The company that filled your can is usually not Coca-Cola
Ask almost anyone who made the can of Coke in their hand and they will say Coca-Cola. In most of the world that is not quite right. The Coca-Cola Company's own annual report for 2025 says that most of its drinks are "prepared, packaged, distributed and sold by independent bottling partners."
The company sells those partners a concentrate. The bottler adds water, sparkling or still, and sweetener. It fills the cans and bottles, loads the trucks and sells to shops. The report also says that a bottler is not a partner in the legal sense : bottlers are "independent contractors and are not our agents."
Some of these bottlers are large listed companies that most people have never heard of. Coca-Cola FEMSA covers much of Mexico, Brazil and Colombia. Coca-Cola Europacific Partners covers Britain, Germany, Spain, mainland France and Australia, among others. Coca-Cola HBC covers Italy, Poland, Switzerland, Nigeria and much of Central and Eastern Europe. These three and two more, Arca Continental and Swire, handled 44 percent of all the drinks sold worldwide under the company's brands in 2025. That figure covers every brand the company owns, Sprite and Fanta as well as Coke, and not Coke alone.
What Coca-Cola actually sells
What the company mainly sells is the concentrate. Each bottler signs an agreement that lets it make and sell the company's drinks, under its brands, in a defined territory and in approved containers. In most markets the price of the concentrate is influenced by what the bottler charges for the finished drink, along with where it sells and in which packages. When the bottler sells more, or at a higher price, Coca-Cola generally earns more too.
The company's report divides its business in two. In 2025, sales of concentrate and syrup accounted for 85 percent of the drinks sold under all its brands, but only 59 percent of its revenue. The other 41 percent of revenue came from the remaining 15 percent of drinks, which it made and sold as finished products itself. Here too the figures cover the company's whole range, not Coke alone. Concentrate is light, cheap to ship and sold in volume. A finished drink is mostly water in a heavy container, and moving it costs money.
Bottling brings in revenue, concentrate brings in profit
The bottlers Coca-Cola still owns are grouped in its accounts as one unit, called Bottling Investments. In 2025 that unit brought in 5,735 million dollars, which was 12.0 percent of the company's revenue. It produced 3.1 percent of the company's operating profit.
The difference shows in the margins, meaning the share of each sales dollar left over as operating profit. In 2025 the bottling unit kept 7.4 cents of every dollar it sold. The Latin American business, where bottlers such as FEMSA make the finished drinks, kept 59.1 cents. The business covering Europe, the Middle East and Africa kept 39.7 cents.
The company gives the reason in a single sentence : making and selling finished drinks generally brings "higher net operating revenues but lower gross profit margins than concentrate operations." These are segment figures for one year, not the profit on a single can. The regional units also include activities other than selling concentrate, and each carries its own costs and currency effects. But the direction of the gap is the one the company itself describes.
Coca-Cola has been selling its own bottlers for years
This is a choice the company keeps making. Ten years ago, bottlers it owned brought in about half its revenue : the company puts the bottling unit's share at 52 percent in 2015, against 12 percent in 2025. The company calls these sales refranchising, meaning it hands a territory back to an independent bottler.
The United States went first. In October 2017 Coca-Cola announced that it had handed all of its American bottling to nearly 70 independent bottlers. It took 60 separate transfers, which moved more than 55,000 employees and more than 50 production plants. Its remaining North American territories, in Canada and the US Virgin Islands, were set to follow in 2018.
The selling has continued since. In 2024 the company sold its bottling in the Philippines and Bangladesh, and territories in India. In May 2025 it sold more Indian territories, and in October 2025 it sold its operations making finished drinks in Nigeria. Its report says the 2024 sales in the Philippines, Bangladesh and India were one reason its gross margin rose from 61.1 percent in 2024 to 61.6 percent in 2025.
It still runs bottling itself in a shorter list of places : parts of Africa, India, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Oman, Singapore and Sri Lanka. So in those countries, the answer to the headline can still be yes.
The biggest sale, in Africa, is not finished yet
The largest bottler Coca-Cola still controls is Coca-Cola Beverages Africa, which operates in 14 countries in eastern and southern Africa, including South Africa. Coca-Cola owns 66.52 percent of it. In October 2025 the company agreed to sell 41.52 percent of the business to Coca-Cola HBC. HBC is also buying a family investor's stake, which would give it 75 percent, in a deal that values the whole bottler at 3.4 billion dollars. HBC also has an option to buy the remaining 25 percent within six years. The deal would make HBC the second-largest Coca-Cola bottler in the world by volume.
In July 2026 South Africa's Competition Commission recommended approval, with conditions including a pause on job cuts and investment in local distribution. The Competition Tribunal approved the deal with conditions in an order dated 8 September, made public on 11 September. Approval is a step toward closing, not the closing itself. When the deal was announced, it also needed approval from regulators beyond South Africa, among them the regional body COMESA and authorities in Kenya and Ethiopia. As of early October 2026 no completion had been announced, and the companies have said they expect to complete the deal by the end of 2026, once the remaining requirements are met.
- The Coca-Cola Company and Gutsche Family Investments agree to sell controlling interest in Coca-Cola Beverages Africa to Coca-Cola HBC AG
- Competition Tribunal of South Africa : Coca-Cola HBC AG and Coca-Cola Beverages Africa case record
- South Africa watchdog backs Coca-Cola HBC bottling buy
- Coca-Cola HBC gets approval for major African bottling merger
- The Coca-Cola Company 2025 Form 10-K (PDF)
Selling the bottlers does not mean letting go of them
Coca-Cola keeps a slice of many bottlers it does not run. At the end of 2025 it owned 18 percent of Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, 28 percent of Coca-Cola FEMSA, 22 percent of Coca-Cola HBC and 24 percent of Coca-Cola Bottlers Japan. Through those stakes it takes a share of the bottlers' profits on top of what it earns from concentrate.
It can also sell those stakes. In March 2025 it sold part of its stake in Coca-Cola Europacific Partners and booked a gain of 331 million dollars. In November 2025 it sold its whole stake in Coke Consolidated, the largest Coca-Cola bottler in the United States, back to that company.
Restaurant Coke in America is the exception
There is one familiar case where the usual assumption comes closer to the truth, though not all the way. In the United States, the Coke poured from a restaurant or cinema fountain is mixed on the spot by the restaurant's machine. The syrup it mixes is made by Coca-Cola itself and sold to restaurants, or to wholesalers who supply them.
The report says that outside the United States, bottlers are usually allowed to make fountain syrup too, from the company's concentrate. The company also sells some finished drinks itself in certain markets, and runs the Costa coffee shops. These are real exceptions, but they do not change who fills most cans and bottles.
Pepsi chose the other model, and is now reviewing it
PepsiCo shows this is a choice, not a law of the drinks business. In North America it owns much of its own bottling and delivery. In September 2025 the investment firm Elliott, which said it held a 4 billion dollar stake, wrote to PepsiCo's board. It described an "underperforming vertically integrated bottling structure" and asked the company to evaluate refranchising it, "as its closest peer has and as PepsiCo itself has done in years past."
PepsiCo did not agree to sell. In December 2025 it set out a plan that Elliott said it supported. In it, PepsiCo said it was "carefully evaluating an integrated model" and would look at return on investment, scale and market share state by state in the United States. It promised a full update on its North American supply chain in late 2026. Which model serves PepsiCo better is still an open question, and the answer may differ from one state to the next.
The name on the can and the company that made it
So the short answer, for a can or bottle in most countries, is no. In one sense Coca-Cola does make your Coke : the concentrate that gives the drink its taste comes from Coca-Cola. But the finished drink was mixed, filled and delivered by a bottling company that buys that concentrate under an agreement letting it sell the drink under Coca-Cola's name. The heavy, costly part of the work belongs to the bottler. The part that earns the most on each dollar, the formula and the brand, stays with the company whose name is on the can.
