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"Brandjacking" Coke in India

Photo by A. Jay Pillarisetti, found via flickr

Nice reporting in today's Wall Street Journal about the activists/badasses blamed for "brandjacking" Coca-Cola in India. Maybe you remember the brouhaha a couple of years ago, when tests showed that Coke products in India contain pesticide and incesticide residues 11 - 70x above the safety standard? (Pepsi products were guilty too.) After that story came out, activists started spreading the rumor that farmers were using Coke as a cheap alternative to pesticide. The Guardian, for example, reported that Things Grow Better with Coke.

Coke's other crimes read as typical corporate shenanigans (polluting groundwater, offering toxic sludge to unwitting farmers, aggrevating water scarcity), etc. But one of my favorite outrages isn't mentioned here, which is a shame because it nicely illustrates Coke's ethos on global matters:

Once cases of Coke expire and can no longer be marketed in the US (poor neighborhoods featuring colored people excepted), Coke ships them to Latin America. Of course, a little staleness ever killed anyone.... though Coke has done that too.