Fool’s News

Environmental groups in India are charging that Coca-Cola and Pepsi beverages contain toxic levels of pesticides. As a result of these allegations, six Indian states have issued full or partial bans on the sale of Coke and Pepsi in their states.
Predictably, the companies are fighting back. “The Coke you drink in India would be as clean as the Coke you get in Paris,” Coca-Cola Asia group communications director, Kenth Kaerhoeg said.

The scariest part is that India’s Supreme Court has given the companies’ Indian arms six weeks to reveal the ingredients of their soft drinks. Coke and Pepsi account for nearly four-fifths of India’s $2 billion soft-drinks market.

Both Coca-Cola and PepsiCo were forced out of India in 1977 by a socialist government that objected to a lack of local investors and an unwillingness to share technology such as Coke’s top-secret formula.

The 16-year ban ended in 1993, two years after India launched ambitious economic reforms to open its closed economy and so start catching up with rival China’s stellar growth.

After all these years of secrecy, I have difficulty believing that either company will give up its formula willingly. On a practical note, it seems odd that the formula – or at least the ingredients regardless of percentages – could be reverse-engineered to determine whether toxic levels of pesticide exist.