With Trump watching, Coca-Cola makes clear its new CEO is American

By Matthew Boyle

 

Coca-Cola Co.’s advertising has long made clear that its flagship product is “the Real Thing.” Now, the beverage giant wants you to know that its new chief is a real American. 

 

In Wednesday’s press release announcing that Henrique Braun would succeed James Quincey as the company’s top executive, Coca-Cola said Braun “is an American citizen who was born in California and raised in Brazil.” 

 

The mention of Braun’s citizenship was unusual for a US-based company, and raised the question of whether it was done for geopolitical reasons — especially after President Donald Trump inserted himself in the affairs of both Coca-Cola and Brazil this year. 

 

“Given this administration and the controversy over immigration, they are covering all their bases,” said Charles Elson, a corporate governance expert. “In this environment where there’s a strong ‘Made in America’ movement, you make it clear that your CEO was made in America.”

 

Coca-Cola declined to comment about why it mentioned Braun’s citizenship.

 

Trump, whose love of Diet Coke is so strong that his desk reportedly has a button used to order them up, also has a keen interest in the beverage company’s strategy. In July, he suggested that Coca-Cola had “agreed” to replace high-fructose corn syrup with cane sugar in its flagship cola in the US, generating a flurry of speculation and sparking a decline in the shares of corn refiner Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. 

 

Days later, Coke said it would debut a new sugar-sweetened variant, making the announcement on Fox — a news channel favored by the administration.

 

Brazil also commands Trump’s attention. Over the summer, Trump threatened to slap 50% tariffs on Brazilian goods to pressure President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to end what Trump called a “witch hunt” against his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump ally who was later convicted for plotting a coup. Trump later relented, exempting dozens of Brazilian food products from the increased levies and delivering a victory for Lula. 

 

Trump has also taken steps to overhaul US immigration policy, revoking thousands of visas and seeking to “permanently” pause migration from certain countries.

 

Those events, coupled with the Trump administration’s “America First” mantra, might have prompted Coca-Cola to decide it was safer to make Braun’s nationality as clear as a glass Coke bottle. Based in Atlanta but with sprawling global operations, Coca-Cola serves up around 2 billion drinks a day in more than 200 countries and territories. Last year, North America accounted for less than a fifth of the volume of drinks the company delivered. 

 

The company’s CEOs over the years have hailed from Ireland and Australia, with Quincey from the UK. Former CEO Muhtar Kent was born in New York but raised in Turkey, while Roberto Goizueta was born in Cuba but became an American citizen. 

 

Australian Doug Daft, who became CEO in 2000, symbolized the company’s desire to look beyond its American heritage, according to Jonathan Feeney, a longtime consumer-goods analyst who’s now a corporate adviser. Coke’s run of foreign-born CEOs actually makes Braun’s US origins “particularly worthy of note,” Feeney said. “It’s an interesting detail that wouldn’t be clear unless they said it.” 

 

When Quincey was named CEO in 2016, replacing Kent, his English heritage was not mentioned. 

 

Whatever Coca-Cola’s motivations were, “this is stuff you have to do,” said Paul Argenti, an expert in corporate communications at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. “We live in crazy times.”