coinciding push to
blame parents for not policing their kids more
carefully; there’s been this weird attempt to reorient
sodas as healthy products; there’s been
a stubborn resistance to improving what were
once good products (by using, say, sugar) rather
than give up on a bad idea (cheap ubiquity).
And that’s unhealthy, the whole way around.