dolution

Coca-Cola has not always been a squeaky-clean company that never had problems. The stock price of the company is the same price as it was 10 years ago, and this is due to the ethical and legal issues that were associated with the company. A small problem occurred in Belgium in 1999 when a few children fell ill after drinking a product with the Coca-Cola brand on it. They had a recall on the product there in Belgium, but soon after, every item Coca-Cola made was pulled off the shelves in every store. This caused a loss of reputation, which, in turn, made people lose respect for the company and investors started selling their stocks in Coca-Cola. Neighboring countries, such as Luxembourg and the Netherlands, soon followed suit and recalled all products throughout both countries. After Coca-Cola found the root of the problem, that being a bad batch of carbon dioxide, they made an announcement regarding the situation. Being a few days after all this happened was a little too slow for the media, and they ate up the story making Coca-Cola look worse than what was said about them. However, this was not the only occurrence. France supposedly had about one hundred people become sick due to mold in the products they consumed. Every single product was banned throughout France until the problem was resolved, but Coca-Cola had yet another slow response to the problem and their reputation was further diminished. During this crisis, Coca-Cola started to run into different problems with their marketing in European countries with anti-trust laws. They wanted to create a merger with themselves and Orangina, a French company, but their overaggressive style turned off the other companies in the deal, which became a problem. Their strong-arm tactics proved to be too much for the foreign countries, and creating a competitive advantage seemed to cross the line of the anti-trust laws in which they were sued for the by the country of Italy. Italy won the court-case, which caused investigations of the company’s competitive practices, which is never a good thing for business,

1. What was the issue coca-cola faced in Belgium in 1999?What actions did the company have to take right after the issue?