Ben Gilbert

And in that category, they built something that for many years, the better part of a century, people felt was N of 1.

Yes.

They were the original.

Yes.

They were the real thing.

And it took a long time for that to get eroded.

And honestly, if I'm looking at sodas, it's still the real thing.

It's just that there's a lot of other things, too.

Yep.

Three, World War II and having a unbelievably paved path for them to expand globally and then also kind of shut the door behind them on global expansion.

Yeah, so much of Coke's success.

I mean, I keep going back to that moment earlier where bottlers enabled them to scale so much faster than not having bottlers.

And even if you look at all the beautiful business dynamics of you don't have to deal with that lower margin stuff, you don't have to deal with the high headcount stuff, the high complexity stuff, the high overhead, the lower returns on invested capital, even if it's just about speed to market.

They got to blanket America and then blanket the world very quickly.

Before anyone else.

With the thing that people pick a supplier once, whether the restaurant's picking the supplier or people are picking their favorite beverage, they pick it and then it's over.

And they sort of had this unbelievably fast way to saturate in something that was a race.

It turned out soft drinks were a category that was a race and who's going to get to global scale first.

Yes.

Because of the worst business deal in history.