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Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism . By Bartow J. Elmore . New York : W. W. Norton & Company , 2015. 416 pp. Photographs, illustrations, figures, bibliography, notes, index. Cloth, $27.95. ISBN: 978-0-393-24112-9 .
Book Reviews
For nearly all of Coca-Cola's commercial life, its ingredients have been treated with an air of mystery, its carefully guarded "secret formula" known only to a handful of the company's highest executives. Yet from environmental and business perspectives, Bartow J. Elmore argues in his powerful new book, Citizen Coke, that everything we need to know about the soft drink's constituent parts is right on the label: water, caffeine, sweetener, and natural flavorings.
In the first half of the book, Elmore traces the Coca-Cola Company's rise to prominence from its founding in 1886 until 1950 in a series of crisp and well-researched chapters, each of which follows a major ingredient back to its origins. In doing so, he uncovers a pattern of corporate practices that he dubs "Coca-Cola capitalism," defined as an "outsourcing strategy" that has allowed the company to "make substantial profits as a kind of third-party distributor of wares produced by others" (p. 10). Eschewing the sort of vertical integration embraced by many other leading American industries, the Coca-Cola Company has thrived in large part, Elmore argues, because it has consistently avoided the risks associated with investing directly in large-scale commodity production, infrastructure development, or untested technologies.
Elmore carefully documents the ways that this pattern held true for each of the commodities comprising Coca-Cola's primary ingredients. Because...