Major ClientsNarrow moat

The most useful fact about Coca-Cola's customers is that they are not the people drinking it. The company sells concentrates and syrups to bottling partners, who add water and sweetener, package the result and sell it on¹. Beverages bearing Coca-Cola trademarks account for 2.2 billion of an estimated 65 billion servings consumed worldwide every day — and essentially none of those transactions involves Coca-Cola.

That structure produces a specific and disclosed concentration. For 2025, one bottler accounted for 10% of net operating revenues, reflected in the EMEA and Asia Pacific segments. The company notes that its bottling partners are independent companies making their own business decisions, which may not always align with its interests — an unusual thing to say about the parties who carry your product to market.

Behind the bottlers sit two further groups who matter more than their absence from the accounts suggests. Retailers decide shelf space and increasingly compete for it with their own labels. Restaurant chains decide what comes out of the fountain, and the most famous of those relationships has begun to loosen after seventy years.

The moat pages argue the bottling system is an asset, and it is. These pages argue something narrower: that a company which never meets its drinker depends entirely on intermediaries who each have their own economics — and three of those four groups have recently found reasons to act on them.