Coca-Cola US launches Steward Redqueen impact study

On September 19th the Coca-Cola Company launched the results of a groundbreaking socio-economic impact study in Washington DC. The launch was part the ‘Building the New American Economy’ event organised by POLITICO, which focused on the generational economic transformation the United States is going through and was attended by politicians and business leaders, including President Biden’s chief economist.

While it is intuitively clear that Coca-Cola is deeply embedded across the US, until now there was no clear quantitative picture of this. Coca-Cola asked Steward Redqueen to explore this. Building upon on 15 years of experience with socio-economic impact modelling, we developed the most granular approach and methodology to date that uses multi-regional input-output modelling. Over the past few months, we traced over 25,000 different spending events across all 50 states in the US. Each of these are traced through 546 sectors in 50 states. This has resulted is a very detailed picture of how Coca-Cola and its entire value chain contributes to employment and incomes for households, business owners, governments and communities in the US. The results of the study are displayed on Coca-Cola’s website, providing interactive insights at national and state-level.

Over the course of the study, we mapped the many different types of jobs its supports: from young people entering the workforce in restaurants or shops to well-paid executive jobs. The study will aid decision-making in areas such as making capital investments, upskilling of employees and aligning community support activities.