The New Faces of Coke

Oreo has a line of cookies called Thins which is thin cookies with cream filling in a 10 oz. package rather than a 16.6oz package for the same price. I often ask myself knowing that I can get more for the same price how much is the price to my health. So once in a while I will buy the mint Oreo Thins. Nothing beats an Oreo, that is fact.

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.

The thing is that isn't what happens and Coke knows that.

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.

I don't like it. Personally, I'm of the opinion that all beverages should be basically sold in three sizes: a small refillable "I'm in a hurry" travel size (say, 0.5 - 1L), a standard refillable daily-use container (say, 2 - 2.5L) and a refillable family container (say, 5L). Additionally, there should be an option to refill your bottle. It could be even metered by 1ml or something. The pre-bottled versions should be adequately more expensive - taxed with a recycling fee, and then taxed again with a "we know you ain't gonna recycle anyway" pollution fee.

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.

I'd argue that no, ice cream is not worse than coca-cola. Few things are.

The striking thing is this:

    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.

"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."

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.

While not limited to the Soda industry, this sentiment is expressed pretty vividly (even comparing testimony, marketing etc.) in the documentary Fed Up[1]. Worth a watch if this sort of thing is interesting to you and currently available on Netflix.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2381335/

Yeah, the aspen tame thing really got me wondering about the ethics here. It is one of the most attacked substances, yet it appears basically harmless.

If we assume it is in fact harmless, then it is actually quite ethical of Coca Cola to spend money defending it.