This report applies Zero Baseline Method (ZBM), evaluating whether minimum conditions of protection and political equity are met before assessing outcomes. Where these conditions are absent, value claims may reflect what we define as illegal baselining—systems that assign value without ensuring meaningful self-determination, particularly for children entering unequal conditions.
Corporate sustainability communications increasingly rely on expansive, values-oriented language to signal positive social and environmental impact. A representative example appears in The Coca-Cola Company’s public-facing vision statement, which asserts that its business is conducted “in ways that create a more sustainable business and better shared future that makes a difference in people’s lives, communities and our planet.” This formulation is analytically significant because it operates at the level of total system impact—encompassing human wellbeing, community outcomes, and planetary health—while functioning as a reliance-inviting claim directed at consumers, regulators, and investors.
At the core of the claim is an implicit baseline problem. The statement invokes improvement—“more sustainable” and “better”—without identifying the condition against which that improvement is measured. The operative baseline appears to be the company’s own existing operations and internal trajectory of incremental change. No external comparator is defined, nor is there reference to a rights-based or scientifically grounded threshold for sustainability. This absence is determinative. Without a disclosed baseline, the claim defaults to a status quo comparison, where any marginal operational adjustment can be framed as progress, regardless of whether underlying harms remain intact or materially unaddressed. The comparator structure is therefore both undefined and internally controlled, limiting interpretability and preventing independent evaluation.
This baseline opacity is compounded by a clear outputs-versus-outcomes distortion. The claim communicates outcome-level effects—“making a difference in people’s lives, communities and our planet”—which implies measurable changes in real-world conditions. However, the company’s own published sustainability materials translate its activities into a narrower set of operational outputs: water replenishment targets, packaging collection and recycled content goals, and emissions reductions benchmarked to a 2019 baseline, with stated exclusions for certain acquired entities and third-party operations (The Coca-Cola Company sustainability disclosures). These are internal performance metrics, not demonstrated outcomes in public health, ecological integrity, or community wellbeing. The gap is structural. Activities and targets are presented as proxies for broad societal impact without establishing that those activities produce net positive effects at the system level.
The issue is further intensified by boundary compression. The public-facing claim spans “people, communities and the planet,” yet the underlying reporting framework adopts narrower system boundaries. Upstream and downstream impacts—such as supply chain externalities, product consumption effects, and waste lifecycle burdens—are only partially incorporated, if at all. Public disclosures acknowledge exclusions in emissions accounting and operational scope, particularly with respect to third-party manufacturing and acquired brands. These boundary choices materially shape the interpretation of sustainability performance, yet they are not surfaced in the high-level claim. As a result, the claim presents an aggregated and totalizing benefit narrative while relying on selectively bounded internal metrics.
The evidentiary record reinforces these interpretive limitations. The vision statement itself provides no methodological detail, metric definition, or causal explanation linking business operations to claimed outcomes (The Coca-Cola Company purpose and vision materials). Supporting sustainability documents offer more specificity, but only within constrained operational domains. For example, corporate reporting indicates that 30.0% of the company’s 2024 global volume consisted of low- or no-calorie beverages, and that 69% of products contained fewer than 100 calories per 12-ounce serving (The Coca-Cola Company 2024 portfolio update). These figures describe product composition, not health outcomes. They do not establish reductions in diet-related disease, improvements in population health, or alignment with recognized public health baselines. Nor do they address distributional impacts across populations or age groups.
External public sources further contextualize the omission. The World Health Organization has identified sugar-sweetened beverage consumption as a significant contributor to excess caloric intake and poor diet quality, particularly relevant to non-communicable disease risk. Similarly, UNICEF has characterized such products as inconsistent with child health objectives. In the environmental domain, independent brand audits continue to identify Coca-Cola as a leading global contributor to plastic pollution by count. These findings do not, by themselves, negate corporate sustainability efforts. However, they underscore that material system-level harms remain active and must be accounted for in any claim asserting net positive impact across human and ecological domains. The absence of this context in the claim constitutes a structural omission.
The claim also compresses temporal considerations. It is framed as an ongoing vision without specifying a time horizon, trajectory, or endpoint condition. There is no indication of how long-term environmental burdens—such as persistent plastic waste—or cumulative public health effects are incorporated into the assessment of “making a difference.” Nor is there any discussion of intergenerational implications, despite the clear relevance of both environmental degradation and health risk factors to future populations. This temporal indeterminacy allows present-tense claims of benefit to coexist with deferred or unaccounted harms.
From a structural perspective, the claim exhibits characteristics commonly associated with impact-washing. It aggregates a series of partial, internally defined initiatives into a unified narrative of system-wide benefit, while omitting baseline definitions, comparator clarity, and boundary conditions necessary for interpretation. It relies on the assumption that incremental improvements within an existing system suffice to establish meaningful progress, without demonstrating movement toward a condition in which health, environmental integrity, and equitable outcomes are secured at a baseline level.
The central issue is not whether The Coca-Cola Company undertakes sustainability initiatives or achieves operational efficiencies. The issue is whether the claim, as communicated, provides sufficient information for an independent reviewer to understand what is being measured, against what baseline, and with what implications for real-world conditions. It does not. The absence of a defined baseline, the lack of a specified comparator, the substitution of outputs for outcomes, and the omission of material scope and harm considerations collectively render the claim non-interpretable under a disclosure-based standard.
Interpretability is a prerequisite for verification. Where a claim asserts broad positive impact but does not disclose the structural elements that give that assertion meaning, it fails at the threshold level. On that basis, the determination of NON-COMPLIANT is compelled.
