Ben Gilbert

So it's not just the obesity thing.

There's a trend into energy drinks that has nothing to do with health.

Yeah.

The other funny thing that happens is Coca-Cola buys Glasso, which makes vitamin water and smart water, in sort of yet another, oh, we should also be in water play.

They pay about $4 billion for that.

The founder then goes on to leave Coca-Cola and starts Body Armor, a sports drink that I think is coconut water-based, a little bit more sugary.

Turns around, sells that back to Coca-Cola for $5 billion.

If you're going to look at Coca-Cola as a total beverage company and say, what beverages have really been killing it the last 20 years that you've managed to bet correctly on or incubate in-house?

And the answer is Diet Coke and Coke Zero.

Yep.

Coke Zero, 2005.

Taste infringement.

For a few years, it was growing at 10% a year, which is really fast considering it launched like 20 years ago and it was already very large.

So that was a lot of stuff that happened in the 2000s.

The 2010s, they did acquire more brands.

They continue to grow the Total Beverage Company's portfolio.

They did a whole bunch of stuff that we're not going to spend too much time on in this episode, rehabbing their bottler operations, bringing a lot of it back in-house.

making sure the quality and the efficiency was up to where they wanted to have it, and then spinning it back out.

And so a lot of these bottlers came on balance sheet, then went back off balance sheet to new owners.

They encouraged consolidation among their bottlers.