Producer
The Coca-Cola Company
Makes Coke concentrate at a few select plants worldwide and sells to independent bottlers; the concentrate is the captive moat product.
1
Inputs supplied
1
Goods downstream
0
Facilities
0
Stories
What they make
1 input The Coca-Cola Company supplies
Click an input to see every good that depends on it, every country that produces it, and every other company in the supply chain.
Where it shows up
Goods downstream
Essential goods that depend on something The Coca-Cola Company makes — pick one to see the full supply chain.
What else they do
Business segments
The company's full revenue map — where this supply-chain role fits within their broader business.
Concentrates & Syrups (the moat)
Sparkling Soft Drinks
Hydration, Juice, Dairy & Plant
Coffee & Tea
Intelligence
What's known
Sourced claims about this company's role in supply chains — chokepoints, concentration, incidents, dual-use connections.
Chokepoint2024
The fizz in a Coca-Cola is hostage to the fertilizer industry. Carbonation requires food-grade CO2, and most of it isn't made on purpose — it's captured as a byproduct of ammonia production, the core of nitrogen-fertilizer manufacturing. So when European fertilizer plants idled in 2021–22 because surging natural-gas prices made ammonia uneconomic, food-grade CO2 supply collapsed with them, threatening not just soft drinks and beer but also meat packing (which uses CO2 to stun animals and protect packaged meat). A drink most people would never connect to agriculture turns out to depend on the economics of nitrogen fertilizer: when farmers' fertilizer gets expensive, the gas that makes soda fizzy and keeps packaged food fresh can vanish at the same time. It's one of the most counterintuitive single points of failure in the food-and-beverage system — the carbonation in your glass is downstream of an ammonia plant. [verify: Food-grade CO2 as ammonia byproduct, 2021-22 EU shortage confirmed (C&EN/Everstream)]
The Coca-Cola Company (KO) ↗Concentration2024
The Coca-Cola Company barely makes any actual soda. Its genius is structural: it manufactures a secret-formula concentrate at a small number of plants and sells that concentrate to a global network of independent bottlers, who add the water, sweetener and CO2, then bottle and distribute. This deliberately splits the business into a tiny, ultra-high-margin intellectual-property chokepoint (the concentrate, plus the brand) and a sprawling, capital-intensive, low-margin job (bottling and logistics) that Coca-Cola pushes onto partners. The entire worldwide system therefore funnels through a handful of concentrate facilities owned by one company, while thousands of bottling plants do the heavy, unglamorous work. It is one of the most successful moat structures in business history — own the irreplaceable, asset-light core; franchise out the replaceable, asset-heavy rest — and a template later echoed across franchising and platform businesses.
The Coca-Cola Company (KO) ↗Substitution2024
Why does "Mexican Coke" taste different? Because in the United States, Coca-Cola is sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, while most of the world uses cane or beet sugar — a divergence driven not by recipe preference but by trade and farm policy. U.S. sugar import tariffs and quotas keep domestic sugar expensive, while corn subsidies make HFCS cheaper, so American bottlers switched to corn syrup in the 1980s. The same product thus carries different sweeteners across borders purely because of agricultural policy. Beyond sweeteners, Coca-Cola is one of the world's largest buyers of several farm commodities at once — citrus for Minute Maid and Simply juices, sugar, caffeine, and (since buying Costa) coffee — which makes a single beverage company a price-moving force across multiple agricultural supply chains, each exposed to its own weather, disease and trade-policy shocks. [verify: Confirmed: HFCS switch 1980-84 driven by sugar tariffs/quotas + corn subsidies]
The Coca-Cola Company (KO) ↗