For nearly all of Coca-Cola's commercial life, its ingredients have been treated with an air of mystery, its carefully guarded “secret formula” known only to a handful of the company's highest executives. Yet from environmental and business perspectives, Bartow J. Elmore argues in his powerful new book, Citizen Coke, that everything we need to know about the soft drink's constituent parts is right on the label: water, caffeine, sweetener, and natural flavorings.

In the first half of the book, Elmore traces the Coca-Cola Company's rise to prominence from its founding in 1886 until 1950 in a series of crisp and well-researched chapters, each of which follows a major ingredient back to its origins. In doing so, he uncovers a pattern of corporate practices that he dubs “Coca-Cola capitalism,” defined as an “outsourcing strategy” that has allowed the company to “make substantial profits as a kind of third-party distributor of wares produced by others” (p. 10). Eschewing the sort of vertical integration embraced by many other leading American industries, the Coca-Cola Company has thrived in large part, Elmore argues, because it has consistently avoided the risks associated with investing directly in large-scale commodity production, infrastructure development, or untested technologies.

Elmore carefully documents the ways that this pattern held true for each of the commodities comprising Coca-Cola's primary ingredients. Because the Atlanta-based company manufactured and sold a syrup concentrate, its steadily expanding network of soda fountain operators and licensed independent bottling companies had to acquire and add the drink's most important ingredient by volume—water—on their own. That they were able to do so easily and at incredibly low cost, Elmore observes, reflected the massive public investments of big American cities in safe, clean municipal water supplies. In the case of sugar, another key ingredient, Elmore narrates the story of big investors like Milton Hershey, owner of the Hershey Chocolate Company, who lost significant sums by investing in tropical sugar plantations. By contrast, Coca-Cola's leadership cashed in on low prices when sugar markets flooded—and strong-armed bottlers into absorbing the costs of rising sugar costs when prices ticked upward. In the particularly interesting case of coca—a key ingredient in the drink's famous “secret formula”—the company's president, Asa Candler, dealt with growing public fears over cocaine by eliminating all traces of the drug from the drink by 1902 or 1903. Because Candler “insisted that the beverage contain a new decocainized coca leaf extract so as not to alter Coke's flavor profile,” however, the company had to gain a special exemption in anticocaine legislation for “de-cocainized coca leaves or preparations made therefrom” (pp. 116, 118). In addition, it had to obtain for its supplier, the Maywood Chemical Works (now the Stepan Company), the right to import “‘special leaves’ specifically reserved for production of coca leaf extract in beverages,” making it basically the only legal purchaser of coca leaves from Peru (p. 119). Coca-Cola's other major stimulant, caffeine, warrants two chapters, the first reflecting the company's first major source—caffeine derived from waste tea leaves—and the second reflecting its successful search for cheaper alternatives in laboratory-synthesized caffeine and caffeine derived from cocoa waste.

In the second half of the book, Elmore documents the company's global expansion after 1950, maintaining his focus on the beverage's key ingredients while raising trenchant questions about the environmental consequences of a business model built on the premises of endlessly abundant resources, on one hand, and the desirability of the ever-expanding consumption of a sugar- and caffeine-infused product, on the other. Expanding use of public water resources may have seemed both possible and benign in the pre–World War II United States, for example, but Elmore argues that the company's postwar expansion into parts of the world where adequate drinking water supplies are scarce raises troubling questions of equity and sustainability.

Elmore also narrates growing concerns about the public health implications of two of the drink's main ingredients, caffeine and high fructose corn syrup, the latter of which had replaced sugar as the sweetener for Coca-Cola in the U.S. market by 1985. In the case of caffeine, Elmore notes that the company ended up profiting from the anticaffeine movement, which created new markets for caffeine-free drinks on one side of the market even as it prompted the coffee industry to dump huge quantities of caffeine—a by-product of making decaffeinated coffee—at very low prices on the other. In the case of high fructose corn syrup, Elmore ties the sweetener to debates over growing obesity and concerns about environmental sustainability.

In a fourth standout chapter, Elmore shifts his focus from the drink itself to the glass, aluminum, and plastic containers in which it is sold. Driving home his thesis about Coca-Cola capitalism, Elmore demonstrates how the company used its political and marketing muscle to outsource the environmental costs of its shift from reusable glass bottles to disposable aluminum and plastic packaging. The company joined with other beverage and canning companies in a national anti-“litterbug” campaign, which hawked the idea that individual consumers—not the big manufacturers making decisions about how to package goods—should be responsible for the “proper disposal” of disposable packaging. In addition, the company championed recycling systems—in which the costs of materials collection, recovery, and reuse were borne by taxpayers and operated by municipalities—as a superior method of dealing with discarded cans and bottles, especially compared to methods (like “deposit” systems) that required expenditures and management by the company itself.

Citizen Coke is a welcome addition both to business history and to environmental history. The drink's deceptively simple list of ingredients gives Elmore a solid narrative backbone, around which he successfully introduces a variety of complex, interesting, and widely divergent topics. Aside from a few quirks—Elmore describes the company's shift from sugar to high fructose corn syrup, for example, as part of an effort to “stor[e] sweeteners in stomach silos”—the book is in turns insightful, entertaining, and well written (p. 262). The end result is a history worthy of the iconic American company that is its subject.