Beverage Industry

Leading experts from business and academia consider coffee's history, global spread, cultivation, preparation, marketing, and the environmental and social issues surrounding it today. They discuss, for example, the impact of globalization; the many definitions of organic, direct trade, and fair trade; the health of female farmers; the relationships among shade, birds, and coffee; roasting as an art and a science; and where profits are made in the commodity chain.

An interesting public health paradox has emerged in some developing nations. Despite government commitment to eradicating noncommunicable diseases and innovative prevention programs aimed at reducing obesity and type 2 diabetes, sugary beverage and fast food industries are thriving. But political leaders in countries such as Mexico, Brazil, India, China, and Indonesia are reluctant to introduce policies regulating the marketing and sale of their products. Why? Eduardo J. Gomez argues that the challenge lies with the strategic politics of junk food industries in these countries.

Counter-Cola charts the history of one of the world's most influential and widely known corporations, the Coca-Cola Company. It tells the story of how, over the past 130 years, the corporation has tried to make its products and brands physically and culturally a central part of global daily life in over 200 countries. Through this story of Coca-Cola, Amanda Ciafone reveals the pursuit of corporate power within the key economic transformations-liberal, developmentalist, neoliberal - of the 20th and 21st centuries. A story of global capitalism, it is not without contest.