"Honor and respect" and hard seltzer

In 2017, Coca-Cola bought Topo Chico, a beloved Mexican mineral water brand that has been around in one form or another since 1895. The price: $220 million.

The drink itself is refreshingly effervescent and has garnered something of a cult following in the past decade-ish with pseudo in-the-know American drinkers who first ran across it in an impossibly well-curated coffee shop/boutique in Austin, Texas. (Talking specifically and embarrassingly about myself here!)

The drink, as Vice explained in a 2018 piece about blowback from the sale:

But Topo Chico, which comes in a clear glass bottle with a fairly iconic yellow label, has a heritage that far predates its popularity amongst the millennial seltzer set, dating back to turn-of-the-last-century holistic medicine in Mexico. Per the New York Times, in the late 1800s:

(I can only imagine what residents of 19th-century Monterrey thought about the influx of American medical tourists using their pristine volcanic aquifer as TB bidet. Guessing they might not have been thrilled about the arrangement!)

My point is that Topo Chico is not a LaCroix come-lately or a #wellness CBD broth created in some lab in the cursed bowels of a major consumer-packaged goods (CPG) firm. It had a real connection to a real place.

It’s not like Topo Chico was still a little mom-and-pop brand by the time it got sold to Coke—its previous owner, Mexican beverage conglomerate Arca Continental, is Coke’s third-largest licensed bottler worldwide, for chrissakes. Still there’s something just a wee bit gross and colonial about this restorative, sparkling treasure of the mountains of northern Mexico being handed over to a world-eating American megacorp with a history of exploiting the health and resources of our neighbors south of the border. (And maybe worse.)

Perhaps sensing the bad… uh… “optics,” at the time of the sale executives from both companies assured diehard fans of the beverage that nothing would change. From the Dallas Morning News’ item on the 2017 acquisition noted (emphasis mine):

I always wonder if the executives who say things like that believe the words coming out of their mouths and then get overruled later on, or if they know the entire time that it’s a just a gambit to protect the reputation of the brand they just bought/sold until all of us insatiable consumers with broken Twitter brains get distracted by the limitless parade of horrors for long enough that they can do some W I L D shit to something that we all used casually appreciate and identify with, which we’ll all probably still buy because we are insatiable consumers and that’s what we do.

Anyway.

I am not surprised by this because it’s 2020 and nothing gold can stay, and least of all a delightfully bubbly mineral water with a rich history purchased for hundreds of millions of dollars by a publicly traded beverage conglomerate whose “Venturing & Emerging Brand” team’s website boasts stuff like this:

Subscribe to Fingers to read the rest.