Honest Tea will operate as a stand-alone business while benefiting from Coca-Cola manufacturing and distribution services.
The Coca-Cola Co. (Coca-Cola; Atlanta)) has acquired the remaining portion Honest Tea (Bethesda, MD), the nation’s leading organic beverage company, according to Coca-Cola.
Three years ago, Coca-Cola acquired minority stake in the company.
Honest Tea will continue to operate as a stand-alone business under current CEO Seth Goldman, but the company will benefit from various Coca-Cola services, including manufacturing and distribution.
The acquisition appears to be influenced by Honest Tea’s motivation for environmentally sustainable practices: all Honest Tea products are USDA-certified organic and, by March 2011, are expected to be fair-trade certified.
"Beyond growth, having the unique vantage point of a minority investee and watching Honest Tea has helped our company in many other ways, from encouraging Coca-Cola to obtain organic certification at three of our facilities, to establishing a state of the art tea brewing and filtration system at a bottling plant,” said Deryck van Rensburg, president and general manager of Venturing and Emerging Brands, Coca-Cola North America. “Additionally, it enabled us to participate with Honest in a number of sustainability initiatives on recycling.”
The Nutritional Outlook Podcast Episode 33: Keeping up with contract manufacturing
July 26th 2024Nutritional Outlook talks to Lauren Samot, commercial innovation leader, and Blayney McEneaney, sales executive at Vitaquest International, about trends within the contract manufacturing space, and the ways in which contract manufacturers like Vitaquest keep up with the market and differentiate themselves from the competition.