Hartford Business Journal

6 Hartford Business Journal • September 3, 2018 • www.HartfordBusiness.com By Matthew Broderick Special to the Hartford Business Journal W hen Wayne Pesce started his career with Coca-Cola, Connecticut — like many states — was home to multiple bottling plants for the soft drink giant, run predomi- nantly by family owned production franchises that operated more inde- pendently from the demands of the Atlanta-based parent company. That business model, said Pesce, who is now president of the Connecti- cut Food Association, led at times to competing goals between the produc- tion demands of Coca-Cola Co.'s corpo- rate headquarters, which generates its greatest profits from the sale of soda syrup for company-owned brands, and the revenue driver for bottlers — re- sponse to local consumer demand. In the past, products the national en- terprise prioritized may not have been top sellers locally, creating a tension at times between profit motives. To better align its go-to-market strategies with its bottling system, Pesce said, Coca-Cola spent several years buying out independent bot- tling centers, which have declined from hundreds of facilities nationwide to only 68 today. In recent years, with restructured contracts with bottlers, Coca-Cola has divested all of its compa- ny-owned facilities, including the sale last September of its 400,000-square- foot production, distribution and sales center in East Hartford to New Hampshire-based Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Northern New England (CCNNE), which — in light of addition- al acquisitions in the Northeast — has more than tripled its workforce and expanded annual production from 27 million cases to more than 82 million. As the general manager of the 500-employee East Hartford facility, Mike Defeo is responsible for manag- ing a production center that cranked out more than 30 million cases last year. The facility, which runs 24-hours a day, produces cans — at a dizzy- ing pace of 2,200 per minute — and two-liter and one-liter bottles across multiple product lines. Although carbonated soft drink sales have declined over the past decade, as consumer tastes have shifted to more health-conscious options like teas and bottled water, soda sales across North America still totaled more than $81 billion in 2016, dwarfing grow- ing categories like water ($23 billion) and sports drinks ($9.4 billion), accord- ing to Beverage Digest, which also found that during that time Coke's market share in North America increased from 17.3 percent to 17.8 percent. The market- share figures are substantially higher in the Hartford area, where Coca-Cola tops 45 percent of the region's soft-drink mar- ket. In part, that's because despite the headwinds of shifting con- sumer demand, new aluminum tariffs and the threat of a soda tax, which has been explored in Connecticut, Coca-Cola has con- tinued to innovate both in its product offerings and packaging, including zero sugar sodas like Coke Zero and 100-calorie mini-cans, which have Homegrown Cola East Hartford Coca-Cola bottler sees greater local control after buyout by regional franchisee Coca-Cola still sells plenty of its sugary drinks but healthier choices like bottled water have grown in popularity. Mike Defeo is the general manager of the Coca- Cola bottling plant in East Hartford, which runs 24-hours a day and produces cans at a dizzying pace of 2,200 per minute. HBJ PHOTOS | STEVE LASCHEVER

• Cover