CompanyGraph
Coca-Cola Europacific Partners PLC
CCEP · United Kingdom
Bottles and delivers Coca-Cola products across 31 countries in Europe, Australia, and parts of Asia.
Coca-Cola Europacific Partners buys concentrate from The Coca-Cola Company and turns it into 3.9 billion unit cases a year across 31 markets in Europe, Australia, and Southeast Asia, operating as the only entity legally permitted to fill Coca-Cola products inside those territories. Because carbonated drinks lose quality at room temperature and the licence requires product delivered to Coca-Cola's exact specifications, the company has to build and run refrigerated fleets, filling lines, and cold-chain logistics reaching 4 million individual customer locations — not as a strategic choice, but as the direct physical cost of holding the licence. A 2021 acquisition brought European and Asia-Pacific rights under a single operational structure that no other Coca-Cola bottler holds, which lets the company coordinate packaging procurement and product launches across both hemispheres without negotiating a handoff at the jurisdictional border. That cross-hemisphere advantage exists only because both licences sit inside one entity — if The Coca-Cola Company were to reassign the Asia-Pacific or European territories to a separate bottler, each half would immediately become an ordinary single-region operation, no different in kind from any other licensed bottler in the system.
How does this company make money?
The company earns money each time it sells a case of drinks — to supermarkets, fast-food restaurants, or vending machine operators. The price per case is agreed in annual negotiations based on how much each buyer commits to purchasing and what promotional support the bottler provides. On top of that, the company charges fees for placing its branded coolers in shops and for securing premium display space at retail locations.
What makes this company hard to replace?
The territorial exclusivity written into the bottler's licence means no rival bottler is legally allowed to step in and serve the same markets. Retailers like Tesco and Carrefour sign multi-year shelf-space agreements tied to this bottler's distribution network, making a quick swap impractical. Fast-food chains like McDonald's use fountain dispensing machines that are calibrated specifically for this bottler's syrup, so switching would mean replacing the equipment, not just the supplier.
What limits this company?
Every market needs its own set of filling equipment, refrigerated trucks, and cold storage — sized to match how densely packed that country's shops and roads are. Adding a new territory is not just a matter of spending more money. It requires building that entire local system from scratch and passing each country's regulations, which means growth is slow by nature.
What does this company depend on?
The company cannot operate without five things: The Coca-Cola Company's concentrate formulas and trademark licences across all 31 territories; aluminum cans supplied by European and Asian smelters; food-grade PET plastic resin for plastic bottles; CO2 for the carbonation systems that make drinks fizzy; and refrigerated trucks and cold storage warehouses in every market it serves.
Who depends on this company?
McDonald's and other global fast-food chains rely on this bottler to keep fountain drink quality consistent across their European and Asia-Pacific locations — if supply stopped, every tap at every counter would run dry. Tesco, Carrefour, and other major retailers would be left with gaps on their fizzy drinks shelves, which are among their most profitable impulse-buy categories. Convenience stores would lose the beverage brands that bring customers through the door in the first place.
How does this company scale?
Coca-Cola's global advertising and brand recognition travel into any new territory for free — the bottler does not need to build consumer awareness from zero. What does not scale cheaply is everything physical: each new country needs its own cold-chain infrastructure, its own filling lines, and its own regulatory clearances, all of which take time and local expertise that cannot simply be bought off the shelf.
What external forces can significantly affect this company?
Several EU countries have introduced sugar taxes, which force the company to either reformulate drinks or absorb lower margins on full-sugar products. Currency swings across Asian markets affect the cost of ingredients sourced across borders and the value of goods moved between Pacific and European operations. Climate and packaging regulations differ across all 31 markets, meaning a shift to new materials — like switching can types or reducing plastic — has to be managed separately in each country.
Where is this company structurally vulnerable?
If The Coca-Cola Company decided to hand the European or Asia-Pacific territories to a different, separately licensed bottler, the whole cross-hemisphere structure falls apart. Each half would then be an ordinary single-region bottler, the same as any other Coca-Cola bottler in the world, and the shared coordination across 31 markets would disappear overnight.