Coke fucks up badly

[tharun]

Well this is about 3 weeks out of date, but I guess most Americans won't be aware of how badly Coke fucked up recently.

The 'Dasani' brand of 'pure' water was launched recently in Britain and the rest of Europe. They spent millions promoting this shit, they brought in their SUVs with the 'Dasani' brand painted on it, they did huge giveaways to get people to like it.. But they fucked up badly.

They launched Dasani in Britain. Unfortunately, there is, as yet, no market for 'pure' water which does not come out of a spring. Every brand of bottled water we have here comes from some spring or other. ie it is 'natural' water. Dasani was launched as a 'pure' water, pretty much the first of its kind. By pure, they just mean any kind of clean processed water (just like tap water really..)

Unfortunately, in Britain, we are not used to this kind of thing. The bottled water we have had in the past is 'bottled at source' at some fancy spring. This Dasani shit was produced at a factory. They took basic tap water, boiled it down to make distilled water, and then added in a few minerals to make it taste ok. Unfortunately we had a sitcom in the 80s (or perhaps it was an early 90s episode) where the characters stuck bottled water from taps and put it in bottles, and sold it. At the time everyone thought it was an amusing, but slightly ridiculous concept. However this is basically what Coke did with its Dasani bottled water.

It made front page news when they did this. It was a kinda scandal to hear that Coke was selling what is basically tap water with a few minerals thrown in after processing. What cost them 0.03p a litre (about 0.05c a litre) they were selling at 95p or $1.70 a litre. A pretty big markup. As I said, there is NO market for 'processed' tap water here (aka 'pure' water)

Now this affected them enough as it was. The newspapers ridiculed them for this. Their campaign got off to a bad start. It was frontpage news of every single paper when Coke started selling this processed tapwater shit, and they got heavily mocked.

Unfortunately for them, as well as selling what is basically a refined form of what WAS safe tapwater, they added various minerals and so forth to make their distilled tapwater more palatable. What they did was add calcium choloride containing bromide to the water, which is totally legal and cool and supposedly improved the 'taste profile' of the water...

However they then they pumped ozone through it, oxidizing the calcium choloride and also the bromide, turning it into bromate. Unfortunately it then contained double the European Union limit of Bromate, a potential cancer causing agent. That is, it contained DOUBLE the legal limit of a CARCINOGEN.

Following this, All Dasani was 'voluntarily' withdrawn by Coca Cola from shelves in Britain (and presumably the rest of Europe) due to its illigal doses of bromate.

Its now thought that Coke has no hope of introducing this particular brand of water into the country. They would in fact have been better off if they'd just sold the tap water they used at source instead of trying to 'improve' it. They'd been mocked for that, then their 'improvement's made it into an illegally dangerous carcinogen.

Apparantely Dasani is the most popular brand of bottled water in the US (where they do accept 'non-mineral' bottled water as a legitimate product instead of being mocked), lets hope that the US version is safe to drink unlike their European effort!

Can we all laugh at Coca Cola for their fuckup please?

-tharun

[Aristotle]

Can I cry instead?