Column In the world of all-natural ready-to-drink beverages, Honest Tea is a key player offering simple, low-sugar and sugar-free options. But, the company is now owned by Coca-Cola. How honest does that make them? We go behind the label to find out.

Honest Tea began like many startup operations: to fill a void. Seeking delicious, quenching and clean refreshment, Seth Goldman and Barry Nalebuff began selling Honest Tea in 1998. Not only was there a gap in less sugary options than the standard sodas, sports drinks and juices, but there was also a gap when it came to high quality tea, as Nalebuff found out while in India a few years earlier. People simply didn’t seem to notice or care where their iced teas came from, which, for the most part, was the dusty remnants of the tea industry. Goldman and Nalebuff wanted to change that, and do it honestly with whole leaf teas and organic ingredients. The company now boasts dozens of products including teas, juices, and kids drinks.

Beverages have come a long way since 1998. The RTD (ready-to-drink) market options have ballooned to include all sorts of organic and natural concoctions. Traditional soda sales are slumping because of concerns over high fructose corn syrup and the nation’s rising obesity rates. Even diet soda sales are seeing a dip. Bottled water has also fallen out of favor, with people avoiding plastic BPA bottles and the high price tags that come with what’s more or less just filtered municipal water in most cases. Consumers want healthier, fresher options.

As the RTD category changed, Honest Tea was purchased by Coca-Cola in 2011 after the soft drink giant invested initially in 2008. While Honest Tea’s mission and product offerings were a direct response to the sugary soft drink world dominated by Coca-Cola, it seemed almost inevitable that the two would soon find their common ground. But the buyout still rattled the natural foods industry, and cost Honest Tea some of its die-hard customers who eschewed the corporate affiliation with Coca-Cola. But the support that came from Coca-Cola’s resources has helped catapult the brand into new markets, and make new loyal customers.

In a recent Washington Post profile on Honest Tea’s Seth Goldman, Gary Hirshberg, founder of Stonyfield Yogurt, said that for Goldman, “being inside Coke advocating for less sugar and more organic ingredients is a way to effect change.” And while the merger may have cost Honest Tea some customers, Goldman is excited that the brand has gone from being available in about 15,000 stores to more than 100,000 with Coca-Cola’s influence. Goldman believes, like his pal Hirshberg noted, that Honest Tea’s portfolio is creating a change within the behemoth Coca-Cola enterprise.

But are they still being honest?

Although Coca-Cola gave $1.7 million to help defeat California’s Proposition 37 (a bill that would have required labeling of genetically modified ingredients in the state), Honest Tea says it still supports GMO labeling, and that Coca-Cola won’t be funding efforts to defeat I-522, a similar bill to Prop 37 gaining momentum now in Washington State. But Coca-Cola is a member of a trade organization working to defeat the measure and keep GMO ingredients a mystery to consumers.

Despite Coca-Cola’s pro-GMO stance, as recently as 2012, Honest Tea had ramped up its commitment to Fair Trade and organic farming practices, which have been a huge focus for the brand since the early days. The company claims its teas have created more than $350,000 in Fair Trade premiums for growers since 2003. In 2011, Honest Tea reportedly purchased 4.4 million pounds of organic ingredients.

There have been changes to packaging, too. Known for their glass bottles, many of the Honest Tea products now come in plastic bottles and kids pouches, which are cheaper to produce, and costs less to ship than glass, even though Goldman says the company is committed to sustainability. But being a single-serve product makes the discussion about packaging a difficult one, particularly when sustainable claims are tacked on. In 2011, Honest Tea’s kid’s drinks boasted a reduction in carton sizes and conservation of more than 354,000 pounds of material, as well as decreased fuel costs. But the question over whether or not RTD beverages are ever really sustainable is gaining more public attention, especially for Coca-Cola, which was recently blasted by Denmark for greenwashing efforts to promote its PlantBottle, packaging it claims is made from as much as 30 percent plant-based materials (cane sugar). Denmark found no credible data to support the company’s eco claims.

Coca-Cola has a vested interest in the continued creation of single-serve products. It’s the world’s largest recycler, claiming to collect 35 percent of the bottles it produces. Ensuring a steady stream of recyclable products into the marketplace is big business for Coca-Cola, not just in the ingredients being sold to consumers, but the money to be made on the returned bottles as well.

“Honest” is a relative term. What brought Honest Tea its fan base and industry credibility more than a decade ago is not necessarily relevant anymore. Consumers are opting for reusable bottles and bringing beverages from home to avoid the massive pile up of single-serve bottles, whether they’re recycled eventually or not. Organic and Fair Trade are still highly important values to shoppers, but so is a commitment to being pro-GMO labeling. Is it enough that a small company under the Coca-Cola brand supports GMO labeling? Or is that overshadowed by the majority of Coca-Cola’s portfolio, which is full of genetically modified ingredients? Honestly, it seems, only time will tell.

Keep in touch with Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

Image: Honest Tea

Related stories

Chobani Greek Yogurt: Naturally Healthy or Not? Behind the Label

7 Unusual Benefits of Green Tea You Need to Know About

The post Honest Tea: Keeping Coca-Cola Honest? Behind the Label appeared first on EcoSalon.

How different would America—and our relationship with soft drinks—be if we embraced a return to old-fashioned soda fountain shops?

While you perhaps saw one of the SodaStream commercials during this year’s Super Bowl, the other ad was pulled, mainly because it was critical of both Coca-Cola and Pepsi, two of the event’s biggest sponsors (Pepsi produced the Half Time show). SodaStream, which is a DIY tool that allows you to make unlimited amounts of soda at home, targeted the excessive plastic and aluminum waste created by the soft drink industry.

The numbers are staggering—plastic bottles are an immense problem, with more than 340 billion produced around the world each year, and fewer than half of those find their way to proper recycling facilities. Coca-Cola’s own website reports the brand sells more than 1 billion servings of its products every day. And even if those are from the soda fountains at fast food restaurants or convenience stores, those sodas still wind up in plastic cups with plastic lids and plastic straws.

Beyond the environmental reasons for ditching the bottled soft drinks, there are of course a plethora of health reasons as well. Sodas are full of caloric high fructose corn syrup, which is closely linked to our nation’s obesity epidemic. They also contain artificial colors and flavors, and those diet drinks, are full of artificial sweeteners that have been linked to  neurological and reproductive issues and even certain types of cancer.

SodaStream’s product challenges an industrial food mainstay that has an incredibly influential power over our culture. After all, little else is as refreshing or satisfying as a fizzy, bubbly, sweet and cold soft drink. But, too much of a good thing is…well, a crippling obesity and diabetes epidemic and a giant gyre of plastic floating in the ocean causing irreversible damage to the planet.

But can’t we have our Mountain Dew and drink it too?

I thought you’d never ask.

Flip on the television to Turner Classic Movies and inevitably you’ll soon see a gaggle of teens or a couple of young lovers sitting in a soda shop, sipping on a rather mediocre sized glass of cola. Our original foray into carbonated beverages was as an attempt to reproduce naturally effervescent mineral waters, which were renowned for their health-giving properties. It’s why the original formulas for products including Coca-Cola and Dr. Pepper were touted as healthy tonics that could treat, cure and even prevent disease—a mix of herbs and spices measured and formulated to enhance the bubbly waters—and it’s also why they were first only available in pharmacies.

Our modern soda shops (rhymes with “Farducks”) serve as communal watering holes, but they’re not quite as alluring as a traditional soda shop. (There’s something about the vibe of a place that serves bubbly, fizzy, fun drinks versus the seriousness of bitter, hot coffee, right?) At the turn of the 20^th century, when soda shops were hitting their peak, they preceded the era of commercial food transport and refrigeration. So, many shops had to make their own syrup formulas, mixing each drink to order by the masterful baristas of their time: soda jerks (the name comes from the jerking motion of pulling the taps).

According to Julia Moskin of the New York Times, as consumers become more enamored with local and artisan-crafted foods, we’re also beginning to see the return of the soda shops in all their steampunk glory: “Places like Blueplate, the Franklin Fountain in Philadelphia and the Brooklyn Farmacy & Soda Fountain are leading a revival that is bringing up-to-date culinary values — seasonal, house-made, ripe, local — to ice cream sodas, sundaes and egg creams.”

Whether a full on soda shop revival is even possible, or whether we’ll all get SodaStreams and make our own sodas at home, we do now more than ever seem to need a return to the soda shop mentality. We do well to invest in the experience of consuming these beverages as much having more control over what’s in them.

While this is certainly a much different world than the dawn of the 20th century, where we can get our social fix at the swipe of an iPhone and our soda fix around every corner, our need for gathering places has not diminished. Our need for treating ourselves and stepping out on occasion is still critical to our sense of pride and participation in our communities. Drinking a 20-ounce Pepsi from a plastic bottle in the solitude of a car or a cubicle, is not.

Keep in touch with Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

Image: hsld

The post Soft Drink Revival: A Return to Old-Fashioned Soda Shops appeared first on EcoSalon.

Just for the taste of it?

Today Diet Coke celebrates its 30th birthday. Since that fateful day when it  was introduced on August 9, 1982, ad campaigns have been targeting sexy, savvy women that just want to keep their waistlines small. In our mid-80s and early 90s stupor (most likely shoulder-pad induced), we were seduced by the likes of Paula Abdul and Whitney Houston selling us a chic and slim product that was made to make us look and feel good. Or at least so the advertising led us to believe.

Lest you think that our newfound love of farmers markets, quinoa salads and artisan cheese would have us move away from mass marketed, artificially sweetened and carbonated drinks, thanks to advertising, branding and marketing, Diet Coke has seated itself as the second most popular soda in the world, with 927 million cases sold in 2010. In Europe you can buy lingerie-inspired Diet Coke bottles designed by Jean Paul Gaultier himself, and apparently it’s so delicious that one consumer in England was drinking seven pints a day for 10 years.

Diet Coke makes you feel sexy. An empowered woman. And hey men, if you drink it, the ladies will be drooling all over you!

We have been seduced by advertising, forgetting to ask ourselves what downing a diet soda a day really does to our bodies.

Diet Coke’s addicts will probably tell you that the research on aspartame is inconclusive (despite the fact that it has over 90 known side effects). As Zoe Williams put it in an article on the history of Diet Coke in the Guardian:

Artificial sweeteners are a very controversial subject. Some governmental health authorities may say they are safe enough, but in the nutrition industry, that’s still up for debate. Some studies indicate that the man-made molecular structure of some artificial sweeteners could be linked to certain health problems. This requires much more research. Research however, has indicated other adverse issues from consumption of artificial sweeteners, including encouraging sugar cravings; and increasing appetite.

No matter how many cheesy ads we watch, deep down we know we shouldn’t be drinking the stuff. Just like you know fully well that you shouldn’t down an entire chocolate cake, or eat barbecued ribs for every meal. “All good things in moderation!” some might say, but is Diet Coke a good thing? Sure, we have yet to prove causation between drink consumption and obesity, but do you see scientists having to come to conclusions on the health effects of water? The fact that we have to test soda to begin with should be true cause for concern.

We should know better. We can forgive our predecessors for sucking down Tab and later turning to Diet Coke when it rebranded, but the fact that we’re still guzzling sodas of any kind in 2012 is simply unacceptable. Single use plastic bottles (because it doesn’t always come in cans), artificial sweeteners, global greenwashing… pick your poison; the entire soda industry is one that’s made up of not only promoting a product whose nutritional elements we don’t need – trust me, Diet Coke is not the place to get your daily dose of, well, anything – but also using resources that could be put to better use elsewhere.

Want to really celebrate Diet Coke’s 30th birthday? Try drinking a nice, sexy glass of water instead.

Image: Amy McTigue, Tim’s Blog

The post Happy 30th Birthday Diet Coke! Keeping Smart Women Drinking Crap for Three Decades appeared first on EcoSalon.