Dearest Coca-Cola,

We were all tremendously excited by your announcement that Mauritius will be the first country in Africa to launch your lovely new campaign, “Taste the feeling”. Words are not enough to describe how honoured we feel. We are but a tiny island in the middle of the sea and yet, we are given the privilege to be THE FIRST IN AFRICA with something as important. Will you do us the honour of answering a question first, though? Coca-Cola, when will you stop underestimating our intelligence? 

Be honest. Are the fit, tanned and frankly gorgeous people in your campaigns really such big fans of your sugary drink? Because if they were, they would be more likely to be diabetic, obese and suffering from a myriad of different health problems, according to extensive research. Coca-Cola, dearest, does a drink that contains nearly twice as much sugar as what the World Health Organisation’s recommends per day really makes us happy and healthy? Because that is what you keep suggesting in your unfair marketing campaigns. Before, you said “open happiness”. Now, you say “taste the feeling”. 

About your new campaign, your representative said this: “We’re going from open happiness to exploring the role Coca-Cola plays in happiness.” Unless someone changed the definition of happiness to mean “obese, diabetic and ill”, we will have to take objection to your claim. 

You don’t learn from your mistakes, do you? Do you even remember that time when, through a campaign, you “created an impression which was likely to mislead that Coca-Cola cannot contribute to weight gain, obesity and tooth decay”, according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission? You were ordered to publish corrected ads after that, having also lied about the amount of caffeine your sugary drinks contain. 

No authority in Mauritius is likely to challenge you the way Australia did. After all, the Ministry of Sports recently teamed up with you for a joint campaign in which you were allowed to suggest that an active life and “a variety of different drinks” (and by that you meant coke) can protect us against non-communicable diseases like diabetes. But it wasn’t enough to tell people, many of whom are pre-diabetic, to go ahead and drink coke, was it? Now, you are back again, talking to us about how “happy” we will become if we gulp down soft drinks, a product which, according to research from Cambridge University, increases a person’s risk of developing diabetes by as much as one fifth.

Dearest Coca-Cola, we feel for you. The fact that soft drink sales are going down globally – a consequence of people making healthier choices – must hurt like torture. And you have every right in the world to promote your products; we would never tell consumers not to buy them. This is a free society and that includes the freedom to make poor nutritional choices. However, consumers have the right to know the truth about the products that they buy. Stop using words like “healthy” and “happiness” in your campaigns. Unlike our ministry of Sports, we don’t want to taste the hypocrisy.