Fizz Page 27
The counteroffensive made little difference. Dentists continued to advise the public that sugary soda could harm teeth but, says Jacobson, the issue of rotting teeth simply wasn’t compelling enough to persuade many people to change their drinking habits. “People didn’t care all that much about tooth decay, so we didn’t get much traction back in the 1970s,” he says. “But we certainly called soda a junk food and bad mouthed it when we could. It was just junk. Total junk. It stood apart from just about every other food in that it was consumed in fairly large volumes and had no vitamins, minerals, protein, fiber—nothing. Just sugar. So we told the public and people didn’t care that much.”
The Cola War deepened. Soda serving sizes grew. More people took to drinking soda. Those who already drank soda drank even more. Soda shifted from a treat to a several times a day drink suitable for every occasion. “I grew up in the ’50s,” recalls Jacobson. “My family would have a soda on a Sunday with dinner or maybe if we went on a picnic. It just wasn’t the kind of thing you get anywhere. Sometimes I worked in my father’s store and one of the guys working there would go out and get a few sodas for us. We saw that as a treat and not a big deal, but it’s become a big problem. One reason is larger serving size. You have to remember that when family sized Coca-Cola was introduced in the ’50s that was marketed as something the whole family could consume. It was twenty-six ounces, four six-and-a-half-ounce servings—today that’s a single serving for some people. Then the proliferation of fast-food restaurants helped to standardize soda as the beverage you would drink with your meal.”
There was no doubt that by the end of the 1990s Americans were drinking soda in quantities that would have been unthinkable in the 1950s, and with much of the growth in sales coinciding with the nation’s weight gain, soda became a prime suspect in the hunt for who made the nation fat. Research intensified and soon more and more studies were concluding that nondiet sodas were the source of some, possibly many, of the extra calories that were making America fat. These findings were followed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publishing maps that vividly illustrated the extent of obesity state by state. Soon the issue of weight had become the foremost health issue in America.
As soda sales peaked in 1998, Jacobson published Liquid Candy, a report that picked out some of the most damning evidence about soda’s role in obesity and pointed an accusatory finger at Big Soda for fattening up the kids. In the wake of its publication, orchestrated stories about the Cola War from their own publicity departments gave way to newspaper and TV reports citing the research that painted soda as the enemy of good health.
Then in 1999, as the debate about soda and health gathered speed, a revolution began in Venice, California. Beverage companies had long sought access to schools. Not so much for the sales, but for the chance to get their products in front of the next generation in the hope of turning them into loyal fans of their brands. In the 1950s every successful push into a school was a cause for celebration among soda makers. “Orange Crush is served to the children and they love it,” the orange soda’s internal newsletter O.C. News proudly reported about one such deal in May 1951. The children, it continued, even spontaneously burst into song to express their love of Orange Crush and “mothers have been writing in to state that consumption of milk has been on the decline since the advent of the program.” Whether the mothers’ letters were thanking Orange Crush for weaning their children off milk remained unrecorded. This push into education evolved into long-term deals where soft drink companies got the exclusive right to provide beverages to a school and, in return, cash-strapped schools got money. As the 1990s ended, these deals, which could last as long as ten years, existed in 92 percent of high schools, 74 percent of middle schools, and 43 percent of elementary schools.
Jacqueline Domac, a teacher at Venice High School, knew nothing about these deals. So when in 1999 one of the students in her health classes asked her why there was no pure fruit juice on sale in any of the school’s twenty-two vending machines, she was surprised at the absence. Simple enough to fix, she reckoned, and she sent a request to the school’s finance manager asking for fruit juice to be added. The next day she got a reply in her mailbox: “Sorry, selling this juice would conflict with our soda contract.”
Venice High School had an exclusive deal with Coca-Cola worth $3,000 a year plus several hundred cases of free beverages. As far as soda-school deals go it was a poor one, given that similar schools were getting $50,000-plus a year, but what angered Domac was that this contract was stopping students from accessing healthier drinks. In response, she and her students launched a campaign pushing for the Coke deal to be canceled and for healthier options to be introduced. As part of the campaign Domac obtained a copy of the school’s beverage contract and sent it to the Los Angeles Times, a move that earned her a stiff telling-off at work but also shoved the nature of these school contracts into the public eye.
Domac wasn’t alone. As concerns about obesity deepened, grassroots campaigns against the sale of soda on school premises were bubbling up all across the country. By 2002 Domac and her fellow campaigners scored their first major victory when Los Angeles Unified School District, one of the largest in the United States with more than 750,000 students, voted in favor of a ban on soda in its schools, despite the objections of several schools that said they would be thousands of dollars worse off as a result. Many kids weren’t too pleased either, as one Pepsi-loving eighth-grader told the Los Angeles Times: “It’s unfair because when we get thirsty we need something to drink, and we don’t want water. We want something that has sugar.”
But the tide had turned. In district after district, state after state, the soda was kicked out and the industry’s contracts ripped up. Similar bans followed in Europe, including the United Kingdom and France. The beverage industry fought back for a while, arguing with little success that pulling soda out of schools would take money away from children’s education. But the momentum was unstoppable. In May 2006 the soda industry struck an agreement with the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, the childhood obesity campaign group founded by Bill Clinton and the American Heart Association. As part of the deal the big three soda giants pledged to phase out nondiet soda in the nation’s schools by 2010. By the fall of 2009 shipments of regular fizzy drinks to schools were down 95 percent compared to 2004-05, and water had become the most common drink on sale in schools.
By the time the industry agreed to start removing fizzy drinks from schools, soda was clearly in trouble. Studies linking it to obesity had continued to pile up, and sales were dropping as weight-watching consumers turned their back on full-calorie soda and opted for bottled water instead. Bottled water had come a long way since the days when Perrier’s mineral water became the fizz of choice for the go-getting yuppies of the 1980s. In 1986 Americans bought 1.4 billion gallons of bottled water, but in 2006 bottled water sales had reached 8.3 billion. Soda still topped the beverage industry, of course, with more than 15 billion gallons sold every year, but it was losing ground fast as water, new age beverages, and energy drinks peeled away its consumers and concerns about obesity damaged its image.
As it happened, the soda giants had been looking beyond the world of fizz for several years. Coca-Cola was accelerating its efforts to turn itself into an all-around beverage company that produced water, juice, energy drinks, and sports drinks, as well as the soda that made the company famous. Cadbury Schweppes tried unsuccessfully to reinvent soda’s image with 7Up Plus, a diet version of the lemon-lime drink that featured added vitamin C and calcium. PepsiCo went furthest of all. In the late 1990s it started hunting for healthy brands to add to its portfolio of soda and snacks. It sold off its fast-food chains, bought Tropicana, and then swallowed Quaker Oats. By the time Indra Nooyi became its chief executive in 2006, PepsiCo had become bigger than Coca-Cola in market value by reaching far beyond the world of soda in its hunt for a less sugary future.
While Pepsi and Mountain Dew would remain top sellers fo
r the company, PepsiCo now saw its future as a maker of “fun for you” products like Pepsi, “better for you” products like the zero-calorie Pepsi Max and, increasingly, “good for you” lines such as Quaker Oats. For Nooyi the Cola War battles for slivers of market share were history. “We, Pepsi, would push like hell … and get a tenth of a point of market share,” she told the Wall Street Journal in June 2011. “The next period, Coke would come along, push like hell, and gain a tenth. This was a zero-sum game. The cola category was profitable, but didn’t grow profits.”
But even as the soda companies reinvented themselves and their products, the number of obesity studies connecting soda to the problem of fat continued to grow. An examination of the obesity studies published in the journal Public Health Nutrition concluded that the consumption of sweetened beverages might account for as much as a fifth of the weight gained in America between 1977 and 2001. Another review of the studies, this time in the American Journal of Public Health, reported that there were “clear associations of soft drink intake with increased energy intake and body weight,” and that studies funded by the food industry tended to conclude that soft drinks had less of an effect than studies funded by other organizations.
Some researchers claimed that high fructose corn syrup, the money-saving sugar substitute that the industry adopted in the late 1970s and early 1980s, caused even more weight gain than sugar. The finding prompted a spate of sodas such as Mountain Dew Throwback that made a virtue out of containing cane sugar instead of corn syrup. But the evidence that high fructose corn syrup was worse than sugar was weak. Obesity was rising just as fast in Europe, where the industry had stuck with sugar, and even the ardent soda critics at the Center for Science in the Public Interest felt corn syrup made little if any difference compared to sugar. But even without the unconvincing claims about high fructose corn syrup, by the start of the 2010s soda was being compared to cigarettes with the New York Times posing the question: “Is soda the new tobacco?”
Comparing soda to tobacco was a real stretch, but that such a comparison was even being made only underlined how the concern about obesity had turned fizz into public health enemy number one. The American Beverage Association, the trade body representing the beverage industry, argued that the research wasn’t conclusive or thorough enough and that it was unfair to blame soda alone for something as complex as obesity, but just as with the fight over soda in school, the momentum was with the health campaigners. “It’s clear that soda is losing,” says Michael Jacobson. “It’s been kicked out of schools and some city government properties. They are really feeling the pressure from a bunch of different directions. Sales of the sugary drinks have been going down year after year.”
Soon cities and states across America were floating proposals designed to curb soda drinking. Most looked to taxes as a way of not only encouraging people to drink fewer fizzy drinks but also raising revenue. Attempts to impose such a tax in the small California cities of Richmond and El Monte were firmly rejected by voters in November 2012 after heavy campaigning by the beverage industry. But while soda taxes remain more idea than reality, Jacobson is convinced that the soda industry will ultimately fail to stop the introduction of such levies: “The industry wants to crush every tax initiative. They got a tax repealed in the state of Maine and a temporary tax in Seattle repealed. They spent millions of dollars to fight off taxes in Philadelphia and New York State. They are willing to put any amount of money into killing these proposals. But as the health evidence continues to build up and as cities and states need money, I think our governments will continue to look at soda taxes as a way to reduce sales and generate revenue.”
Price, however, is just one battlefront in the new obesity-inspired war on soda. Another is portion size, where New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s bid to limit soda serving sizes in the city’s food establishments to sixteen ounces is leading the charge. A clash between Bloomberg and the soda industry had been brewing for some time. The New York mayor had already required the city’s restaurants to display calorie counts on their menus and tried—unsuccessfully—to get the federal government to ban people from buying soda with food stamps. Then there was “Don’t drink yourself fat,” an off-putting TV ad in which a man pours a vile gloop of liquid and solid fat into a glass from a cola can before messily guzzling away. “All over the United States, public health officials are wringing their hands saying, ‘Oh, this is terrible,’” Bloomberg told the New York Times. “New York City is not about wringing your hands; it’s about doing something.”
The serving-size ban became yet another big-budget fight between public health officials and the soda industry, which ran ads showing Bloomberg dressed up as an old woman, with the slogan “New Yorkers need a mayor, not a nanny.” But this time the only votes that counted were those of the city’s Board of Health, and its members were all appointed by Bloomberg. On September 13, 2012, the measure got approval, limiting the Big Apple’s restaurants, food trucks, concert halls, delis, stadiums, and movie theaters to serving sizes of sixteen ounces or less for nondiet soda. “This is the biggest step a city has taken to curb obesity,” said Bloomberg as he announced the decision. “Simply by proposing limits on sugary drinks, New York City pushed the issue of obesity—and the impact of sugary beverages—onto the national stage. The Board of Health’s passing of this proposal means that New Yorkers will soon consume fewer junk calories and eventually begin turning the tide of the obesity epidemic that is destroying the health of far too many of our citizens.”
The following month a group of business groups, including the American Beverage Association, launched a joint lawsuit against the measure on the grounds that the New York City health authorities had overstepped the limits of their power by introducing such a ban. The lawsuit worked. On Monday June 11, 2013—the day before the ban was due to start—the Supreme Court of the State of New York ruled against Bloomberg, who immediately announced plans to appeal. Yet even as Bloomberg slugged it out with Big Soda in the New York courts, just a short stroll away from his Manhattan office over the East River, a new breed of soda could be found amid the food stalls of the Brooklyn Flea’s Smorgasburg food market.
Brooklyn Soda Works started out in 2010 as a search for the perfect cocktail mixer by installation artist Caroline Mak and chemist Antonio Ramos. “We both love making things and always liked to do projects together,” recalls Ramos. “In the beginning of 2010, we started with a project to make the perfect mixer, starting with a classic Dark ‘n’ Stormy ginger beer. We tried carbonating it with yeast to make an alcoholic ginger beer and had a lot of fun with it.”
The ginger beer experiments got the couple interested in taking their carbonation adventures further. “Around the same time a lot of the DIY soda siphons came out in the home ware supply stores,” says Mak. “They all said only use these to carbonate water, nothing else, but the two of us went: ‘Screw that, let’s try and carbonate whatever we can.’”
And that they did, zapping any liquid they could with bubbles of carbon dioxide. “We just threw everything we could think of in there to see what happened,” says Ramos. “We tried carbonating milk. It was gross. We tried bourbon. That was wrong. It gets you really drunk, really quick. It’s almost like champagne, the bubbles make it go to your head. It was a little too intense with all the alcohol burn and the carbonation burn. It was an assault on the senses, but it was fun.”
They also tried carbonating juices, starting with orange and apple before progressing to more exotic combinations. Soon they found themselves with soda recipes that, unlike the fizzy milk and bourbon, tasted great while still offering something far removed from the likes of Fanta. Drinks like apple and ginger (“our signature flavor,” says Mak); or grapefruit, jalapeño, and honey; or cucumber, lime, and sea salt (a mix of freshly squeezed cucumber and lime juice plus a pinch of salt and a dash of cane sugar). The pair wondered if other people would enjoy their unusual soda combos as much as they and their friends did, so they decided
to test it out by getting a stall on the Brooklyn Flea food markets, where they charged around four dollars a cup. “We hooked up a few kegs onto our draw system—we don’t bottle, everything is in kegs. We sold out in four hours and realized we that we had a potential mini-business we could develop,” says Mak.
Brooklyn Soda Works was born, and in the two years since its public debut in 2010, the hobby-turned-business has grown into a six days a week operation with three employees and an eighteen-hundred-square-foot production space. Not to mention deals to supply several upscale restaurants, including Blue Hill, the swanky Greenwich Village eatery where the Obamas dined when they visited New York in 2009. “Most of our customers, I would say, are people who had given up on soda for health reasons or because they didn’t like the idea of the preservatives or the sugar and drank juice most regularly, but can now go: ‘Wait, I can have something carbonated without all the sugar and additives,’” says Ramos. “There’s no shortage of products at the lower-end price scale of soda, but what’s missing is a premium, artisanal product. There was a big desire for that, but not much going on in nonalcoholic beverages so people were very excited by it.”
Brooklyn Soda Works’ small-scale soda production offers its customers something very different from Coca-Cola and Pepsi: a chance to feel a personal connection with their drink. It is an appeal not far removed from that of the craft beer makers, which have exploded in number so much that they make up almost 98 percent of the breweries operating in the United States today. And nor was Brooklyn Soda Works a one-off. Although still tiny in number, all across the United States small artisan soda companies are popping up. From Oregon to Maine tiny soda outfits are putting the passion back into fizz and winning over lapsed soda drinkers. Outfits such as Humdinger Craft Soda, making its soda in the basement of St. Patrick’s Church in Richmond, Virginia, or Maria’s Packaged Goods & Community Bar in Chicago, which came up with a custom ginger ale to use in its cocktails.