Coca Cola
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History
On May 8, 1886, pharmacist John Stith Pemberton made a caramel-colored syrup and offered it to the largest drugstore in Atlanta. But first-year sales averaged only nine a day, and Pemberton was never able to see his product’s success. He died in 1888, the same year in which Atlanta businessman Asa G. Candler began to buy outstanding shares of Coca-Cola.
Within three years, Candler and his associates controlled the young company through a total investment of $2,300. The company registered the trademark “Coca-Cola” with the U.S. Patent Office in 1893 and has renewed it since. (“Coke” has been a trademark name since 1945.) By 1895, the first syrup manufacturing plants outside Atlanta had been opened in Dallas, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Candler reported to shareholders that Coca-Cola was being sold “in every state and territory of the United States.”
As fountain sales expanded, entrepreneurs sought additional sales by offering the drink in bottles. Large-scale bottling began when Benjamin F. Thomas and Joseph B. Whitehead of Chattanooga, Tennessee, secured from Asa Candler exclusive rights to bottle and sell Coca-Cola in nearly all of the country. They gave other individuals exclusive territories for community bottling operations. Those efforts laid the groundwork for what became a worldwide network of Coca-Cola bottling companies.
The company’s response to the imitators who quickly arose included the adoption of one of the most famous product containers ever developed — the unique, contour Coca-Cola bottle, created in 1915 by the Root Glass Company of Indiana and approved as standard by the company’s bottlers in the following year.
In 1919, a group of investors headed by Ernest Woodruff, an Atlanta banker, purchased The Coca-Cola Company from the Candler interests. Four years later, Robert W. Woodruff, Ernest’s 33-year-old son, became president of the company and led it into a new era of domestic and global growth over the next six decades.
Since Woodruff’s time, Coca-Cola has always placed high value on citizenship. Today, as part of the Coca-Cola Promise to “benefit and refresh everyone who is touched by our business,” the company strives to refresh the marketplace, enrich the workplace, preserve the environment, and strengthen communities. Working through The Coca-Cola Foundation and other avenues, the company’s lead philanthropic efforts are focused on education and youth achievement. The Coca-Cola Company’s recent five-year, $1 billion commitment to diversity through a comprehensive empowerment and entrepreneurship program offers individuals and small businesses many opportunities as well.
On the corporate side in 2004, E. Neville Isdell formally assumed the position of chairman and chief executive officer of The Coca-Cola Company. Mr. Isdell became the company’s 12th chairman of the board in its 110-plus-year history.
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