A Truly Social Company!

Today I am going to talk about a cola company that does not advertise or market its products. It donates one cent per bottle sold to offset its carbon footprint. Every customer can look at the company’s bank account, and if they disagree with how the founder is running things, they can argue to have his share reduced. This queer company is called Premium Cola. There are no salaries, no office, and no bosses, per se. All decisions are made equally by members of the cola collective. The drink is only sold to select locations which resonate with the Premium Cola ideologies. Sounds impossible to sustain, doesn’t it?

Started in Germany in 2001 as a protest project among lovers of a soda called Afri-Cola that had turned its back on them, the brand had lowered caffeine and made its flavor less strong in its formula. While Afri-cola moved back and forth with the new formula, by 2006 Premium Cola had evolved something more like the distilling and bottling of drinkable ethics.

When posed with the question of how are they marketing this brand and how they pay their employees, the founder Uwe Lübbermann replied:

“Mostly we just react to people asking “How can i get Premium in my city?” – our answer could be “Well, not until now, but maybe you´d like to talk to some outlets of choice?” We support them with information, aid the choice of outlets and assist in talking to dealers and setting up logistics. That's it. Premium is working with different kinds of people to talk to outlets, e.g. helicopter pilots, nurses, students and a few beverage promoters who like our idea. Logistics is fulfilled by professionals on most of our routes, as customers require reliability. There is the occasional private and overloaded rusty VW bus though .

We don´t advertise because we don´t want to get on people´s nerves – and we don´t want people buy bottles and pay us for getting on their nerves with a part of their purchase. We don´t issue press releases, as we do not want to influence the media, and we deny offers like “send us 10 cases and we will do a nice text” because buying positive media is evil.

We actively publish every production problem because we feel producers in general should do that. and so on and so on.

Fritz-Kola is different, their claimed goal is to attack coca-cola and make money, which we do not see as our goal, not even secondary. It took more than five years for me to get stock, and i´m fine with it – all the other “externals” had to get their share first.” 

The premium-cola label roughly translates as follows:

premium-cola 0,33 liter very caffeinated soft drink
correct favorite-cola with collective spirit and passion
ingredients: water, sugar, carbonic acid, (e150d), phosphoric
acid, caffeine 25 mg / liter, natural flavor in a nice returnable bottle
history, power, taste, honesty, consequence and life
and my home address, as we have no office.

The fifth line has ingredients also, and every word has at least double meanings.

Uwe continues: 

"In order to pay everyone, we calculate per single bottle, and everyone gets his share after sales, not before. this means there is no pressure, no rush, no debt to pay – and plenty of time to do things thoughtfully and thoroughly."

Read more about Uwe’s interview here: Uwe Lübbermann Talks To PSFK (About Premium Cola)

A project started without any substantial funding took the form of a fully operational company in few years. Isn’t that strange to believe? Consider sheer luck or ingenious business acumen, the founders transformed this opportunity into a cola business without compromising their ethics and ideologies. Is this possible today? Are there any other businesses that you can think of, have the potential to shift their business models which embrace critical social and environmental factors into their key activities and decisions? What could be their benefits and challenges?

  

References:

Premium Cola, The Ethical Company

Premium-cola [Wikipedia]
Afri-Cola [Wikipedia]

- Karishma Shah