The New Faces of Coke
medium.com
medium.com
“Sometimes only the real thing will do when it comes to soda, so I am a big fan of the new Coke mini can! It is real soda classic, but it’s in a cute portion-controlled can that keeps my bubbly treat to only 90 calories!” - Sarah Bedwell
I would argue that this is actually the kind of endorsement we should be encouraging. It re-frames a soda as a treat that should be consumed in moderation instead of guzzled from a supersized bucket. Ice cream is worse than soda, but it doesn't get nearly the negative attention because everyone knows it's an unhealthy treat.
First they can sell the smaller cans for more money for the same amount, which doesn't matter from cost of making it, but does matter to the amount someone will consume.
It's the same rationale behind 99% payouts of slot machines in the casino. It just allows someone to play longer.
Soda is loaded with sugar and nothing else. It has to be extreme moderation to not have an effect on someone's health (relative to what we think of as normal now). Coke is trying to reframe soda as somehow ok.
One way to do that is to have small cans and say 'no problem they cans are obviously tiny'. Someone will buy them and drink as much as they want anyway because what they want isn't to take a long term view of their health, they want a rationalization. That is what Coke is offering and it does happen to be what people want.
The whole industry is continuously doing that for processed foods. It's called nutritionism. Margarine is still around, after provoking cancers and heart disease, isn't it? Now enriched with omega-3.
What exactly is that assumption based on?
It's been abundantly demonstrated that smaller servings do help people follow through on efforts to reduce their food intake. I don't see any reason Coke should be different.
Comparing typical servings, a pint (416 grams) of Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia has 84 grams of sugar, while one 20 oz (567 grams) bottle of Coke has 65 grams of sugar.
Ice cream can be mostly made of natural ingredients, like milk, in which case it would get its sweetness from the lactose in that milk. Ice-cream can also be made of fruits, like peaches, or coconuts. The ingredients can be all organic and ice-cream can be made at home. Furthermore, after one cup of ice cream, most people are done, whereas Coke drinkers can drink more than half a gallon per day, because it is engineered to create addiction.
Of course, ice-cream can be made from processed ingredients as well and with plenty of HFCS or other cancerogenic and diabet-inducing ingredients. But reduce the problem to one ingredient or another and you end up missing the forest from the trees.
I often wish restaurants had the same deal. A person should be able order a normal portion or just order a smaller portion paying the same price. I want the side of garlic roasted mash potatoes but I only need four bites so give me 1/2 the serving and charge me $4, I don't care. Restaurants have fallen into a trap of having to put a huge amount of food on a plate. A customer should be given the option to state how hungry they are, they are paying for the ambiance, experience, and food that can't easily be made at home not just the quantity of food.
I was a private yacht (120ft) chef for 6 years. I cooked everyday lunch and dinner for an older couple cruising anchorages and marinas on the Eastern Seaboard, Bahamas, and Caribbean months at a time. I'd make plain simple food everyday and serve leftovers knowing there are very few chefs on salary making more than I did. I served small portions and figure if they were hungry they would ask for more. It takes a lot of courage for a chef to make plain food and serve small portions of it. They know if they have guests on board, I'm in the mood to do something fancy like a Beef Wellington, or it is a special occasion, I can turn on the intensity, but nobody wants that all the time.
I think pretty much every kind of food stuff that you buy regularly - things like ketchup, or oil, or spices, or pickles, etc. - should be available this way.
Because if you step outside your daily routine and look at the shopping experience, you'll see that it's absolutely ridiculous how much packaging you buy and throw away all the time, week after week. If you know that you're using, say, a 500ml of ketchup every week, you should be able to get a 2L bottle and refill it once a month instead of having to buy and throw away 6 bottles a month like you do today. Now take that and multiply it by all the other things you use like this - sauces, sodas, etc., then multiply by the first-world population (say, ~1B) and divide by average family size (say, 3), and you'll get billions of bottles going straight to landfill every month. This is just wrong.
The absolutely worst offenders are catering companies, who far too often think: "hey, we don't know exactly how much people will want to drink, so let's go for the least common value and buy a hundred thousand 0.5L bottles". Or the standard catering/hotel stacking mug size which ensures your guests will waste a lot of bagged tea trying to quench their thirst.
The second worst is bottled water. Especially in big cities, where municipal water is often cleaner than the supermarket one, buying bottled water is pure insanity - and yet people keep doing it all the time.
Why wouldn't it occur to someone that a brand-name product used on television has been paid for? Especially when every other product used has been conspicuously genericized, labels covered up and whatnot.
Also Coca-Cola as a glaze for food doesn't strike me as particularly better or worse than using barbecue sauce or ketchup or anything of the other sugary things we eat every day.
virginia willis and 9 others recommended
Also, Coke has been around as an ingredient for a long time in BBQ because BBQ sauce has to have... sugar.
and acidity. it's kind of perfect.
You're correct on labels but there isn't really a generic version of Coke that tastes the same. It's not unreasonable to think a professional chef would specifically want Coke over another cola.
[0] http://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/jul/24/marketingandpr....
What does "do something" mean? That statement reads like a fairly blatant request for a bribe.
Now onto an actual on-topic comment:
This comes at no real surprise to me. I'm certain Coke isn't the only soda company to be paying people off. Let alone the only company. It's nice the author researched enough into the people and the not-so-subtle advertising going on; but really... anyone with public outreach is a potential advertiser and if they're mentioning a name-brand product, you'd likely win a bet that they received a donation in some form or another.
The problem should be that these sorts of implicit bribes are legal in the first place.
So, if the science refutes claims of danger, yet the belief persists, why shouldn't Coke promote its safety? It is one thing if a company is promoting bunk research to get away with something, but I really don't see the problem here.
If we assume it is in fact harmless, then it is actually quite ethical of Coca Cola to spend money defending it.
Seriously, there's a difference between lying and product placement. Using Coke as an ingredient in barbecue sauce is completely different than saying "sugar helps me lose weight", and this article doesn't care. It's lazy at best.