Two Point Two Billion Servings, and Not One BuyerWide moat
Coca-Cola (KO) — moat facet
A company three parties removed from its drinker must win the preference long before the purchase.
Beverages bearing Coca-Cola trademarks account for 2.2 billion of an estimated 65 billion servings consumed worldwide every day1. The company's revenue comes from selling concentrate to bottlers — so of those 2.2 billion daily transactions, essentially none is with Coca-Cola.
This is the defining feature of the business model and explains most of what the company does. It is why marketing spend is so enormous and so relentlessly brand-focused: Coca-Cola cannot influence the purchase at the point of sale, so it must influence the preference long before. It is why the trademark rather than the factory is the real asset. And it is why the concentrate margin can be so extraordinary — Coca-Cola performs the one step that cannot be commoditised and hands away the steps that can.
The cost is distance. A company three parties removed from its drinker learns about demand slowly, cannot adjust price at the shelf, and depends on intermediaries whose interests only partly overlap with its own. Every structural threat on these pages — the bottler's independence, the retailer's private label, the chain's fountain — is a version of that distance.
Watch unit case volume alongside price/mix. Volume measures whether people are still drinking it; price/mix measures whether the intermediaries are still willing to pay for the privilege of selling it. The second is the moat.
2.2 billion servings a day of a product Coca-Cola never sells to the drinker. The structure is unchanged and remains the reason the concentrate margin is extraordinary — Coca-Cola performs the one step that cannot be commoditised. It is also the reason every threat on these pages is a version of distance from the customer.
The consumer never buys from Coca-Cola, but every case is counted. A fall in cases would show demand weakening before revenue does.
Source: Coca-Cola Form 10-K FY2025 ↗- ReportedBeverages bearing Coca-Cola trademarks account for 2.2 billion of the estimated 65 billion servings of all beverages consumed worldwide every day.Coca-Cola Form 10-K, FY2025 — for the year ended December 31, 2025, one bottler accounted for 10% of net operating revenues, reflected in the EMEA and Asia Pacific operating segments; as independent companies, bottling partners make their own business decisions that may not always align with the Company's interests; the Company generates net operating revenues by selling beverage concentrates, syrups including fountain syrups, and certain finished beverages to authorized bottling operations, which combine concentrates with water and sweeteners to produce finished beverages; beverages bearing trademarks owned by or licensed to the Company account for 2.2 billion of the estimated 65 billion servings of all beverages consumed worldwide every day — FY2025 (ended December 31, 2025) · publ. February 20, 2026 · source ↗