Ronni Kobrovsky, CEO of the Central Bottling Company, Coca Cola’s franchisee in Israel, said today that serious harm has been caused to the company since last week’s discoveries of a poisonous substance in family-size Coca Cola bottles. The damage is expressed in a 20-30% plunge in sales from Friday until today, meaning losses of millions of shekels daily.
Kobrovsky said that the company has checked all its production lines and all production activities of its suppliers, including the Emraz company which supplies its bottles, but so far no findings have been discovered which would point to the source of the poisonous substances in its drinks.
Kobrovsky said: "I wish to reiterate what Ministry of Health deputy director general Dr Boaz Lev said, who announced this morning that the ministry examined all the company’s production lines but found nothing. Therefore there is no reason to stop drinking our beverages, unless there is a bad smell emitting from them. I can tell you that the smell of Coca Cola is wonderful."
Kobrovsky added that in view of the financial and image damage caused to the company, experts from the parent company in the US will arrive this week in an attempt to trace problems outside the plant, for example storage or other problems, and to help the management in Israel in actions necessary in view of this incident.
He also said that the Israel plant ranks among Coca Cola’s ten largest outside the US. On one production line, some 240,000 bottles are produced per minute, and thus it cannot be assumed that the problem lies in production lines, taking into account that only 14-15 bottles were found to be contaminated. He stressed that examinations conducted by the company ruled out the possibility of sabotage on the production line itself, and said that "if there is a problem, it lies outside the company plants."
The Consumer Council urged the Ministry of Health today to order Coca Cola to immediately stop its marketing of the drink in plastic bottles, to ban distributors from selling such bottles and to warn the public from drinking from them, until the reason for finding poisonous substances in the drink is discovered.
Published by Israel's Business Arena July 12, 1998.
The Consumer Council called on the Ministry of Health today to order Coca Cola to stop immediately the marketing of its plastic bottles of the drink, to ban agents from selling these bottles and to warn the public from drinking from such bottles, until the results of examinations to discover the reason of finding poisonous substances in the drinks.
Published by Israel's Business Arena July 12, 1998.