Coca-Cola and it Supply Chain Model

 Hi, I’m Jithin Sunil- A final year MBA student from Amrita School of Business. Welcome to my Logistics and Supply Chain Management learning room. In this blog I am going to talk about the supply chain practices followed by the Coca-Cola.

Cola is now one of the most popular beverages in the world, and one of the most prominent brands is Coca-Cola. In more than 200 countries, more than 1.9 billion servings of Coca-Cola are sold every day worldwide.

Coca-Cola is a multinational enterprise working on a local basis. This suggests that there are about 225 bottling partners worldwide at present. The supply chain starts with the purchase of raw materials, which also include agricultural goods ( e.g. sugar cane or fruit) and water, in the case of Coca-Cola. The most important ingredients, such as water and sugar, are sourced locally, and only the kind of sugar used can be chosen by the partners.  In Europe, mainly beet sugar is used, in Asia cane sugar and in America sugar from corn syrup.

The processing of a concentrate that is blended with water, sugar and carbon dioxide by the bottling plants is one of the first steps in the supply chain of Coca-Cola. At other plants, the concentrate itself is produced. The secret recipe is stored in a safe in Atlanta, according to legend. The legend further notes that there can never be more than two persons accessing it without understanding the precise recipe. After mixing, the bottlers package, market and distribute the finished beverages to grocery stores, restaurants, cinemas, etc. Therefore, the management of supplier relationships and the continuous monitoring of suppliers is of great importance to the company.

How improved technology improved the supply chain process

The business needs to constantly improve its supply chain management with the aid of technologies like warehouse automation. Portfolio diversification and customization are also critical problems that the organisation plans to pursue by the use of emerging technology.

The block-chain is the latest example of the use of emerging technology in the Coca-Cola supply chain. At present, in the sense of contact and collaboration with partners, there are so many intermediaries that slow down processes. An inter-organizational, open distributed ledger can provide real-time visibility into the transactions made on the network by all the various bottlers, producing revenue of more than $21 billion per year.

Using 25 percent recycled marine plastic, almost 300 sample bottles were made. These revolutionary processes allow used plastic of any quality to be transformed back into high-quality plastic. This implies that inferior plastics will linger in the material cycle and be used for food packaging again. This increases the amount of recyclable content in the cycle, decreasing the need for fresh PET in turn. For the Coca Cola supply chain, this could mean strong changes.

So in a wrap !!

Coca-Cola has been a global player for a long time. The business is therefore constantly refining and modernizing its supply chain. The supply chain relies on the management of partner firms because of the large sales of soft drinks. Smooth interaction with the partners and the resulting smooth delivery to the points of sale play an important role here.

Coca-Cola is and continues to be a very popular soft beverage. For this reason, it is even more remarkable that for decades the company has managed to keep its exact formula secret and thus also the exact steps of the supply chain of Coca-Cola. The supply chain is definitely a little mysterious and impressive because of the hidden formula.

Happy Learning !! 😃