Coca-Cola History: Exporting America To The World
In 2012, the Coca-Cola company announced a deal to export its product to Burma. With this venture, Cuba and North Korea were left as the only two countries in the world where you could not legally obtain a bottle of Coca-Cola.
Of course, even in those authoritarian communist dictatorships, the drink is secretly distributed throughout underground black markets alongside other forbidden pleasures such as dirty pictures, cell phones, and PSY’s latest singles.
Just as those black markets exist today, people had been informally exporting Coca-Cola almost from the beginning. Ironically, given the drink’s current status in Cuba, the first rum and Coke seems to have been mixed in a Havana bar in 1900, by a Signal Corps officers who drank a toast to – more irony coming – Cuba’s newly won freedom from Spain.
His cry of “¡Cuba libre!” thus named the drink millions of people would break the ice with at nightclubs over the rest of the century.
Cuba aside, early overseas success for Coca-Cola was limited. Asa Candler’s son and successor, Charley, tried to fire up enthusiasm for the product on a 1900 business trip to England, but Coca-Cola’s total exports to England for that year amounted to five paltry pounds of syrup.
Other efforts to expand into Europe met with similar failure. In Germany, the idea of adults drinking non-alcoholic beverages was absurd — anything other than beer, wine, or water was for children. In France, the very idea that anyone wanted to buy an inferior American beverage was, frankly, insulting.
It fell to a new generation, and another marketing genius, to pry open Europe and establish Coca-Cola as the American standard.
Ernest Woodruff. Image Source: The Coca-cola Company
That genius was Ernest Woodruff, who bought the company and took it public in 1919. Woodruff was one of those human dynamos who conquers every inch of the world around him, then chews the scenery until he’s a household name.
Before taking over Coca-Cola’s operations, Woodruff had already risen through the White Motor Company, starting as a truck salesman and finishing as general manager after just a few years. Woodruff then ran Coca-Cola for 60 years, and nothing would ever be the same again.
For starters, Woodruff instinctively realized that bottles were going to be a much bigger seller than fountains overseas. Indeed, it was on his watch that bottled sales passed fountain sales for the first time.
To help make this happen, Woodruff sponsored the development of metal-topped coolers to keep the bottles cold, then invented the six-pack with a handle, so people would buy more Coke to keep those coolers filled. He also pioneered the famous glass-fronted, coin-operated cooler that dispensed a single bottle for a nickel, and which would be a fixture of every single gas station in America for half a century.
Eventually, Woodruff turned his dynamic energy toward overseas markets, resolving that there wouldn’t be one place on Earth that didn’t have a Coca-Cola handy.
Coca-Cola’s first organized attempt to market overseas started in 1926 when the company opened an office devoted to buying the world a Coke. Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, Coca-Cola was advertised, given away, and sold all over Europe as a fun, refreshing import from exotic America.
The company even developed a special “export bottle” for foreign consumers. These bottles were dark green and closely modeled on champagne magnums, presumably on the theory that the French would be more likely to drink it if it looked like wine. The export bottle even had a gold-foil seal over the cap.
If you happen to find one of these in your grandparents’ attic, be sure to let somebody know; on the rare occasion they come up at auction, authentic export bottles command thousands of dollars each. Even the official Coca-Cola museum only has three surviving bottles from this early attempt at global expansion.
