If you can't succeed because somebody made a low effort, low quality copy of your product, then you don't deserve to make money. Especially in light of the fact that Coke has been around for 150 years and is essentially just sugar water.
You can hardly develop open source software and then be shocked when someone goes ahead and uses it within their rights.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License
Anyway they sell all kinds of varieties of sugar water, and the margins are extremely thin.
To an extent, the barrier to entry could end up so high that it's effectively _as if _ Coca-Cola has a legal stranglehold.
The special dispensation for Coke works on a branding level: "we have a special process dating back to 1890".
This is the reason any restaurant that doesn't just resell soft drinks they bought at the grocery store only sells either Pepsi / Coca-Cola.
It would be really interesting to see what kind of rates major chains/conglomerates (E.g. McDonalds, Subway, 3G, Recipe Unlimited, etc.) get for their soft drinks as these guys are big enough that they can probably push their own soft drinks and really bite into Coca-Cola/Pepsi's turf.
[0]: http://www.presidentschoice.ca/en_CA/products/productlisting...
"Coca-Cola's latest twelve months Net Income Margin % is 23.1%."
"Coca-Cola's Net Income Margin % for fiscal years ending Dec, 2014 to 2018 averaged 14.3%."
Amazon isn't the only company that makes shoes that look like Allbirds. All the shoe companies rip each other off.
As a consumer I like when store brands do this. It tells me what they're trying to impersonate more than the "compare to XXX" in teeny tiny print. But they're just a brand like anything else on the shelf -- Kroger pretzels are better than Rolled Gold, but their sandwich cookies are much worse than Oreo.
Coke is still around (primarily) because of tremendous money spent on marketing and tremendous money spent on owning the channel of distribution of their products (where 'own' means defacto by how they operate).