Coca-Cola
also referred to as: coca-cola company · the coca-cola company
includes Coca Cola Classic
67 statements across 2 episodes · 18 bullish · 6 bearish · 3 people on the record · first statement Dec 21, 2021 by Michael Ovitz · said 691 times in 17 episodes since 2021 · across every show →
Mentions by year, the whole family
brought up most by David Rosenthal (386), Ben Gilbert (291), Michael Ovitz (7), David Senra (3), Howard Schultz (2), Michael Lewis (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 9 mentions in 5 episodes 2 per episode
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- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 651 mentions in 3 episodes 217 per episode
2024 10 mentions in 3 episodes 3 per episode
2023 6 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
2022 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2021 13 mentions in 1 episode
Everything said about Coca-Cola, oldest first
Dec 21, 2021
Dec 21, 2021 positive
Nov 24, 2025 positive
Rosenthal: Coca-Cola wouldn't have scaled without its franchised bottling network
“If they had taken the Amex approach and Candler had decided, ah, you know, we're gonna enter the bottling business ourselves and
We're going to go market by market and invest the capital in the production lines and the bottles.
Absolutely no way would they hav…”
Nov 24, 2025 neutral
The Coca-Cola formula was first written down in 1919 as loan collateral
“This is actually the first time the secret formula for Coca-Cola gets written down. It had been sort of this cool secret before, but as collateral for the loan that Woodruff took out to complete this transaction, they wrote down the formula and placed it in a …”
Nov 24, 2025 neutral
Nov 24, 2025
Nov 24, 2025
Nov 24, 2025 negative
Nov 24, 2025 positive
Nov 24, 2025 neutral
Nov 24, 2025 positive
Rosenthal: Coke's Santa campaign is the greatest lifestyle advertising success ever
“Because in 1931, Lee and Woodruff and the Coca-Cola crew create what I think is unquestionably the greatest lifestyle advertising success in human history, where they manage to associate Santa Claus with Coca-Cola.”
Nov 24, 2025
Nov 24, 2025 positive
Nov 24, 2025 positive
Nov 24, 2025
Nov 24, 2025
Nov 24, 2025 positive
Nov 24, 2025 positive
Gilbert: Coca-Cola would be worse off today without New Coke
“I think Coca-Cola would be worse off today if they didn't go through the new Coke moment, which is crazy to say, but I guess we don't have the counterfactual, but if you just look at the data on the resurgence in Coke afterwards, you couldn't have come up with…”
Nov 24, 2025
Rosenthal: Don Keough converted Warren Buffett to Coke using Cherry Coke
“Keo converts him to Coke by telling him about this new product that they're going to launch, Cherry Coke, because Buffett loved cherry syrup in his Pepsi, and so he converts Warren to a Coke guy before Warren ever invests a dollar in the Coca-Cola company.”
Nov 24, 2025
Rosenthal: D'Arcy agency established strict brand commandments for Coca-Cola
“And so he and the Darcy agency come up with a list of commandments for the Coca-Cola account. Some of them are never split the trademark Coca-Cola on two lines. Coca-Cola must always be together on one line. The circular sign should always carry the phrase del…”
Nov 24, 2025 negative
Nov 24, 2025
The famous Coca-Cola contour bottle was mistakenly modeled after a cocoa pod
“Something got lost in translation, and the bottle was designed to look like the cocoa plant. The cocoa pod that you smash open to get out cocoa beans. This is a whole different thing called the coca plant, not the cocoa plant. C O C A versus C O C O A.”
Nov 24, 2025 bearish
Nov 24, 2025 bearish
Warren Buffett's legendary Coca-Cola investment has actually underperformed the S&P 500
“He would have been better off buying the S&P Over that same time period. Including dividends over that same time period. The S and P 500 is up about 11% annually. So the famous Berkshire Hathaway Coca-Cola investment today is actually underperforming the marke…”
Nov 24, 2025 neutral
Nov 24, 2025
Coca-Cola captures $47B of its $175B system revenue with 10% of employees
“Revenue, forty seven billion dollars at Coca-Cola company out of one hundred and seventy five billion dollars in total revenue by the system. And this is as reported by Coca-Cola in their proxy statement. There are 70,000 employees of Coca-Cola. But again, if …”
Nov 24, 2025
Early Coca-Cola contained roughly one line of cocaine per five glasses
“As best as I was able to read from a few different sources, I think roughly once Coca-Cola starts being produced in that first decade, call it four or five glasses of Coca-Cola would be about the equivalent of a line of cocaine today.”
Nov 24, 2025 bullish
Gilbert: Coca-Cola's $2B+ stake in Monster grew to nearly $12B
“Coke puts in over two billion dollars. At least they're getting on the train. So Coke is the largest shareholder now in Monster Energy. And you know, that deal looks pretty good. That two-ish billion that they put in is worth almost twelve billion dollars toda…”
Nov 24, 2025 neutral
Nov 24, 2025 positive
A 1920 Supreme Court ruling legally defined Coca-Cola as a single-source brand
“And the Supreme Court says we are ruling in favor of Coca-Cola. It is a phrase that has transcended being a descriptive name, and it is now just a brand. And the official ruling, which is the stuff of legend, contains this phrase. Coca-Cola means a single thin…”
Nov 24, 2025 negative
Nov 24, 2025 positive
Nov 24, 2025 neutral
Nov 24, 2025 positive
Nov 24, 2025
Nov 24, 2025 positive
Coca-Cola's pure syrup-and-marketing model earns far higher ROIC than bottling
“The Coca-Cola company has higher gross margins, much better returns on invested capital, requires less invested capital. They get to focus on just making syrup and marketing. They don't have to do any of the undifferentiated stuff. You'd much rather be Coca-Co…”
Nov 24, 2025
Nov 24, 2025 neutral
Nov 24, 2025
Coca-Cola's board rejected a $16B Quaker Oats acquisition after the CEO announced it
“In 2000, the CEO of Coke announces publicly a sixteen billion dollar deal to acquire Quaker Oats and Gatorade... So he announced it without board approval. The board rejected it after the public announcement. The deal falls through and the next year Pepsi ends…”
Nov 24, 2025 positive
Gilbert: Coca-Cola's core moat is aligning ecosystem partner incentives
“If you really boil it down, the Coca-Cola company in a nutshell, it is figuring out how to incentivize partners to sell your product. And everyone is incentivized. The bottlers are massively incentivized. The retailers, there's great margin there for you. The …”
Nov 24, 2025 neutral
Nov 24, 2025
Coca-Cola secured trademark protection for its bottle shape in 1951
“The company then went to the patent office and made the case that the bottle shape was so distinctive and so well known in 1951 that it should be granted trademark status Which they got. It is highly unusual for packaging to be granted a trademark.”
Nov 24, 2025
Nov 24, 2025 neutral
Nov 24, 2025 negative
Rosenthal: Coca-Cola directly addressing Pepsi in ads was its worst mistake
“Coca-Cola is a singular N of one product. Coca-Cola does not exist in a universe with other competitors. And here's Bill Cosby directly talking about Pepsi and the challenge. It's the worst thing that Coca-Cola could possibly do.”
Nov 24, 2025
Nov 24, 2025 neutral
Nov 24, 2025
Nov 24, 2025
Nov 24, 2025
Nov 24, 2025
Coca-Cola's New Coke taste tests never asked consumers about replacing the original
“So it turns out that in all the research that they conducted for New Coke, all 200,000 people that they did the taste test with They never asked them how they would feel if this new beverage replaced the old Coca-Cola.”
Nov 24, 2025 positive
Rosenthal: Coke hired Norman Rockwell and N.C. Wyeth for lifestyle ads
“Lee goes out and he contracts with all these famous American artists and illustrators of the day to create these like American lifestyle tableaus for the visual aspects of the Coke ads... They actually go get Norman Rockwell. Along with N.C. Wyatt and Haddon S…”
Nov 24, 2025
Pepsi's 12-ounce bottle was textbook counter-positioning that Coca-Cola could not match
“This is textbook counter positioning. Coca-Cola cannot respond because they and their bottlers have just invested all of this capital and all of this IP into the six and a half ounce contour bottle. They can't react.”
Nov 24, 2025 positive
Nov 24, 2025 positive
Rosenthal: Diet Coke became America's #3 soft drink by 1984
“By the end of 1983, the first full year on the market, Diet Coke is the number one diet drink in America. And unlike Tab, which clearly from That commercial that you talked about earlier was exclusively marketed to women. 30% of Diet Coke drinkers, even in the…”
Nov 24, 2025
Nov 24, 2025 neutral
Early soda fountains generated $6.40 in revenue per $1.30 gallon of syrup
“Coke, when they were selling gallons of syrup to the soda fountains, they sold them for about a dollar and 30 cents per gallon. The soda fountains then sold drinks to customers at five cents a drink. They're 120 drinks per gallon. They're making six dollars an…”
Nov 24, 2025 neutral
Nov 24, 2025 positive
Nov 24, 2025
Nov 24, 2025 neutral
A Coca-Cola facility in Peru once sold 42 pounds of byproduct cocaine
“Around 1930, when they were really freaked out about whether or not they'd have the ability to import the coca leaves to the United States to do the refining here, they actually leased a secret cocaine refining facility in Peru. They spun the factory up. It wa…”
Nov 24, 2025
Nov 24, 2025 neutral
Coca-Cola's supplier is the sole commercial entity legally permitted to import coca leaves
“In 19 oh three, They contract with a company called the Schaefer Alkaloid Works of Maywood, New Jersey, that has developed a process to decocanize coca leaves. And this company, which still exists to today and is still the sole supplier of decocanized coca lea…”
Nov 24, 2025
Nov 24, 2025
Nov 24, 2025
Nov 24, 2025
Woodruff fixed underperforming bottlers by buying, standardizing, and reselling them
“And so he changes course for the Coca-Cola company and says, I'm now willing to buy and own and operate bottlers. Oh, not because I want to, but as a way to like force standardization and clean up underperforming bottlers, I'll buy them out, fix them up, and t…”