Hello everyone. Welcome, and good afternoon. I almost said good morning because some of us just got here, but good afternoon and welcome. My name is Mark Preisinger, I am a Manager of Corporate Governance at The Coca-Cola Company. In that role, one of the things that I do is facilitate engagement like this between our investors in the company and the board on environmental, social, and corporate governance matters. As of late, in the last several quarters, I'm working more and more closely with my colleague, Tim Leveridge. Many of you know Tim. Tim heads up our more traditional IR function at Coke. Again, with this growing embrace of ESG, Tim and I are working more and more closely together, particularly on events like this.
I also want to just acknowledge very quickly all of my associates from our London office who have been nice enough to have us here in this great space. We're really happy with the attendance today. We've got a great group of investors here from many important firms for the company. We also have people on our webcast. We're webcasting today, and we're happy to, here comes Nick, have everyone. As your co-host today, as usually happens when you work with Tim, I've been left with the hosting responsibilities. I've got two or three of those, and I'm going to get to those pretty quickly. One is refreshments. Bathrooms are up the stairs to the left. To share this with you and remind you of our forward-looking statements before we get going. I think you're all familiar with these and have seen them. Here they are.
I have to read this, because I've been told by Nick that I have to for the webcast. You can access today's presentation at our company's website under the investor section. That's important for you all. We do have a presentation for you today, and if you'd like to follow along, you can download it there. That's within the investor section, within the investor webcast and events tab. It's pretty easy to find. Importantly, investors listening on the webcast can also submit questions via the Q&A link at the top right section of the webcast. Again, you should be able to see that pretty easily. We're not taking questions today from the news media. I know there's some news media listening in on the webcast. The other thing I'd say, just in terms of housekeeping, is that this is a pretty intimate space. I'm mic'd.
My colleagues will be mic'd. That may not be necessary in your mind from a Q&A standpoint, but the fact is that when you ask a question or want to make a comment, please use the microphones. There will be microphones attended, so you can just signal them. We can be casual about that, but we need to make sure that the people on the webcast can hear your comment and question. More importantly, we want that recorded in the transcript. We'd appreciate your cooperation on that. That's about it on housekeeping. Let's move on and get the program going. When we invited you today, we used the term discussion a couple of times, and that's what we want to do today.
My colleagues and I agreed that right at the beginning, I'm going to stick a stake in the ground and just let you know that we do have a presentation. Bea and Jon are going to go through the presentation. It's tight, it's topical, and it's stuff we need to talk to you about. We want to have a discussion, and if you all leave here today feeling like you were a passive audience, we failed. I'm just telling you, our intent is to leave the bulk of the time today for Q&A and discussion. This is a truncated version of what I think you saw in our pre-read and a truncated version of the agenda. These are the issues that we'd really like to talk to you about today. Sugar reduction, water management, and World Without Waste, which is our packaging program.
I want to tell you how we got to these things, and it's simple. It's investor-led. Over the last several quarters, I'd say by and large, but just hands down, whether we're at a conference, whether we're in a meeting, in an office with an investor, whether it's a phone call we're taking, these are the things that investors have wanted to talk to us about. As we put together our agenda for today, it seemed natural to us to build the discussion around this. I'm going to tell you that we talk to plenty of investors, some of whom are in this room, about many other ESG topics throughout the year. We got a lot of brainpower that I'll share with you in a minute in this room today, and we're happy to take your questions on just about anything.
It just seemed natural to us with the time we had that we'd build at least what we're going to talk about in a short presentation around these topics. That's how we got there. This is the team that's going to engage with you today. I'll get to them in just a second. Our run of show is pretty simple. We're going to have a presentation, as I said, built around those topics I just showed you that is going to primarily be led by Bea Perez. I'll introduce Bea in a minute. Jon Woods, who I'd like to just recognize. He runs the franchise unit for Great Britain, Ireland and Northern Europe. He will participate in that presentation as well. Once the presentation's over, my colleagues will all come up and we'll be here, and we'll do Q&A for the remainder of the time. This is a great group of folks.
All of them have some core responsibility for all of the things we're going to talk about today. They have very, very deep knowledge of the business. I think we have somewhere around 150 years of collective experience in our business with this group, working in 20 different countries around the world. We've got a lot of great brainpower here, and these are the folks who you'll be engaging with. Let me talk about the presentation for one second. Who's going to give the presentation? I'm going to introduce Bea. I'm not going to introduce the other folks. You've got their bios, and when we ask them to come up after the presentation, they're going to introduce themselves.
Not just introduce themselves, they're going to give you a sense in their introduction as to what they're responsible for covering, so if you have a question, you might know who to direct it to. On to the presentation. Bea Perez, who I've had the pleasure and honor of knowing for years and years and years, is one of the top officers at Coca-Cola. She's got quite a big title, as you can see, but for the purposes of this event today, she's our Chief Sustainability Officer. I'll point out a couple of other things that I think are very important and very relevant. Bea is also a member of our Executive Leadership Team, and that quite simply means she's one of the few people that run this business worldwide and oversee the business worldwide. Bea is also a public company board member in her own right.
She sits on two public company boards. I'm not going to name which ones they are, but one of which has a lot of sustainability stuff that they're working through right now. She comes from a board perspective. The same thing, but maybe more importantly, Bea is one of two management members that sit permanently on our Public Issues and Diversity Review Committee, the board committee that oversees sustainability. We've got that connection as well. That's Bea, and Bea's going to handle the presentation today. I'm going to turn it over to Bea. Thank you.
Thank you, Mark. Thank you. Yes, on the next. Got it. All right. I'm going to try to stand in the middle of the room over here just because I know we have people split around. Thank you again, Mark, for that great introduction. Thank you all for taking the time to be here today because I know it's a couple of hours out of your schedule, as well as travel time for those of you who've traveled far. Thank you for those of you who just took a train over, thank you for still doing that as well, because I know it's never easy. I've got a little bit more here on my agenda to cover. I wanted to give a snapshot of all of our sustainability priorities, even if we're only going to cover, in a deeper way, three of them today.
When I start to go through them, the reason why Jon Woods is here is because I felt it'd be more relevant to have you all see how it's applied in the business and in the marketplace versus just a top-line overview. Then I'll talk about the last piece, which is sharing our impact. We've learned that through this journey, if we don't tell the story, whether that's through general disclosures that many of you read, all the way to consumer communication, then we won't really be able to leverage the full maximum benefit to drive the value and to get the opportunities. Let me start with this journey. This journey is, even though I was appointed as the first Chief Sustainability Officer in 2011, you can see the journey started even sooner. This is a snapshot.
There is literally a lot more that I could put onto this chart. All the way to, if you think about just the topic of women today and the role that women play in society and in business, in 1934, Coca-Cola was the first corporation to put a female on its corporate board of directors. Fast-forward to today, 38% of our board of directors, females, and our workforce is over 47% female. We've always considered gender balance and diversity and inclusion critical to the success of our business. That wasn't just in the last 10 years. That's since 1934. I had fun when I first took my job in 2011 to go down to the archives and actually read some of the minutes that Robert Woodruff, who appointed Lettie Pate Evans, had written.
He said, when he was asked by the board at the time why he appointed a female, he said, "Well, they're purchasing our products. We need to know what they want since they're putting it into the household." It was a business decision, even in 1934. Keep going forward. We're the first in 1963 to offer a low/no-calorie sugar option for the cooler category. Some people back then said it tasted great. I have had Tab. I prefer Coke Zero. You can see the evolution. Without Tab in 1963 and starting to innovate in terms of reformulation or new recipes, I'm not sure we would've been able to move to Coke Life, Diet Coke. There was even something called C2 in between them, and Calorie Cola, to Coke Zero today.
That's part of the evolution of the journey, is how do we continue to follow what the consumer wants? Then packaging. You can see packaging throughout this whole chart. Everywhere from the first refillable bottle to the glass bottles that used to be dropped at your door, picked up, and you could get them refilled. Kind of if you think of the milk industry, similar kind of concept, all the way through today to innovation in materials. We're the first to really innovate in terms of bio in the PlantBottle technology. We today have opened up that IP to anyone who wants to use it. If you think about creating these new innovations, for us, this is really important to be able to offer them up to the industry so they can operate at scale.
Keep going all the way on terms of packaging. I think many of you have heard World Without Waste. I'll talk about that as I go through the presentation. Quick snapshot so you could see the evolution of some of this journey. In addition to that, we believe that sustainability creates both short-term and long-term value. We can use it to mitigate risk, save money. If we're more water efficient, we save money. That makes sense. Energy efficiency, we save money. At the same time, if you move towards the right half of that chart on this side, it's an opportunity to drive business growth. It's what consumers want. You look at some of the data here, I like to look at the one in the middle, the 66% of global consumers say they're willing to pay more for sustainable goods.
I suspect I have skeptics in this room. I was a skeptic when I saw this, and I said, "Well, really? Will people actually pay more?" What I paid attention to was, what did that look like a couple of years ago? What was the year-over-year data? This has grown over 10 percentage points since 2016. What that said to me is whether or not you believe they're willing to pay more, they're expressing it, and there's more of an interest. I look at the year-over-year data. All of these data points have continued to increase year- over- year. The one in the middle is actually from Nielsen. It was done in 60 countries.
For me, I looked at that and said, "I know the word millennial is a U.S.-type term," but they looked at the 19- 34 age group, so that 76 below the 66. We've really shifted here from having sustainability as our social license to operate. Could we exist in a country? That to me is table stakes. What do you need to do to exist? That's wastewater treatment, that's being a responsible employer, all the way to leveraging this to have a social license to lead. It's doing more than what's expected of us as a business, and how do we continue to learn to do more and listen to consumers, listen to customers, listen to communities, listen to our investors? What's your expectation of our business? We know that the expectations have increased.
To look at just a 10-year horizon and think of how much has changed in this world. In 10 years ago, think about this, you could go to the airport and you could still leave your shoes on. Today, you can't do that. Right? Ten years ago, you actually could. You could actually come through with your water bottle. Today, you have to empty it before you go through. 10 years ago, how did you date? Not online. You actually called someone, and you asked someone out on a date. Today, it's usually one of these digital services. The world has changed, and it requires us to use the digital aspect of life to create more transparency and put information out there so people know the story.
Also, at the same time, the expectations are much higher, because as you've had more transparency, you've had people take a look and say, "Well, I expect more now that I know what companies are doing." At the same time, there was a lot of questions, could you grow your business by doing these things? Was it going to be a cost to the business or an incremental value? We looked here, and we said, "Well, just over the last half year alone, we've been able to continue to grow our business volume, value, transactions, while reducing down our societal and environmental impact." This chart on the right of the environmental impact is about an eight-year snapshot to show you that we've been reducing our carbon, reducing our water use while we've been growing the business.
In addition to that, we leverage it now in terms of the sustainable edge to our brands. At the end of the day, we bring brands to life, to consumers in a very personal, relevant way. What's relevant is how we bring the sustainable message to life, and the consumers reward us for it. We can talk more on this in detail when we go to the Q&A, but I wanted to give a snapshot to show that whether it's a brand who I call was born out of sustainability and had it as its original brand proposition, like an Honest Tea, all the way through to a Coke trademark, which we've continued to improve and made more sustainable over time. Here's the view of the top priorities for sustainability.
While you heard Mark talk about we'll cover the three in detail, reduce sugar, water, waste, I didn't want to leave the rest somewhere else because I think it's important that to explain the journey, we've not always been perfect, and I'm sure many of you know that. If I take a look at, for example, climate. In 2013, when we started to focus on reduce the carbon of the drink in your hand by 25%, we worked with WWF on setting that goal and defining it. That was cutting edge. That was considered really remarkable because it was across the value chain. Today, as many of you know, companies are moving to science-based targets. We've not moved there yet. We're actually studying and learning, trying to figure out what's the implication to our business, and is it right for us to do that.
We know we have more work to do in these different places. We also know that these areas are connected, water and agriculture. If agriculture is 70% of the water use in this world, we have to make sure we're linking those together. You'll hear a little bit more from the experts on how we do that as you get into your questions. Let's take sugar first. As many of you know, we were a little bit late in this game, so I think we were in denial in the beginning.
When we realized that this was not an issue that was going to go away, that consumers deeply cared, and consumers and communities cared about this, it was James Quincey who stood up, and he's our Chairman and CEO, and who said, "I'm going to go ahead and sign up for the World Health Organization recommendation on reducing added sugars by 10% of your daily intake." He quickly signed up for that, but also didn't stop. He pushed the business to drive different actions in terms of smaller can pack sizes, making sure that wherever we had a full-calorie soda or beverage, we had a low or no-calorie option. Took a look at how do we reformulate? What else can we do in terms of reinventing our brand to ensure that we're still meeting consumer needs while reducing that sugar?
In addition to that, we continued to innovate in terms of the sparkling portfolio. Just recently, you probably saw some of the new inventions in terms of Coca-Cola Energy or Coke with coffee. Make sure that as those launch, they all had a zero-calorie option. You can see while the business went up, we were still able to reduce the calories. It can be done. It takes a lot of work and a lot of system emphasis. That's why I wanted to actually have Jon come up and walk you through the GB model, because this is where it comes to life, the strategy with the actual implementation.
Welcome to London, folks, to the Coke office in London. I'm Jon. I run the U.K. business for Coke. Bea's talked a little bit about the setup, the way we think about sugar reduction globally. I'm just going to talk a little bit about what we've done here in GB, because if you live in the U.K., you know that consumers are conscious of sugar intake, and they are actively trying to reduce the amount of sugar intake. We've been on a journey as a company to try and reduce that. Starting quite a long time ago when we launched Diet Coke 30-odd years ago, people weren't thinking about sugar reduction. It was the time of Jane Fonda workouts and calorie control, and turning the clock back to then. Now it's all about sugar.
We have a five-point plan which we've used to navigate our way to reduce sugar levels in the U.K. It started with offering choice, and this started right back with Diet Coke, with the launch of Diet Coke. If you look at the way the portfolio has expanded, we've actually entered 10 new soft drink segments in the last few years. Every time we've entered a new segment, we've gone in typically with a lower sugar variant to try and lead. We've really focused on that expansion of the portfolio as a key lever for us to bring down sugar levels on average. The second thing which we've been focused on is changing recipes. We've got three examples up on the slide, Fanta, Sprite and one of our big U.K. brands, Oasis.
All of these brands have been reformulated, typically not once, but several times, each time trying to reduce the sugar level in the drinks. We think that's a good way to go because if we reduce the sugar a little bit at a time, it's less noticeable to the consumer. If you're in my shoes, really you're very conscious of the need to reduce sugar, but you're conscious of it because it's important to the consumer, and getting it right with the consumer allows me to grow the business. Each of these brands has been reformulated. We've changed the recipes. Each of these brands now, the regular variant is less than 5 g of sugar per 100 ml, which means they're all exempt from the U.K. soft drinks sugar tax.
The only brand which in our portfolio, the only scale brand which is still captured by the tax is Coca-Cola Classic. We've not changed the recipe of Coca-Cola Classic. We've really worked hard to expand our lights portfolio within Coke. If you look at our numbers here in the U.K., this is the first country in the world where more than 50% of all the Coke we sell has no sugar. We're at about 55% year- to- date is either Diet Coke or Coca-Cola Zero Sugar, and that's where all of the growth is coming from for us in our Cola business. Thirdly, we're really keen to make sure that consumers understand what's in our products. We were one of the early adopters of the U.K. government's preferred nutrition information scheme, so-called traffic lights. This example on the screen is Coca-Cola Zero Sugar.
It shows that we're green for sugar, green for fat, green for salt, green for saturated fat, and we contain no calories in the drink. Clear information on all of our packages. Fourth key element is portion sizes. Here, I think it's really focused largely on Coca-Cola Classic, which we haven't changed the recipe on. It is subject to the U.K. sugar tax. We've really focused on reducing portion sizes to make the products more acceptable and easy to give and to control the amount of sugar which you consume from each portion. These smaller packages, this is a 250 mL glass bottle and 150 mL cans, the little tiny cans. These are important growth elements when I think about our pack strategy across Coca-Cola. Finally, marketing.
Marketing is a really important part of the commercial levers that we have in GB to grow our business. We've focused the vast bulk of our marketing now on to no and low-calorie products. Typically, this is Coca-Cola Classic and Coca-Cola Zero Sugar. When we market those brands, we typically market them together. We treat them as a single brand. When we advertise them, either on posters that you may see outside or on TV, typically, we combine the two. In our most recent ad, which I'll show you in a second, our message to the consumer is Coca-Cola with sugar, Coca-Cola Zero Sugar, these are the same things. It's the same brand, and you can enjoy one just as much as the other. I'll just show you the ad and then hand back to Bea.
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Thank you, Jon. Appreciate that. It shows how we're also bringing it to life through integrated marketing campaigns to tell the story. I also wanted to talk for a minute about water replenishment. This is something that we've been known for a long time. As you know, without focusing on good water stewardship, there are no beverages. That's the most important ingredient that we have in terms of our brand portfolio.
How do we protect and preserve it for our brands, but also for the community, because it's for the lifeblood of the communities at the same time? Several years ago, we set the goal, a highly ambitious goal at the time, to replenish 100% of the water we use. That required us to be more efficient in terms of our water use, reuse it, also help protect riversheds, replenish water aquifers, and really work to see what was happening around the world. As we know, one size doesn't fit all in water. In some communities, there are droughts. If you think of Cape Town over the last several years. In other communities in Ghana, there's a lot of water, but it's just not drinkable. How do you clean it?
We had to work across the business with our bottling system to ensure that we looked at what problem were we trying to solve in that local community, and then how did we put the systems in place in order to do that. We're very proud that even though that goal was aligned to 2020, we met the 100% water replenish goal five years ahead of schedule. That doesn't mean we stop. As a matter of fact, today we keep going. We continue to replenish more water than we put out there. At the same time, we increase our efficiency of use to produce one of our beverages. The average goal right now, the average number today is 1.89 in terms of water efficiency.
I can tell you that I've actually been into different business systems where I've seen that the lowest I've seen today is 1.23. I won't tell you where that is, but it's very close to here. It's really important to know that it can be done. It requires a lot of systems and infrastructure to do it. We allow time in order to get there, but our goal is to continue to get even better and to get that down as fast as we can. Of course, through partnerships. We're one of the original founding members of the Water Resources Group. That's an organization that today is partnered with the World Bank, and it builds programs with different competing industries, competing businesses with governments and NGOs. To give an example, who sits on that today and who sat on it back then?
It's Coke, it's Pepsi, it's Nestlé, it's Danone. The CEOs sit together. They talk about which areas are important. They also listen to the government leaders, then they implement the work. Today there's projects everywhere from Brazil, Mexico. Think about just different countries around the world. There's 11 countries today that the Water Resources Group is focused on, that's really driven by an annual discussion, annual agenda, then everyone puts in the same amount of funds to partner through that. In addition to that, Coca-Cola was one of the first to do water risk mapping. When we did this initiative ourselves, we realized, well, this is great for us, for our business, but actually, this could be a better service to the world if we shared it. We did.
We shared it with the World Resources Institute, they then again shared it with other governments to look at where is the water stress around the world. Anytime we try to work within the partnerships, we also want to open up the information so others can see it. Let's move now to World Without Waste, because I'll have Jon in a minute come up and go through the deeper example of how this is being operationalized in the business. A couple of years ago, you've probably heard first from James Quincey, our chairman and CEO, that we're getting more focused on packaging. We knew that pollution, plastic pollution was a real issue, the oceans were being damaged.
We wanted to make sure that we were a part of looking at what role do we play and how can we ensure that we are part of the solution and part of the cleanup, as well as being more mindful of the impact. We built a strategy with three components, design, collect, partner. We got into design, we looked at things like PlantBottle, which reduces the carbon out there. At the same time, we looked at how do you increase more rPET usage. If you drink this bottle, you toss it in the bin, it comes back, and it could be used bottle to bottle. It can also be used bottle to chair, bottle to table, lots of different uses. How do you do that? That's a really important component, but the most important is the collection.
The reality is that if you're not bringing it back into the system, you don't have the opportunity to create the circular economy and to use it again. How can you make sure you're tapping into infrastructure, you're working with governments and other businesses? These problems are too great to do on your own. You have to have partnerships to do this and do it well. If you look at different places where we started to put bottle-to-bottle facilities, you have PetStar, who's in Mexico. It's in combination with different bottlers as well as government, where it takes the informal collection process, collects the material, and that can be used bottle to bottle or for other materials. Petco started in Johannesburg and has now expanded up to Kenya. Similar type of concept.
One of the largest facilities here in France, which is run through this region. There's different places or a recent investment we just made in the Philippines. It's not enough. If you look to the partnership side, we have to work with industry to make sure we're looking at what are the different opportunities to be able to get those bottles back. There was a point in time, and I'll let Jon talk a little bit about this in detail from the business, but there was a point in time where Coca-Cola probably did not come out and say we're for deposit schemes. Today, we're a different company.
Times have changed, we know that where there's solid models around deposit schemes, we have to be for them because we want to make sure that we have the infrastructure in place, but also we have the mechanisms to get those bottles back to create the circular economy. That requires partnerships. Let me turn it over to Jon again. Sorry, I missed one of my charts. I get asked this question a lot, so we put it into this presentation for you. Everyone says, "Well, how many bottles are out there and how much have you collected back by package type?" The way you read this is the number on the bottom is how much packages were out there last year, 2019, and then the percentage within the package type, that's how much of that package we've collected back in 2018.
When you look at this and you look at the 2030 goal, it says roughly that we're at 56% of the way there towards the 100% collection. That might sound exciting, and I love headlines too, more than halfway there. The amount of work that has to happen to get to 100%, that's what really requires partnership, dedication, and focus, because it's not going to be easy. There are countries still to this day, think of China, India, that don't allow you to do bottle collection and take it back to another bottle. It's actually illegal. How do you look at infrastructure, public policy, and different mechanisms to be able to drive a circular economy? At the same time, you have to have the government have a willingness and a seat at the table with you. It can't be done simply by one enterprise alone.
Now let me have Jon come up and talk a little bit about how GB's been doing this.
Thanks, Bea. Well, I guess sugar's been an issue of concern to U.K. consumers for a long time. Plastic packaging, actually less so. It's become much more of an issue in recent years. Clearly now is very front and center in concerns that people have around soft drinks. Particularly young people think about it, the younger generation think about it, and the role that the plastic bottle plays, and also the role that businesses like Coke should play in managing and dealing with packaging, particularly plastic. We have a three pillar approach which we've followed in the U.K. business. First around packaging design, then using the power of our brands, and then finally on collection. I guess the start point really is what goes into the bottle itself. We focus very much on trying to reduce the amount of plastic which goes into each package.
This package contains 19.9 g. We've reduced it by about 27% in recent years. That means making the cap a little smaller, trying to make the bottle a little thinner, finding any way we can use in the shape to make the pack a little lighter. The first thing is to make it lighter. The second thing is to make sure that whatever we put into the market in GB can be recycled. All of our packages are fully recyclable. This one's 100% recyclable. The cap, the label, the bottle itself can all go back into our recycling systems, which is a key step, actually, in creating the material which we can reuse at a later date. We announced just recently that we were also going to double the amount of recycled plastic which we put in the packages. This one contains 25% recycled plastic today.
By the end of next year, all of our plastic bottles will contain 50% recycled plastic. Indeed, our water brand, smartwater, our key water brand here, next year will move to 100% recycled plastic in all packages. We're trying to reduce the amount of plastic we use, make sure that what we use is recycled. Then we're trying to take that recycled plastic and use more and more of it in our packages. We're also doing some, I think, relatively simple things, I guess kind of housekeeping things, like on Sprite, we're moving the bottle from green to clear because clear plastic is easier to recycle. We're going to move that bottle from green to clear. That's our first one, key pillar is packaging design. The second is how we actually use the brands to encourage consumers to recycle more.
You may see some of that, the graphic is on the screen, or it was on the lifts when you came in. This campaign is just breaking this week and next on the tube. All it does is talk about the fact that all of our bottles are recyclable and encourage consumers to recycle these packs. We also put recycling messages on all the bottles. This is just a Coke Zero bottle, it says, "Please recycle me" on the pack. We try and work with partners, whether that's Keep Britain Tidy as a partner, or we have some customers where we may make specific initiatives around recycling, and encourage consumers who are in there with those customers to recycle the packages with us. We try and use the brands to bring that recycling message to life. We think that's appealing and credible with consumers.
The final element, which is a big part of the plan on packaging here in GB, is on collection. We collect approximately 74% of all of the packages in GB get recycled. We collect, I should say. That varies by pack type. It also varies a bit by region in the country and location. 74% is a kind of average number. That number actually has stalled in the last two years. You think people are more and more concerned with plastic recovery, but the amount which is being recovered actually has stalled in the last two years rather than accelerated. We think we need to find some new ways to make it easier for consumers to recycle. We're trying to champion that initiative to improve recycling rates.
The key element of that really is around a deposit return scheme, which is in discussion both with the government in Edinburgh and also the government in Westminster. We are supporters of a well-designed deposit recovery scheme. We see in other markets around the world where the recovery scheme is in place, rather than collecting 74%, it can be 94%, 95% of products recycled. It's just a matter of trying to get that scheme up and running, make sure it's well designed, make sure it's efficient and sensible, and that we ideally have one scheme that covers the whole of the U.K. rather than multiple different schemes. So three key elements, improve our packaging design, use the power of our brands to encourage consumers to recycle, and then work with other partners to increase the recycling rates across GB.
Thank you, Jon. Perfect. We're seeing the home stretch of this part of the presentation before we go to Q&A, just a few more minutes. We wanted to talk about sharing our impact, and sharing our impact starts with having our sustainability recognized. What are the risks in our 10-K? Having a report that goes out. This is the first year that we actually took the business review and the sustainability report and put them together. We launched that this past April, and that was, for us, very exciting because it moved our timeline up from sustainability reporting almost three months, and it forced a good discussion around the business and how it was performing with sustainability hand-in-hand. At the same time, you see, it starts with our board of directors. Our board of directors take this very seriously.
The public issues committee that Mark referenced that I sit on, meets 4x a year. We report out four times a year on sustainability. Jon has a scorecard for this region. All of our business units have a scorecard. We measure and we track and we look at how are they doing against the global goals. It's broken down by their region, so we know what they have to each deliver at the same time. We get into those discussions as well as new topics emerging. Before World Without Waste became a part of the strategy, we had a very deep dive discussion at the board of directors level on packaging, and the list goes on. Right now, we're discussing what happens beyond 2020, because if you look at our business vision 2020, that's expiring soon, and so are some of these goals.
What happens next? We're currently in those discussions, and we're doing the deep dive. In addition to it, if you look at all of the stuff going on in the report, it was really interesting. In 2011, when I got into the role of sustainability, I found that a lot of the data was validated through third-party NGOs. My a-ha moment back then was I said, "Well, the third-party NGOs are the ones we actually pay to implement the work, so how could they validate the data and this be credible enough?" We moved to E&Y. It took us a couple of years, but E&Y assures the data in our report. For us, it was very important to have an independent source to assure the data, so when we report out, we know that the data is strong.
We have internal audit teams who also audit every single year, and this is a part of their cadence. We wanted to have a third-party independent firm to audit at the same time. We also, as you I'm sure look at several reports, this is the part where we would love to have a discussion in the Q&A as to what you all take a look at. We fill out every single one that we've been told is important to be ranked against, and we feel good about some of these numbers. We want to improve. We know that for us, it can be confusing as to which ones really matter to you all. Which ones do you look to that you say are the ones that you would consider as credible? Look forward to that part of the discussion as well.
Continue telling our story around the market. You saw an example here in GB. We have over 20 different countries today that are running campaigns around how do you tell the corporate story in terms of the work we do in a credible way. We had some stops and starts. When we first launched some of these campaigns, the one in North America started three years ago. We found that actually we needed to put not actors in the commercials, but the real people doing the real work. That's actually a little bit harder to do because you're out there filming the hydrologist doing the work in a river who's used to just being a hydrologist, but now you've got a camera following him. You have different folks in the community who might be filmed because they're telling a story.
For us, it was important to get that right and to build credibility. We also ran the campaigns with fully integrated marketing components. Here's one. This one's the longest video I will show you. It's two minutes, but I think it's worth it because it takes together a lot of the core issues that we face. Poland ran this in their marketplace. It's one of the highest-scoring pieces of content. It's long film. You're going to see Coke is very subtly a part of it, but it really represents the issues and some of the work we're trying to do. I'll show you the North America one, and then we're about to wrap up and go to Q&A. Bear with the two-minute spot. Bear with the next U.S. spot, which is about 30 seconds, and then we're almost done with this section.
If we continue to disregard our world, we will eventually destroy it, and in turn, ourselves. We can make excuses, or we can make a difference. Let's get to work. A World Without Waste is possible. Plastic is not something that is just neatly thrown away. Let's recycle. Let's reuse and repurpose. People deserve every opportunity to thrive and to live in societies without barriers. Every drop of water is precious and should be conserved for those that need it most. This change must happen, and it starts with us. This is just the beginning.
I'm going to go right into the U.S. spot to give you an idea of the differences.
This is Willie. He's on his way to work in Alaska. This is John. He's on his way to work in New Mexico. Willie and John both work for us, a business that employs over 90,000 people in the U.S. alone. We are The Coca-Cola Company. We make much more than our name suggests. We're an organic tea company, a premium juice company. We've got drinks for long days, for birthdays, for turning over new leaves. All of our products rely on the same thing we all do, clean water, which is why we have John leading our efforts to replenish every drop of water we use. We believe our business thrives when our communities thrive, which is just one of the reasons we help make college a reality for thousands of students.
Today, companies need to do more. John and Willie are trying to do just that. Thank you for listening. We're listening, too.
That gives you an idea of the difference in the campaigns. The U.S. has the benefit of three years in the running, so wanted to share the data with you in terms of what we're seeing. It's increased our industry perceptions in five years. The source for that testing is done through the American Beverage Association, and they look at different brands. In addition to that, we've seen within our own corporate reputation studies, our corporate reputation moved by +7%. That's pretty significant. Corporate reputation typically does not move that much. It might move in very small increments, so that was a big number. When you look at the 10%-18% portfolio consumption intent for Coca-Cola Company brands, that depends on the generation as well as the geography.
Sure you can guess the younger the generation, the higher the scores on both of those two bottom numbers. We realized that in the U.S. here, telling the portfolio story first was critical. When we started the campaign three years ago, we actually started with just the water work and the work around plastic waste, and we found that having the story told around the campaign for the portfolio and what we're doing in the portfolio really mattered to consumers, and that's what started to drive the scores higher. Three years in the running for this campaign, but it's evolved over those three years.
Of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that we're also involved in a lot of other discussions, whether it's working through The Consumer Goods Forum with the other manufacturers and retailers to talk about how do we collaborate to build these different initiatives together on World Without Waste, or at the World Economic Forum, where the Water Resources Group was first started several years ago, to the United Nations week coming up. Also taking our marketing assets. You saw in my title earlier, I have a lot of different things I do. I also have the Olympics and the World Cup, and we had to take a stand in certain places.
We were one of the companies who took a stand within the FIFA World Cup organization a couple of years ago and said, "We would like to see a change," and the change in the leadership. We're also recognizing that it's not good enough just to keep the programs off here. They have to be integrated to everything we do and how we operate, and that includes to the entire marketing portfolio. We also partnered with a Ceres organization a couple of years ago to start to understand the investor perspective. I think I've shared with some of you that my dream back in 2011 was actually to have a meeting like this where investors wanted to have a dialogue about this topic. For me, I'm very excited about this discussion here today. We know we're not perfect.
There's still a lot more that we can do. We know what matters to consumers. We also want to hear what matters to you as investors in our business. Lastly, culture is what makes this work in terms of our associates doing the work. I think many of you heard that saying, "Culture eats strategy for lunch." We know that without the right strategies, without the right culture mirroring those strategies, it's difficult to accomplish some of this work. James Quincey, when he came in, took a look at the values of the business, and he said, "Let's make this simple and easy for people to understand, and let's talk about what we expect in our culture." Curious was one of the first things he talked about. We want people to ask questions.
We want them to push us, and we want them to help us become better. Let's ensure that we have a culture where curiosity is embraced and that you're debating the ideas. Inclusive. Let's get everyone's point of views at the table. Let's make sure that we hear from the people who like us, the people who maybe don't like us so much, so we can get better and more effective and at least understand different perspectives. The version 1.0, 2.0 is a way of saying, "Let's be more agile. Let's be able to iterate. Let's not wait anymore to launch things. Let's actually launch it. No, it might not be 100% there yet, but we're going to learn as we're actually applying it into the marketplace." Empowered.
Instead of waiting for someone to call Mr. Quincey to get permission to actually create a World Without Waste program in their market, they can do it because it's core to the strategy of the business. If it's not perfect the first time they launch it, they'll get it better. Culture is the enabler to us to deliver this work and to integrate it further into the business. With that, I'd like to bring my colleagues over here so you can have all the experts sitting at the table with. I'll let them introduce themselves. Hopefully that gives over an hour for questions, which-
Oh, yeah.
Was part of the goal. Feel free to ask any questions on anything you saw in the presentation that you want more clarification or some things that you didn't see in the presentation that you want to push us on. Yes?
Can we-
Oh, we need a microphone for the webcast. Sorry.
If we could just ask questions through the mics, that would be great, so we catch everything.
We need a mic up here.
We need a mic.
Incentives. When we look at companies like Unilever, as part of the executive committee's four-year comp, they have at least 10% of that is looking at the movement in some kind of sustainability index. Where is that in your incentive scheme?
Yes, it's integrated into our annual incentive and has been for quite some years. What we're doing right now, and Mark actually is my partner on this, is we're actually having a discussion right now with our compensation committee and the next board meeting around how can we think about this in terms of the next evolution of it, and how can we continue to look at not just short-term annual incentive, but also the long-term compensation.
Down does that metric go within the organization?
Today, if you look at our business strategies, it's primarily within the leadership ranks, a couple of layers down within leadership. We're looking at what does that mean as we go forward.
Okay.
Thank you.
On an unrelated area, you spoke a lot about recycling. The conversations I've had with your Japanese franchisees is actually quite interesting because they tell me that the levels of recycling in Japan are very high. The ideal for them is to be able to use the stuff that they recycle into new bottles. Unfortunately, the government infrastructure around that does not allow that. Quite a chunk of that plastic ends up in China being made into clothes. I suppose the question is that given that Japan is quite high up in terms of its development around ESG, this is a clear sore point. How does that vary, and what are you doing about that in your other territories around the world?
Yep, I'm happy to jump in. First of all, I would say that we do have 100% recycled content in Japan today. Our Hajime Tea brand launched that a couple of months ago. As you said, there is absolutely a very high level of collection in the market today. We're also working with our supplier partners, there is a bottle-to-bottle facility that has started up again and is able to supply us with content. Clearly, there are other places in the region as well that have investments in that, we are seeing the ability to actually integrate and move towards our goals across both collection, but also from design and incorporating up to a 50% rPET limit in our bottles in Japan and in other places around the world.
Japan is leading in collection, but we're also seeing other great markets where things like that are happening, whether that's Mexico, like Steve mentioned, or South Africa, or most recently in the Philippines, one of the top leaking countries where we announced also our water brand within 100% rPET going forward, along with a major investment in a bottle-to-bottle facility in that country as well.
Just, a housekeeping , if you would not mind as you ask the question, if you'd give your name and the firm you're with, that'll help from a webcast standpoint so we can manage with the archives.
Francisco, Société Générale from Italy. Thank you for the presentation. I didn't see in the presentation. We have seen the millennials. We haven't seen the post-millennials, the next-
Very true.
Generation, the youngsters. They do believe in recycle, but they better believe in a no plastic world at all, and they like to use a flask to drink from and not plastic bottles. Question is, will this have an impact on your business? Do you consider this a recession or will be a long-term trend? Thank you very much.
Yes. Well, we've definitely seen the information on the next generation is against single-use plastics. What's interesting, the more educated they become around the circular economy and turning it into something else, the more receptive they become. There's some data here in GB that actually shares that. The reality, we have to have a portfolio of packaging. If you looked at the earlier chart around our materials, it's why we have to continue to have things like refillable glass, aluminum, and other options. We're going to follow the consumer very closely. In the U.S., we also launched something called DASANI PureFill. If the consumer comes up with their flask, they can actually go ahead and fill it within the water machine. They get charged when they add flavors, if they want flavors for the water.
We have to continuously innovate and watch those trends, but we actually share in the goal of eliminating single-use plastics. We do share in that part of the goal.
Hi, my name is Nancy Aversa. I'm with William Blair. Following on that question, I wondered if you could talk about how you make a decision between PET, aluminum cans, and glass, both from a sustainability perspective, but also from an economic perspective, because clearly there are different implications related to that. Also, it seems to me like everybody is very focused on PET and eliminating the waste related to that. My understanding is that with aluminum cans, the processing there can be very heavy usage of water and energy as well. I'm just wondering how you balance those when you're making decisions.
The key comment there is. Balance is absolutely right, because all of them have different potential negative environmental impacts if you're not being very careful and thoughtful through the process. We have a lot of discussion market by market. Where's Jon? Oh, Jon right here sitting next to me.
Right here.
I think it'd be important for you to hear directly from someone who sits in the marketplace to talk a little bit about the decisions they make, which is following the consumer and what package the consumer wants.
Yeah, that's the start point. You follow the consumer. Where are they likely to drink it? What occasion will they be drinking it? What else will they be doing? Typically, resealable plastic packages are very useful on the go when you're moving around. That's a particular time when you would focus on those kind of packages. Glass packages tend to be more premium. They would sit in more premium occasions, maybe with a meal or in a restaurant to focus on cafes, restaurants, those kind of environments, with glass packages. Cans are kind of universally popular. The disadvantage with the can, of course, you can't reseal it, so they tend to be smaller packages. Our typical can is a 330 mL can. A bottle is 500 mL. It tends to be for smaller consumption occasions.
I think consumers are partly aware of the different environmental impacts of different packages, but not really. For the most part, at the minute, it's about plastic. While you may see other impacts about the way that the glass is recycled or the aluminum is recycled, from a consumer perspective, it's all about plastic and how we can minimize the plastic we use and maximize the amount of recycled plastic that we put back into the packages. If you're a British consumer, that's largely where your thoughts are on packaging, start and finish.
If you look at the broader sort of sustainability elements of that, each of the packaging materials has their own advantages and disadvantages. As Jon mentioned, PET is resealable, it is also lightweight, and it protects the beverages inside.
If you move to other packages like glass or like aluminum, these are much more energy-intensive packaging materials both for transportation, manufacturing, or for recycling. There is absolutely a place for PET if we can manage the first full circle and create that circular economy and make sure that we're managing the end of life of the package.
I think there are some questions over there first.
Thank you. Peter van der Werf . I'm with Robeco. We've spent a lot of time in the last years looking at the Sustainable Development Goals, and specifically the impact on the obesity of some of the consumer staples companies. I think your maturity matrix is really spot on, putting obesity perceptions really in the top right upper corner of highest impact. I was really wondering how you, as a strategy, are really looking to create more positive impact on the Sustainable Development Goals. For us, as an investment strategy, we've been looking at what are SDG positive companies, and we really think that it's very difficult to get a company that is very heavy on carbonated soft drinks and the amount of sugar in there to move into that positive territory because of the potential negative impact.
What is your thought on sort of moving your portfolio into a lot of the newer categories? I mean, we've seen a lot of growth there, but it's still 70% carbonated soft drinks and a lot of growth in the newer categories. What are your thoughts on moving towards 2030 to a different sort of split there? My reflection on, I think also on Jon's story, is that I think Coca-Cola does a very good job in listening to consumers and moving along. Our concern is that consumers aren't moving quickly enough to actually meet the 2030 SDGs. What are your thoughts on that?
Yes. Well, first, we're very supportive of the SDGs, and we were thrilled to be able to be a part of the working dialogue and helping to be a part of the initiatives there. It's interesting. If you go to our website, you can actually see where we mapped them out, I'm sure you've already done that, and how pieces connect. It's important for us to follow the consumer. While we would all like consumers to move faster in certain places, it takes education. What I love about the commercial that Jon Woods showed, where it can show that you can have great tasting Coca-Cola Zero Sugar, if this is the right product for you, that you don't have to actually sacrifice.
I think that's one of the most important messages to the consumer, is that you don't have to sacrifice to have that great taste by having a low or no-calorie option. I think that's the best we can do, is to educate the consumer. As you know, consumers have to make their own decisions. Jon, I don't know if you want to add.
I just think, Peter, on the question, 70% of all the drinks we sell in the U.K. are low or no sugar. They're below the soft drinks tax in the U.K. That's despite the fact, as you say, that the majority of the business is sparkling drinks. It's possible to move sparkling drinks into a low and no sugar space. 55% of all of the Coke we sell here has no sugar in it at all. If I look just in the year- to- date, Coca-Cola Zero Sugar has grown 20%. The reason it grows, I think, is because we're educating the consumer, we're bringing them with us, which is that when you drink a Coke Zero, it tastes like a Coke, because that's what they want. They want the great taste of a Coke. I think we've got to keep going on that journey.
It's also important, the way you take sugar out of drinks is also important. I think if you try and do it in one big step, it becomes very noticeable to the consumer, and the danger is they just don't like the taste. If you're in the soft drinks business, it doesn't matter how much sugar's in the drink. If it doesn't taste good, you're lost. We've gone through a process of gradually reducing on brands like Fanta, Sprite, Oasis. The change has been less noticeable, and we think that's the best way to try and do it. We'll keep going that way. I don't know how much further we can go, but we'll keep trying to reduce the sugar through recipe changes and take the consumer with us.
Yes. Globally, I don't know if you caught it in one of the charts, but we currently have pilots in nine different markets where we're testing and piloting this to see. Those are in markets where the low or no calories are less developed, where we're actually trying to see through this reformulation, can we educate consumers and will they move to it?
If I can just build on that. Reducing sugar that consumers get from soft drinks obviously comes through changing recipes, but not just changing recipes. Innovation is a very important component of that as well. As you may have seen in the presentation, in 2018, we have launched globally 800 new drinks, 250 of which are low or no-calorie beverages. 400 of them are from water, juices, and non-sparkling beverages. Whilst we continue to work on changing recipes, providing smaller pack sizes, we also are accelerating our innovation pipeline and bringing drinks to the market in other categories. Combined, we believe these efforts will help us to ensure that we meet SDG 3.4.
One final thought on a subject close to my heart. Even when we're launching new products into established categories, I think we can still do them with a lower sugar alternative. If you look at the Costa ready-to-drink products, which we've launched just recently, they have about a third less sugar than their standard competitors. I think a coffee doesn't have to be sweet to taste great. We're kind of learning that lesson and we're trying to apply that even on new products in new categories.
Oh.
Hi.
Hi.
Yeah. Yo Takatsuki from AXA Investment Managers. Our parent entity is a French insurance company. They provide health insurance all over the world. For them, obviously, obesity is an actual material business driver for them to dealing with diabetes cases and other complications from obesity. For us, actually, the sugar content of drinks is actually one of the key issues that we're faced with, not just in investment, but for our insurance activities as well. One of the things that we're struggling with is to really see across your global portfolio what the sugar intensity of your drinks, say, per liter, sold. We realize you're selling more drinks which are sugar-free. You have more products out there. As a whole, is the sugar intensity of your drinks actually falling over time? I'd love to see that figure.
It'd be quite interesting to see the breakdown because obviously, in the U.K., it's clear it's probably going down. In Mexico, Brazil, in these markets where there's a different consumer trend happening, it'll be very interesting to see the patterns there. Secondly, we'd definitely encourage you to set ahead of time forward-looking targets to say, "By 2030, we would try and reduce our global portfolio sugar intensity by, say, half of what it is in 2020." That would show real commitment of Coca-Cola's approach, because I think to some extent, it still feels a little bit like a very slick PR exercise.
Maybe if I could start. I guess I first would want to say that the strategy that Bea and Jon talked about is absolutely a global strategy. This is not something.
Ladies and gentlemen, please stand by. We're taking a three-minute break. Once again, please stand by. Thank you.
Hear me on.
I don't think we need to. There was a difference a couple of months ago in a report.
I went to the restroom.
Actually looked at the risk factors of premature-
Coke Zero on a 1.5 liter bottle of Coke.
Interestingly enough.
At the same price.
Well.
they
Okay, I think we're going to get started again. If I could ask everyone to take their seats.
Cyber physical.
I think it's also an opportunity for growth for our business.
Louder.
Through juices and all of that.
Squeeze in behind you.
We're going to go ahead and let the panel finish introducing themselves, and we'll go back to questions. Looked like everyone needed a two-minute break anyway. All right, let's start. Will you go ahead and introduce yourself?
Should I do it again?
Oh, you want to introduce yourself again?
Okay. Ulrike Sapiro. I'm Global Lead for Water Stewardship and Sustainable Agriculture. Questions about that.
Good afternoon. My name is Wouter Vermeulen. I joined The Coca-Cola Company in 2006. I lead our EMEA Public Policy Center based out of Brussels, my area of expertise is health and wellbeing.
Good afternoon. My name's Michael Goltzman. I lead our policy and environmental sustainability team. I'm based in Atlanta, but with a global portfolio, and happy to answer questions on packaging or sugar reduction or climate.
Good afternoon. Tim Leveridge. I run our investor relations function here.
Jon?
Bea?
Mark, head of Corporate Governance. We already met.
Yes.
Go.
All right, back to questions. I think she's been patiently waiting right here. Let's come right here. Thank you.
My name is Sumana Manohar from BlackRock. One of the things you pointed out in your presentation, which I thought was good, that consumers are willing to pay a premium for better, more sustainable products. I'm not a skeptic. I think that's true, but I do think there's a limit as to what premium they're willing to pay before they completely shift away from the product. In that context, I wanted to ask, currently across your different global franchises, how much of a premium is it to put in recycled or rPET in the bottles? How much does that increase costs? Are you confident that those costs can be passed on to consumers without seeing a volume decline?
It turns around maybe three or five years down the line when infrastructure improves and collection rates improve, then where do you see the price premium for rPET? I have a second unrelated question, if I may, which is again on packaging waste, but you didn't mention Costa Coffee in that context at all. Do you see the same scrutiny coming on coffee cups, and if so, when and what can you do about it?
Sure. Let me just start by saying a few things. The way that frankly, I look at sustainability is you're going to pay today or pay tomorrow. It's worth the investment to actually make sure the infrastructure's in place and to be able to do the programs that appeal to the consumers, that make them say, "Okay, Coca-Cola is a responsible business, and they are collecting their bottles back. They're using it from a bottle to bottle." It's really important because at the end of the day, we need to actually protect our business for the future. The consumers say that they're willing to pay more for it. We do need to make sure that that cost comes down by working across with partners.
What I didn't really get into a lot in the partnership bucket is we do work with our competition. We work as industries, and we look at all of the different materials together, and we look at how can we build infrastructure to bring those price points down. I'm going to answer the Costa Cup question, and then I'm going to turn it over and let Michael answer a little bit more deeper in terms of the rPET cost. The reality is that any business we own, that's how we look at it. On that part, I'd say whether or not the consumer looks at that Costa Cup and says, "I view that as Coke's product or not," we have our goals and initiatives for any businesses that we own.
It's important for us that our entire system adheres to these goals and initiatives, and that's how we measure and track. When we have acquisitions, we do have within our due diligence, some of these factors. Costa, as you probably know, does really good sustainable agriculture and how they source their beans. Can we all learn from each other? Absolutely. Where they're strong, they can educate us, and where we're strong, we can help educate them and rise together. Let me go ahead and just turn it to Michael specific to the Costa.
Maybe just to add, Costa does already have a target for recycling coffee cups in the market, and they are on target basically to be balanced by the end of next year, in terms of the amount of cups that we're bringing back and recycling. In terms of the overall questions around rPET, I think the most important thing is to step back and to realize that when we built the World Without Waste initiative and the goals there, we did that in very close collaboration with our global procurement team. We are very much not just looking at the own investments that our system can make, but how could our suppliers invest to make sure that we can have the recycled content that we need to meet our goals. We're using our leverage with them to do that.
You will have seen just a couple of weeks ago that one of our largest PET suppliers, Indorama, announced that they are spending a billion and a half dollars on actually creating recycling infrastructure and being able to supply people with recycled content. We see that as part of the work that we've been doing, and we have built globally, actually, plans for each region in order to be able to hit the recycled content goals that we've set out for ourselves by 2030.
Gavin.
How much capital Coca-Cola was prepared to put to work in deposit schemes, in parts of the world where the governments are not prepared for those schemes? Invariably, they're the parts of the world where your plastic bottle floats down the river and out into the ocean. Can you just give us the decision-making that went behind the Philippines? Clearly that's a marketplace where you own the bottler, unfortunately for you. What happens where you don't? Who funds that, the bottler or Coke? Are those discussions ongoing?
Maybe we start from the point of view that, as Bea mentioned in the presentation, we've evolved our position over time that we do support well-designed deposit schemes when those are basically the best solution that stakeholders in a market want to move to. That doesn't mean, though, that in every market around the world, we think that a deposit scheme is the solution in that market. Certainly in the Philippines, there is an ability that if we can create the market pull, which investing in a bottle-to-bottle facility that's going to buy collected content, is going to create that market pull to be able to then incentivize the collection of our packages and other people's packages in the market.
We have a variety of what we think are best practice models, whether that's the system that we use in Mexico that's similar, which is an investment in a bottle-to-bottle facility that then purchases the collected content to create that pull, or a South Africa model where we, along with all of our value chain partners, have invested in supporting and investing in the collection system. As Bea mentioned, that's not meaning just Coke and its suppliers, but really the broad value chain of retailers, of converters, of other brand companies all investing in that. Today, Coca-Cola South Africa and the Petco model is on track actually to collect for 2019 more PETs than our system puts in the market there today.
Thank you very much. Gavin Grant from Baillie Gifford. You mentioned in your earlier discussion the topic of carbon footprint and your thinking, perhaps moving with a more scientific approach. Currently, you're using the
Drink in your hand metric, which is quite complex and difficult for us to use in comparisons with other companies and also year-over-year. Could you just give maybe some greater thought on how you are proposing to move forward with your measurement of and reporting of carbon and carbon emissions in your models, but also system-wide? Thank you.
Yes. Thank you. We recognize that when we set the goal, the goal was set to 2020, so reduce the carbon of the drink in your hand by 25%. We would agree for someone to sit down and break out how it works across the value chain and then combine it together and compare it to someone else's. We recognize that. At the same time, we're very careful that when we set a goal with our systems, it's to make sure we're meeting it. That goal, we knew with the work, it expires in 2020. We know we're going to meet that, reduce the carbon of the drink in your hand goal. We also knew that 2020 is right around the corner, and so that's why we started building that discussion to understand what are others doing.
We're meeting with other companies to understand how they're measuring, how they're tracking. We also are working through the industry to do this and having the discussion so we can get some common definitions. As you probably saw, we have the Carbon Disclosure Project that we also participate in. We look to see how they're measuring and tracking. Michael can go through this in more detail, but we're looking at the three tiers. If you actually move to the science-based targets and you move to the three-tier approach, the bottling system is included in that three-tier approach. Otherwise, you really can't move to the science-based targets, and their credibility is minimized if you're not actually doing that. I don't want to share too much right now because we're not disclosing, and I don't want to break any news here.
That's not what we're doing here today. We do know that we have to move quickly if we're going to do this because the metric is about to change. I would just say stay tuned. We're happy to have this conversation as the next couple of months come up.
Maybe the only thing I would add is that when we did announce the goal in 2013, it really was industry leading just for that reason, that it was a value chain approach. That's what the new targets are as well, is that except there is an absolute reduction in carbon emission. That is the whole point today is it's not just about in your own manufacturing operations, but also working with all your suppliers and downstream. We were there in 2013 when we launched it, and as Bea mentioned, we're on target to hit that goal at the end of next year and looking at what 2.0 means.
Thank you for the presentation. Teri-Ann from UBS Asset Management. In relation to some of the SDG and obesity questions, the response is often focused around the reduction of sugar and also the zero-calorie drinks, which I think there's some research now as well that shows that there's other health impacts from that, negative health impacts. I think the millennials who are very focused on sustainable products are also focused on healthy products. I worry that going from unhealthy to less healthy, they will move straight to the healthier product. It's just like the teas and the juices that you were talking about. How do you think you're positioned to cater towards that transition as millennials are becoming your largest consumer base?
All right. Jon, do you want to start and then I'll add?
I think that the start point is we have a fabulous brand which millennials do love. It's called Coca-Cola. It's amazingly popular, and they are more likely to drink a light cola and transition to that a bit quicker. The brand really resonates with millennials, just like it always has. There are a lot more choices out there as well, and millennials, I think, are concerned about healthier products and trying to move down that track, which is why the portfolio expansion has been so important to us. We've launched into tea for the first time with Fuze Tea. We've launched into ready-to-drink coffee with Costa. We're into premium mixers with a premium version of Schweppes. We're expanding our water business. There's a whole series of things which we're doing which are designed to meet more consumer needs on more occasions.
Yes, that's for millennials, for sure, but it's for lots of other consumer groups, too. Again, running the business in the U.K., I can't grow it if I just target millennials. There's the vast bulk of the population who like to have a gin and tonic. Well, I'd like to resonate stronger with the people who like a gin and tonic or who have a fruit juice in the morning with their breakfast with Innocent and those brands. The portfolio expansion is super important, but I think it would be wrong to believe that millennials don't connect with Coke because they do. That's really important as well.
The only other thing that I'll say is, globally, we're looking at constant innovation. We have our Venturing and Emerging Brands division, which takes a look at what else is out there that maybe we haven't created on our own. Who else has created it and how is it doing and what are consumers looking for? We mirror that along with our Knowledge and Insights team, who looks at the consumer data to say, what is appealing, what do people want, what tastes are they looking for and what benefits? It really goes by region. There's a global view on the trends and what people want, but then it has to go by region.
As you know, actually, a gentleman here from Italy probably knows that there's a brand called Beverly in Italy that I will tell you, I'm from the U.S., I think it's very bitter. People in Italy love it. That's fit that flavor profile. It does well there. It's not one size fits all, and we have to make sure we're mirroring what the consumers want.
Thank you.
Hi, thank you for your time. I'm Louise Wilborn from Schroders. I was hoping to dwell a bit more on your water use strategy because I saw quite an interesting stat on your presentation, which quoted quite an impressive 155% water replenishment rate.
I was hoping to unpack this a little bit to understand how and where water is being replenished, and how you account for local water stress within your strategy, considering that the company is exposed to what kind of high water stress levels. You've had a few kind of local community incidents, whether that's in Cape Town or in India and Mexico.
Yes. You have Ulrike here, who's our global water steward, but I'll start by saying that water, it's been a journey for us. I think that if you go back to, gosh, late 1990s, early 2000s, what you might have read about is a little bit of our issues that we had there in terms of India, where we had really strong water programs in place. The reality is every time we were opening up a facility, there weren't the guidelines in place to say what's happening to the communities around where that facility is. As we faced some of those core issues in terms of community and what was expected by The Coca-Cola Company in terms of water stewardship, we set the broad goals to be around how do we reduce the water we use?
How do we recycle and replenish, also at the same time, not just in the particular location where the plants and facilities are. You asked a little bit about the mechanisms of the strategy. It's about the entire community. While we might not be using a water source from a region here, we make sure that we're looking at the water management across the board. Ulrike can go into more of the details in terms of how it actually works.
Thank you, Bea. I probably would pick up on the three or four hours. It's probably fair to say that given our background on water, we've probably pretty much blueprinted the circular economy that we talk about today on water with reduce, recycle, reuse, and replenish for water. We're making this circle ever closer to really address water risks. Water, as opposed to everything to other key resources like carbon or packaging, it's very local. You have to address the risks and your issues and the watershed health in your local environment or in the community that you're actually using it in. We've really tried with our replenish goal, in addition to reducing and recycling and reusing to try to really address the watershed health problems and the gaps of supply and demand in some of those key risks or highly stressed contexts.
For example, India has been a great focus. You mentioned that, Bea, and today, after several years of investment and really targeted engagement with the communities, our India business is replenishing or is giving back. It's balancing out more than about 200% of its actual annual water consumption. It does that, if I just can come into three examples. 3 types of projects you could say. One is around how can we enhance the water balance in a watershed. It simply increase the storage capacity of water in a watershed. In India, as you know, very dependent on monsoons, very short period of time. How we can hold back that water to actually be available more during the dry season and actually keep giving to the community throughout that period. The second part is wetland conservation and restoration.
To be able to give an opportunity for flood water to go back into the environment and replenish the groundwater. Of course, very importantly, working with farmers to become more water efficient because we heard that before 70%, 80%, up to 90% of global water use is in agriculture. How do we help farmers to be more water sustainable, to be more efficient around their water use and soil water capture. Finally, the communities, right? We have still a number of millions of people in India without regular and clean, safe access to water. How can we think about replenish as well as giving back to communities? That's the sort of, in that context, a typical example of how we think about replenish. We do that in India and in the other 200 countries and geographies that we're operating in every year.
Emma Lupton, BMO Global Asset Management. Just to follow on from that question. In relation to water, are you setting context-based water targets like you're talking about science-based carbon targets, bringing in that local element and through the supply chain, not just within direct operations? Then a second question, just about if we can slightly cover the issue or potential issue of negative impact of diet drinks, health impact. There's been some new research on that recently. A lot of it's been dismissed, but I'd just be interested in your view on that as well.
I'll start with the water question. A very good question, very timely as well. Because we're currently looking at where do we go post 2020 with our water strategy, what are the affirmations? What are the real good things that we have done that we've led on that the industry by and large is now following? Replenish actually has been a term that 10 years ago nobody really understood what that meant. It's now actually something that goes into a broader industry KPI around how do corporates actually engage on water conservation. How can you actually measure your impact? How can you measure what you do? Replenish is certainly one of those areas that we will continue to maintain, but we'll make more meaningful.
To your question around context-based water targets, one of the key elements around water, as I said, is it's very local. We can talk about global risks and the global supply and demand gap, but actually it really only matters in your local watershed. If you think that through and think a bit more systemically of how do you actually address these risks as a business more holistically, you need to think in a systemic way around what is the context in which you operate. Are you under water stress? Have you got water quality problems which are increasingly coming to the fore, especially in the food and beverage industry? Finally, do we have infrastructure challenges? Again, in different ways about resilience comes in here as well, climate resilience in that space.
What we're currently doing is to look at all our facilities and actually our key sourcing regions for agriculture ingredients and say, what sort of context can we broadly define and identify and then set targets against those? We're working that through at the moment. One big shout-out on this is, of course, the data that we have and that we all look at for risks do give us sort of a fundamental systemic imbalance, but it doesn't actually tell you something about the actual vulnerability of a place. What we're currently doing is really working with our bottling and our system locally to understand how much does that systemic risk actually translate into local vulnerability and then drive the right strategies against that.
If I may, on your question regarding diet drinks. Well, low and no-calorie sweeteners are food additives that bring sweet taste without the calories. They are among the most researched additives on the globe, have consistently been established as safe by EFSA and JECFA and others, and are approved for use in food and beverages. As you referenced yourself, there was a report recently that indeed, the lead authors themselves had actually to admit that their conclusions were based on observational studies and could not prove cause effect, which was also actually acknowledged in important media outlets like The Guardian and CNN. We are quite confident on the role that low and no-calorie additives can play in helping us to innovate and bring beverages to the market that are great tasting without the calories.
I think it's also important to have a range of products. Some of our products have low-calorie sweeteners in them, like Diet Coke. Others are sugar products, like Coke. If you're concerned about low-calorie sweeteners, there's an option. If you're concerned about sugar, there's an option. Actually, a lot of the products we're launching now are lower calorie, but they don't contain artificial sweeteners either. If I think about Honest Lemonade, which we launched just a few months ago here in the U.K., it's an organic product, but it's lower sugar. I think back to an earlier point, it's important that you keep the consumer with you. It's got to taste good. I think it is possible to slowly reduce sugar levels, not necessarily with replacing them with something else. Having that portfolio of products is the key.
Hi. Jonathan Cook from State Street. At the beginning, you presented a chart with shareholder value around the outside. It seems like presenting this as, these are all the right things to do for the business in the long term. Can you give us some examples of the pain points, the difficult decisions you had to make in order to implement this, where there's been resistance, either within the business, maybe with some bottling partners, or you thought, "We're clearly making a trade-off here in favor of sustainability, which might impact shorter-term profits?
Sure. I'll start with, it has been a journey, and there's been many pain points and rich discussions along the way, and part of trade-offs, depending on what side of the house you're on, is there's so much more that people want Coca-Cola to do. We're a business that also has to bring back a dividend to our shareowners. So it's important that we stay focused on what's core to the business, where we believe we can actually drive a true impact. That means that we're going to say no to other issues that we don't feel fit that criteria, where we can truly make a system impact and are material to the business.
That sometimes can be a pain point because we meet with a lot of different stakeholders, all different kinds of stakeholders, and a lot of times they will ask us to do things that we simply just cannot do at the moment in time, or today is not the most urgent priority. We watch, we look to see what's changing, we try to catch up. I'd also say that I was fortunate in this respect that I have a board of directors who truly believe that a part of the growth agenda for Coca-Cola is ensuring that we're welcomed into communities. It doesn't mean that it's made every single conversation easy. I will share one that I think we've talked a lot about today, which is around sugar reduction. There was a lot of data that pointed in two different directions.
For every trend, there's a counter-trend. A lot of good researchers will show you that. It was trying to really understand, by getting really deep into the data, what do the consumers want, and how fast could we move? To Jon's example, if we moved too fast, it might get rejected. Then if the great quality taste of the product wasn't there, then the consumers would reject us moving into a sugar reduction portfolio. We said, "Well, okay, now that we know that this is something that's core to our business and we have to do it in order to be able to have a business in existence, how quickly do we move?" Those are some of the discussions. At the other side, think about World Without Waste. It does require an investment of people's time and energy.
We had a lot of discussion around how fast can we move and what has to be done and who should do it. This is public, but we have our President and Chief Operating Officer, Brian Smith, who appointed a chief lead on World Without Waste to drive it through the operations to make sure that we were moving faster and that we had standardization across the system and across the business. At the same time, that we were taking a look at sharing best practices. Those are pain points because that means added personnel or resources in those places to drive it through the business. At a point in time, those resources will evolve into the responsibilities of all of the general managers around the world. At this point in time, we said, "We're still learning about some of this.
While we're learning, we need those added resources to do this. As you know, with every single decision, there's always a trade-off. We take a look at which is the trade-off that will help us enable the business to thrive, not just in the short term, but for the long term, protect our corporate reputation, and make sure we are truly doing the right things. We're a company that, if you look back at our founding fathers, Robert Woodruff, he was once known as Mr. Anonymous. There's some real good stories around how some individual donor would make these big donations to create infrastructure or to do good in the community, but it would be labeled Mr. Anonymous. That Mr. Anonymous was Mr. Woodruff, and that was talking in Atlanta, but he did that around the world as well.
Well, the trade-off today, if you think about telling your story, is some people will actually be offended and say you're just bragging, you're being arrogant, and other people will say, "Well, it's about time you told us." There's also trade-offs that are nuanced that not everyone thinks about. We deliberated quite a bit on do we actually tell the story of the work we do or not? Because we were grounded in a heritage of just do the right thing, don't tell anyone, and it'll get discovered. The expectations are greater today. People want to hear our story. Transparency is critical. They want to know how are you doing and how are you getting it done, and how do you stack up versus everybody else?
I like that because I see all of you in the room nodding heads, and I can tell that if we do the right thing and we grow our business, you're going to reward us for doing the right thing. If you don't actually know what we're doing, it's going to be hard for you to reward us. Those are also trade-offs that have to be made along the way. Do you invest in that marketing dollar or not to tell the story?
Hi. Sandra Byrne from Legal & General. I just wondered, have any studies been done as to how many times you can recycle PET, and it still being safe for consumers?
There are several studies being done. Jon, do you want to?
I think there are studies.
Yeah.
It's double digits, is my understanding.
Yes.
I think there've been several studies. My understanding, it's double digits. Of course, it depends how much recyclate you're putting back into the bottles also.
Right.
I don't have an exact number for you, but I believe it's double digits, and it depends on the 25/50.
Absolutely. I think that's part of the reason why we set the current goal that we have to have up to 50% recycled content in all of our packaging. It's really with our R&D teams. We believe there's a need for some continual virgin content, you can keep that quite small, that helps to maintain both the integrity and the quality of the packaging material. As Bea mentioned, we've invested in some other types of material. PlantBottle, which is a bio-based PET. You could look to the future, it's a more sustainable source of PET plastic than petroleum-based PET. You could look to the future and think about recycled content and PlantBottle content, which is in our water bottle today here in the U.K., as being that virgin content that's from a more renewable and sustainable source going forward.
I think we'll have to consistently pay attention to these studies, because as materials get innovated, their lifespan should last longer in terms of being reused. We have to stay well abreast of this. We have an entire technical division that takes a look at these studies and comes back and gives us the guidance.
Maybe just one other point. What you're talking about today is the mechanical recycling technology, where you collect that bottle, you cut it into little pieces, and then you melt it to have it reused. We're also investing in some of the new innovative ways to recycle, whether that's through a partnership with Ioniqa here in Europe that's using enhanced recycling. CCEP, our partner, has already invested with Loop, a Canadian technology company that's providing as well enhanced recycled material. There are new innovative technologies that are actually reducing the molecules back to their original monomers and then rebuilding them up. Through that process, any impurities are able to be removed in that. There's a lot of innovation that's happening in the area, and we are absolutely both as a company, but with our bottling partners, investing in that.
John Howchin, Council on Ethics, Swedish National Pension Funds. Thank you for having us today. Very, very interesting. I think a general point is, I think food and what we eat and drink is really becoming the sustainability frontier and the personal sort of frontier in many, many parts of the world as we speak. I'm quite happy to have this discussion. I think a lot of things I hear is very encouraging. It'd be very good to get some indicators on sugar. I think sugar content within individual products and on aggregated levels to as much detail as possible would be good, because I think this is going to be like with carbon content within products. It's becoming a key indicator, I would say, for your company. Very encouraged on that.
A topic we haven't touched upon, which is a key topic for us at the Council, is child labor. There has been discussion about the sugarcane production in El Salvador over the years and in other regions as well. If you had any points on that, I would appreciate that. Otherwise, it may be something we could get back to later on.
Sure. We have Brent Wilton, who oversees human rights. As a matter of fact, last week, we just had our human rights conference at our building where we brought in the different experts. We talk about these things. We have very strict policies against child labor. What I can do is we can help to set up a meeting with Brent. He is the expert. I think it would be better to hear it from him. Right. Thank you.
Hi. My name is James Scott from[Berenberg]
Observation than a question, but it's about building trust with shareholders and trust with our clients. I think a problem at the moment with building that trust, and this is not just for you guys, but for a lot of companies in the sector, is that we and our clients can hear a lot of talk about this is what we're doing, we're doing this. This is the project. Here are a few stats for it. People, on the other hand, can still see the problem out there. They can still see there's a lot of plastic in the oceans. People say, "How is this working? Can we trust that this company is doing the right thing?" I think part of building up that trust and us being able to say to our clients, "Hey, it's okay.
Coca-Cola is definitely doing the right thing here, and they're moving in the right direction," is if as well as talking about the good things, you gave a bit more problems that you've got, the knottiest challenges, why those are challenges, and what has one done. It's not just a, "Here's the good news of Coca-Cola message," but, "Okay, here's why our collection rate has flatlined in the past couple of years. Here's why that is. Here's what we're going to do about it next." I think that combined with, I think a few people have asked questions about data and the transparency of data, and do you report it for several years so we can track it, and is it measurable?
If you did some of those things, talked about your problems and the data, that would go quite a long way to building up trust for us and for reporting to our clients. Not really a question then, more than observation, but I suspect a lot of people would welcome that.
Great. I appreciate that because we are trying to continuously improve. It's a little similar to the question around what are some of the trade-off decisions. I think that, just in general, everyone who's doing this work is learning about how do you define these impact metrics to make them more consistent? Who should measure and track them? Is it internal, external? How does that work? The reporting process.
If you all see things that you think is a good model, please also feel free to share those because maybe we're not seeing also some of the reports that you see that you say, "That one's really good, and I wish Coke would do it that way." We also have industry discussions together so we can bring some of those into the industry discussions, because I think it would benefit everyone if there was consistency and standardization around some of this reporting to make it easier to follow and to say, "Well, who really is doing good work and who needs to do more?" Also recognizing that things will change. 10 years ago, the innovation of materials wasn't there the way it is today, you could not have maybe done some of the things that we're able to do today.
How do you actually leave a little bit of room to pivot or to do more as things change? Thank you for that.
Maybe I just would add, since you mentioned plastic specifically, when we set our World Without Waste goals, we did go through a quite extensive stakeholder engagement process around the metrics and around the data that we could use then to actually demonstrate progress with the metrics, from academics to NGO and civil society partners, to other peers in the industry and others. We are absolutely thinking about it that way in that you have to be able to report in a way that at the end of the day, if it's not credible to the people who are most concerned about those issues, then you've wasted some time in doing it. We certainly thought about that on the front end, and you see a little more description of that in this year's business and sustainability report for sure.
Lewis from Atlantic Equities. Over the last 10 years, you've done an awful lot with the bottling system, refranchising, consolidating. Just love to hear your perspective of how that's changed your role and all the success you're driving. Ultimately, I guess they're the partners who are really sort of in the front line in this area. Just be interesting to see how that's helped you along the process.
I probably should have said this from the beginning, the bottlers are our partners in delivering this work. We set system goals. It's not just a company goal. We set system goals because we do believe that we need to work together. You'll see that some of our bottlers were just recently announced on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, and that happens year- over- year. What I'd say is that from my perspective, whether they're company-owned or independently owned, we do have mechanisms in place where we have rich dialogue and we look at the metrics together.
At the same time, we know that some of our independent bottlers set some of their own targets, and some of them might be bolder and more aggressive because they're operating in a geography where they have the infrastructure to get bolder, aggressive, or it's expected of them, where there's other geographies that you're not going to see an rPET goal probably anytime soon in a China or India, because right now you need the government policies to change. Working with the bottlers, critically important, whether they're company-owned or independently owned, it actually doesn't matter. We have to deliver together. I don't know if, Tim, do you want to add in or Jon?
Yeah, what I was going to add in on that piece of it is, you mentioned the refranchising piece of it. For me, when having worked in the field and been a part of this is really where the power of the franchise system comes into place. That tension that management oftentimes talks about where we challenge each other in the different approaches, whether it's areas around sustainability, it's sugar, et cetera, that actually always leads to a better result if it's done with trust, it's done in the right way. I think through the refranchising process where we've really gotten back to the core of what we do, which is innovate, market, help lead the system, and drive these types of areas.
I think you've seen us step up in areas where we've needed to, and I think the bottling system not only is responding to that, in many ways have led, but we're working and doing it together, and I think that iterative process is why we're able to achieve these things. As Bea mentioned, we have some bottling partners that are here with us today, and this is just as an important subject to them as it is to us, and we challenge and push each other to do that. I don't know if there's anything-
It depends on what the subject is. My role in the company is to deliver great tasting products that contain less sugar. We do that. We're constantly working on that. My bottling partners here in the U.K., they lead a lot of the work on packaging, how to make the bottles lighter, how to use less water. A lot of that sits on their side. The partnership is really important and close.
Thank you. It's Se Ting Frenzel , from HSBC Global Asset Management. I have one question regarding trade-off that we talked about a little earlier. Single-serve, that's very helpful in terms of portion control, fighting obesity, et cetera. At the same time, if it's increasing the packaging that you have per unit of beverage that you sell. Well, I guess the first question is that the case? Perhaps there's another way that you analyze, depending on the occasion, where on the go it should be small and at home, is that then educating people towards using actually more plastic, or the packaging. Also, to which extent that might then prevent you from, because it is quite helpful in terms of revenue management for the group, prevent you from thinking about other solutions for portion control that may be less impactful to the environment.
I look at, for me, it's about single-use elimination. Single-serve is a different conversation. If it's a single-use package, so for me, actually, this is too big for me. I would have shared this with Jon if you wanted half of it, because I can't drink the whole thing. What matters is what is it made out of, and then what are the collection systems to bring it back to create that circular economy. I don't know if, Jon, if you want to add to it, but for me, it's more about the focus around eliminating the single-use materials. It's not about whether or not I choose to drink it all by myself or share it with others.
Yeah, I talked a little bit about a deposit return scheme.
If you look at the numbers here in GB, we're more successful at getting the big packages back than the small packages back. Why? Because they go into household recycling more readily. One of the key things about a deposit return scheme is that we need it to help us get those smaller packages back. Those are the ones that tend to be the ones you see littered at the side of the street. We want to stop that. I think, again, a deposit return scheme is actually a big step in moving us that way. If you look at what happens in Norway, for example, they actually have a way integrated into their rubbish collection on the streets, to actually get the small packages back into the deposit return scheme.
Maybe I just would add, I think as we look at the broader issue of plastics and plastics in the ocean, we believe that a circular economy is the answer because PET is a high-value plastic, so it does get collected, and it can be recycled. In the broader issue, there are a lot of plastics out there. They're not ones that we're using, but there are a lot of plastics out there that cannot be recycled. If it can't be recycled, then it can't be circular. There's certainly more that we need to do, and that's why we have these goals. As we invest in those collection systems, we're going to bring our packages back and be able to reuse that same content in the next package.
The ability to have more packages won't be as relevant a point if you've actually created the circularity to reuse the material over and over.
Hi. Thanks very much. It's Rose from Findlay Park. Thank you for your very focused discussion, really leading on the key issues that you see investors talking to you about. In terms of emerging issues and one that the EU is very focused on the moment, and I think there's growing awareness of beyond just plastic, could you talk a bit about biodiversity risk and impacts more broadly, so SDGs like 14, 15, looking at agriculture as well? It's one that we as financial professionals will also be challenged on to give an answer to the EU to show more consistent focus on this issue in terms of risk and impact. It'd be great to get your thoughts on this area.
I can take that. Yeah, you're absolutely right. The SDGs, there's 17 of them. We have a lot of interconnections. What we do is we look at essentially our key material issues that we put into focus today and see where are the connection points across. All of them do have connection points. If I take the topics water, agriculture, they of course connect very clearly. They also connect over with climate change and climate adaptation, with women empowerment, in particular in agriculture and community lack of water. Women are always the ones on the front line. If you start addressing that, you also have a knock-on benefit on women empowerment and economic empowerment.
What we're trying to do essentially is to try to map our key anchors around sustainability that are really relevant for our business and where we can make an impact and have a contribution and say, how can we actually optimize what we do in order to have a cross-fertilization, if you like. As I said, agriculture is a typical example. A number of our water and agriculture projects would be set up in a way to also benefit women farmers, smallholder farmers in particular, where women are a large part of and very vulnerable. To try to get a multiple impact. You also mentioned biodiversity.
Many of our water replenishment projects are set up in a way, in particular when they do watershed restoration or conservation, they have co-benefits that are very much connected to enhancing biodiversity because water is a key essential part of an ecosystem. We're actually advancing work. We have done this already, piloted a few years ago ourselves, but we're now bringing this into conversation with CEO Water Mandate on a more collective basis to try to quantify the co-benefits of water conservation work, in particular with regards to carbon sinks, to biodiversity and other natural capital factors to give a better representation of the impact we can make.
Thank you.
You mentioned earlier that you're driven by the consumer in terms of packaging choices and want to offer to the consumer what the consumer wants. There clearly are some trade-offs across the carbon emissions or plastic waste and energy consumption. I just wanted to understand why you don't see your role as educating the consumer as to what the trade-offs are that they are making. If you don't think it's your responsibility, whose responsibility it should be?
I would say that we do believe our role is in providing education, which is why we started on the journey of telling the story. As you saw in the Poland campaign, it was trying to present the core issue first, then moving into the solutions that we're working on. I think this part's going to be a journey for us. We're learning how to tell the story and how to raise the issues in a way that's credible and in a way where we also can talk about what we're doing to help solve them. This is an area where we can improve, and we can do better. I think there's a lot more education that has to be done.
I can tell you that just as much as I thought I was a sustainability expert, it wasn't until two years ago that I started to really understand some of the carbon impacts of glass. I was a little bit astonished because actually many places in the United States, you actually can't even recycle glass. There's no infrastructure. It's a journey, and what I would say is that I do think it's our role to continue to educate. At the same time, we have to continue to educate ourselves in order to be able to have a credible position in that journey and in that discussion. Thank you.
We have reached the official end of our time. The webcast is off. Can we take another question?
Yes.
Oh, it is? Okay.
Mark, I just thought maybe I'd add one other thing. I think the other, maybe to answer to your point, is that we want to make sure that we have the actions on the ground in place before we start launching into that broader consumer campaign. If you take, for example, the South Pacific market and our team in Australia, they announced earlier this year that they were moving 70% of their portfolio to 100% recycled content before the end of this year. Recently, over the last several weeks, they've launched a major new campaign that really brings consumers with them in helping to talk about how those bottles can be reused as new bottles. We're having action on the ground, and then we're talking about it to consumers. That model is being implemented in other places.
There were campaigns in Eastern Europe this summer or in Latin America. Maybe just the second point would be, we're also working more towards collective action. We are working with groups like in The Consumer Goods Forum, where we've come together as a group of 13 major leading brands to work on common solutions. We've joined the Global Plastic Action Partnership at the World Economic Forum, where it's not just private sector, but we're working with civil society and governments on how can we create solutions in some of the markets where it matters most today, particularly on packaging. We see our role as helping to lead that collective action, both bringing our own private sector colleagues along with us, but working with other partners.
Further questions? Yes.
Peter for Rebeco . Just a last question from my side on sort of the longer term policy risks which you see ahead of you, especially Well, actually on climate, water, and on sugar, I think there is larger global risks that policymakers will respond to. We had a lot of conversations last week at PRI in person among investors on sort of the inevitable policy response for climate change. Do you foresee similar risks on the long term horizon when it comes to sugar? I think in the U.K., there's a lot of debate also on sugar taxes. Would there be further implications in terms of restrictions on sales for youth at schools and other places where that might impact parts of your portfolio, and how do you prepare yourself for that?
Sure. I'll start, and then Jon, because you're in the market, it would be good for you to add in. You hit the nail on the head. It's why we have to be focused on these things today, because they are coming, and consumers do expect more, and there'll be a certain point in time where they won't tolerate companies who are not actually being responsible in these spaces. It's also, at the same time, a place where we've learned that consumers reward companies for taking these actions. You heard Jon's story a little bit in terms of sugar. His portfolio here is growing when he reduced the sugar. If he had not done that, he might not have the business he has today. We have to look further out and see what else is coming.
It's interesting because it hasn't come up here today, but I thought it would, is what else is coming too is this use of data and privacy and all of those things that actually right here in the U.K., GDPR was actually born. It's traveled around the world to California with the California Privacy Act. How do you actually take a look at all of those components today and tomorrow? Because there'll be a point in time where someone might want to be able to share their information with us. We've put protocols in place to follow GDPR globally, even if it's not a global requirement. How do we do that? Just like we set policies around marketing responsibly, whether or not the policy or it's a government action in a certain country, we said this is important to us around the world.
We look at all of these coming trends and we say, well, when we start to see things that actually could impact people as well as our business, we try to bring those together and we set global guidelines and rules versus waiting for it to become a regulation and then imposition.
Yeah. I think the other regulation that you talked about, the soft drinks tax is live here. There's some conversation about it expanding into other product groups. The amount of sugar coming from soft drinks has been falling consistently for a decade or so. It sped up a little bit before the sugar tax came through, but it was relentlessly on its way down, in our category anyway. That's not true in other categories that are consumed a lot in U.K. There's still a lot of sugar out there, but less and less in soft drinks. I think the other areas you've mentioned, kind of marketing restrictions and so on, they're more likely to happen if we can't show that we're doing the right thing anyway.
I think it's really important that we have things like a responsible marketing code, which we do, that we're able to say that we're not targeting children, with our advertising, which we do, which the team actually here have just gone through a whole refresher program on what our responsible code is. If you're able to demonstrate not just us as Coca-Cola, but us as an industry, a food and drink industry, that we are doing the right thing, that's the way for regulation to be less. I think if we have big companies out there who can't demonstrate that they're doing that increases the risk of regulation. We need to do the right thing.
Bea, one of the things I was going to add, in many of the subjects we've talked about today, you touched on it in the presentation, and I think it is important to reiterate, is at the core of this is a culture within the organization that gets ahead of things like this, is open, is curious, is willing to admit mistakes on the version 1.0 and move to the 2.0. We learned a lot in terms of how we reacted around sugar, and a lot of that informed our thinking around packaging. So we've been much more proactive in terms of addressing that. I think as we look at additional issues that are bound to come up because society is changing, consumers are changing, that culture that's underpinning that will be incredibly important as we move forward.
Great question to end on, Peter. Thank you. I want to thank my panelists. Because Tim and I get paid to do this 24/7, 365 days a year, and they do not. We've invested a lot of time in this. I hope you're happy about what you heard. Mostly, thank you all for coming. I know this is a big investment of your time. We're not dashing out of the room, at least some of us aren't. If you want to stick around and chat, that's fine, but we'll just put an official end to this and the webcast. Talking about Tim and I, between the two of us, you know us. If you have any other questions about this or other things or are looking for additional dialogue, please just let us know and we'll make that happen.
Yeah.
Thank you very much.
Thank you all very much for coming.