14 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 29.1 ms ] thread
And he's a Tech grad. Makes sense. Coke and Tech, two Atlanta institutions.
Whenever I see "President" as a corporate title, I think "over inflated sales title to make clients feel like they are being taken serious and talking to actual leadership". I've seen "presidents" reporting to "vice-presidents"!
I'm assuming op just finished listening to Acquired's Coca Cola episode...
Not surprising. The old wisdom that "Coke tastes better at McDonald's" endures, and the strategic partnership is mutually beneficial for both companies.
turns out selling caffeinated sugar water is a lucrative business.
I'm guessing that whoever posted this recently listened to the Acquired podcast episode about Coca-Cola:

https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/coca-cola

Great podcast BTW, lots of good stuff in the archives.

EDIT: Someone beat me to the comment, but leaving my comment here for the link.

Making sure coke gets sold at McDonald's is likely a huge driver of revenue.

They're in it together. McDonald's probably also wants Coke to tweak it's formula every now and then to induce hunger. They're trying to create the opposite of a GLP-1.

In tech a customer with an annual contact value of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars will get a dedicated team of sales reps, account mangers, customer support, solutions architects, and definitely an executive point of contact. I'm sure the McDonald's-Coca Cola partnership is worth orders of magnitude more than that.
This is common with companies who support very large customers.
McDonalds has a franchise model and is in 100 markets. There are several thousand individually owned companies with various groupings of regional owners each of which needs to have delivery, logistics, costing negotiated and setup. There are also the compliance and trade aspects of being in basically every country.

Coke is a probably 90% margin product for macdonalds. Not sure i believe the 1B number. It's probably higher if you consider all the various coke products including and the juice that they sell.

Pepsi actually owns taco bell, burger king, etc which are direct competition. So the partnership with McDonalds is strategic.

It's easily worth having a top level exec.

Coke has a separate division for each continent and one of those continents is McDonald’s.

https://youtu.be/GA_OYUHYYMA?si=B-EXCoGyr9JGq87n

Coke tastes different at McDonald’s because they keep the syrup cold from the factory to the restaurant.

Why? Because it prevents the syrup from fermenting.

McDonald's has an executive focused on beverages... which bringing it full circle is primarily Coke products.
How does it work? Coca-cola sells coke to a reduced price to McDonald to get the contract? Or McDonald wants to have the Coca-cola brand in its restaurants and is happy to buy coke to a premium price. I always wonder in parternership like this who is more benificial, who profits more of the brand of the other, and which one pays the other more.