5. The Coca-Cola President

Not many Presidents can say they got their start driving soda trucks around their country. Mexico's former President Vicente Fox can, though. We find out what role Coca-Cola played in his rise to power, and investigate Coke's unprecedented domination in Mexico. PLUS: Customer Service takes on Ikea.

Produced by Anna Mazarakis, Clare Rawlinson, and Dan Bobkoff.

Read more:

• Ikea's furniture names are famous for being hard to pronounce, but they aren't completely random. Here's where they come from.
• The surprising story of how the former president of Mexico helped make Coca-Cola such a huge part of Mexican life that it's used in religious ceremonies and as medicine
• There's a church in Mexico where Coca-Cola is used in religious ceremonies
• The surprising story of ex-Mexican president Vicente Fox, who started as a Coca-Cola delivery worker and worked his way up to run Coca-Cola Mexico

Transcript

Note: This transcript may contain errors.

VICENTE FOX: We used to drink 8, 10, 12 Cokes a day.

DAN BOBKOFF: You personally?

VF: Yes.

DB: Wow.

VF: I did at my time.

DB: This is Vicente Fox

VF: When I was young.

DB: Yes, back in the sixties right?

VF: Back in the sixties, I joined Coca Cola Company in '64.

DB: When Vicente joined Coke in Mexico, the country was in the midst of a cola war.

VF: Coke was in the market first, in the Mexican market, way before Pepsi. It was alone in the market by itself, Coca Cola for years, for decades.

DB: Vicente was on the front lines. He spent his days riding around in a Coca-Cola delivery truck, racing to beat the Pepsi guys.

VF: So we would punch tires to Pepsi trucks or we would take away, it was only returnable bottles then, take away the empty Pepsi bottles, take them out of the cooler, the refrigerator. Very competitive and the whole idea was to get there first.

DB: They'd get the Pepsi drivers drunk on tequila at a trucker bar if they had to. Then Vicente and his crew would speed to small villages and fill up the coolers at mom and pop shops.

And, along the way, Coca-Cola became a part of life in Mexico unlike in any other country.

It started to be used in religious ceremonies. Moms told their children to drink Coke when they were sick. Signs welcoming you to villages started to feature the familiar red logo.

Mexicans started drinking more of it than anyone else in the world. By far.

And Vicente was so good at his delivery routes that just a few years later — in the 1970s — he became president of Coca-Cola Mexico.

And then later…. president of the whole country.

From Business Insider and Stitcher, this is Household Name: the brands you know, the stories you don't. I'm Dan Bobkoff.

Today: Coca-Cola, and Mexico.

PBS NEWS: Mexicans are far and away the biggest consumers of the company's products, especially the flagship Coca Cola.

DB: The average Mexican drinks more than 700 cups a year.

That's nearly double what Americans drink.

So, what makes Coke so radically popular in Mexico, compared even with the US or anywhere else? And what did one of Mexico's Presidents have to do with it?

Well what we found is a story that crosses several decades, presidencies, religions, and also includes some really big shrimp.

Stay with us.

ACT I

DB: We're going to start at the southernmost part of Mexico: the state of Chiapas.

There's a church in the region called the Coca-Cola Church.

Well, really it's called St. John the Baptist Church. But many just call it the Coca-Cola Church.

It smells like incense. It's candlelit. A few decades back, the religious leaders replaced a traditional alcohol with Coke.

They use it for a mixture of things - decoration, healing, drinking in ceremonies almost like communion wine.

The service mixes Catholicism with a local religion. It's said the parishioners believe burping purges evil from their souls. And, well, Coke makes you burp.

I laughed when I first read about this. It's like the ultimate product placement, you made it to religion. But really, it's a pretty big sign of the way Coca Cola has changed the landscape in this region...with some disastrous consequences…

YATZIRI ZEPEDA: I crossed the market.

DB: This is Yatziri Zepeda. She's an activist and nutritionist working in San Cristobal, in the Chiapas region, not far from the Coca-Cola Church.

YZ: It is a very very ancient market nearby Santo Domingo and it's most of the sellers are indigenous people that bring their produce, for example mangoes, and many different beans, and many different types of maize.

DB: And, amongst all this:

YZ: Coca-Cola.

DB: Coca-Cola is everywhere.

Yatziri comes to Chiapas often — on a mission to reverse the effects Coke is having on the population - from the churches, to the schools, to this local market.

She's working on a public health initiative called a "food basket" - kind of like the food pyramid or plate in the US, but for communities in Chiapas.

YZ: Chiapas is one of the poorest states of Mexico. It's in the southern east part of the country and it's mostly indigenous. The municipality of San Cristobal and all the surrounding areas are mostly indigenous, I would say 80 percent indigenous, Mayas. With the diet of these people were based mostly on maize, beans, pumpkins, and all products related to pumpkins, like flowers and the seeds, and some grasshoppers, chilis, tomatoes, things like that. We would be so much better if we had sticked to our traditional diet.

DB: She has a lot of work ahead of her.

Yatziri grew up in Mexico City surrounded by Coca-Cola. Her friends and relatives all drank it. But she didn't.

YZ: There's not a party, there's not a ... Even like a Sunday meal where they don't drink Coca-Cola. They were making fun of me before.

DB: Yatziri was kind of the odd one out in her family....

YZ: Well they think I'm crazy because I don't ... Well, I'm probably very well educated for my family. I'm the only one of my cousins with a university degree, and so maybe they don't understand why I studied so much, and I studied in the UK, and I'm not making a lot of money.

DB: She studied, travelled and worked around the world for several years before returning home to Mexico, and when she got back she saw how much soda was changing her country, and its people. Diabetes was soaring out of control.

YZ: And after that I decided that I wanted to work mostly on food issues because I realized that they were causing huge amounts of pain.

DB: We're going to come back to Yatziri and that pain later.

But first…

We're going back to where this all began: back with Vicente Fox in the 1960s in a very different Chiapas...

I met up with Vicente Fox in New York to ask him about his days working for Coca-Cola. And that caused a moment of confusion. Now, it's fair to say I asked Vicente Fox a lot about this phase of his life, and he was warned I would… but still...

DB: Do you think looking back from 2018-

VF: Do you work for Coca Cola?

DB: No.

VF: And this interview's for whom?

DB: It's for Business Insider.

VF: Ah, really.

DB: OK, well, glad that's cleared up. It had been a long day for Vicente Fox. He was tired. He was here promoting his web videos antagonizing Donald Trump.

CLIP: You're fired.

DB: It's what he's trading on in his public life these days. You might have seen some of his viral tweets too.

So, maybe Coca-Cola wasn't on his mind. Though before the interview, we did bring him a Mexican Coke to try to revive him.

DB: How is it?...

DB: What is the difference in your mind between Mexican Coke and American Coke?

VF: Sugar. Mexico has a little bit more sugar and concentrate, more concentrate, more flavor.

DB: Even today, he's a Coke evangelist. But a lot has changed since his early days with Coca-Cola in Mexico.

DB: Do you still drink a lot of Coke in your life now?

VF: No, much less and only Diet Coke or Zero Coke.

DB: Remember, back in the 60s and 70s, he'd drink as many as a dozen Cokes a day when he was out making deliveries — back when Coke was fighting off Pepsi.

VF: When I joined in Coca-Cola, market share was on the side of Pepsi, almost two to one.

DB: Now, you might not remember...or have been alive, but back then... in the US, Pepsi was running ads suggesting it was cool and young, but in Mexico, it was the bargain brand.

Pepsi had just released a bottle twice the size of Coke's… for the same price.

Vicente's mission: beat Pepsi.

With a new 2L bottle to rival Pepsi's, Coca-Cola sent Vicente Fox off in a red and white truck. On his first day, they toasted him with tequila. He and the other guys on the front line, were doing everything they could to get Coke into towns and villages.

VF: We would not stop, we would just have a Coke with an egg inside and that would be breakfast.

DB: It was a raw egg, by the way. But to him, this was heaven. He had given up a desk job to hit the road.

Vicente was a determined salesman. He says his crew drove the Coke truck faster and farther across the Mexican desert than anyone else.

He believed the American Dream was for Mexicans too, and he wanted some of it.

VF: It was extremely competitive. Extremely aggressive the way you competed for market share and for profits.

DB: He started giving all sorts of incentives to local businesses.

VF: Giving them either a cash amount or giving at no cost the packaging, the returnable bottles. Giving them the cooler and so you would go not only to mom and pop stores that would be exclusive to Coke, but large retailers where they would only sell one product or the other, stadiums, public places, the same thing...

DB: Then, luckily for him…. around this time an iconic Coca-Cola ad campaign swept across TV screens...

[1971 AD]

DB: At the national level, Coca-Cola sponsors the Mexico City Olympics:

[OLYMPICS CLIP]

DB: And then the World Cup:

[WORLD CUP CLIP]

DB: Its marketing is everywhere. Coca-Cola is in the air.

And after lot of long days, and a few slashed Pepsi tires later… it was paying off.

VF: After 10 years, it moved the market share to the opposite.

DB: Coca-Cola was back on top. Vicente Fox got promoted. And now that he's moving up the ranks, he starts to get a front row seat to Mexican politics. And it gets him fired up.

VF: We had one of this populist, demagogue, leftist Presidents that hated business and corporations.

DB: This is 1970, and he's talking about President Echeverría, of the PRI - the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which reigned uninterrupted for 71 years in Mexico.

VF: All of a sudden he called us into the presidential house, Los Pinos.

DB: That president wanted something from Coke. He wanted the recipe.

VF: He needed us to disclose the formula in detail. So Coke at that time was very secret, it was a secret what the concentrate, raw materials were. He tried to force us in that direction.

DB: Just as dire for the company, he also wanted to nationalize Coca-Cola and its bottlers. Vicente and the other Coke officials had to think fast.

So they came up with the perfect distraction...

That's next.

ACT II

DB: We're back, and Vicente Fox is a Coca-Cola executive in 1970, and he's about to go face to face with a...

VF: opulist, demagogue, leftist President.

DB: Who wants the recipe for Mexican Coke. Yes, as silly as that sounds, the president of Mexico is demanding Coca-Cola's secret formula.

And here, we're going on a little tangent involving shrimp - but stick with me 'cause it's a moment that sets Vicente's career in a new direction...and it shows just how close Coke had gotten to politics in Mexico.

As Vicente tells it in his book, Revolution of Hope, Coca-Cola had just built a shrimp farm. That was a new thing then.

It was an experiment for Coke because it thought there was potential to sell the farm-raised shrimp to McDonalds - its biggest restaurant customer.

It was going well. The shrimp were huge. And so, when they got this demand from President Echeverría for Coke's recipe... they thought it might distract him.

When their meeting arrives, Vicente and his team brought some of the shrimp for the leader. After waiting for a few hours, the president comes out wondering what the smell is. He sees the shrimp, is shocked to learn they're not from the sea, and orders his chef to cook them up on the spot.

And for most of the lunch, they talk about shrimp, and not much about Coke.

VF: That's the way we could release the pressure and get out of that moment.

DB: It was a political victory… for Vicente and for Coca-Cola. And not long after, he becomes president of Coke Mexico. But after a few years, he isn't satisfied, and he decides he has two choices:

VF: It's either being a priest, and I didn't want to be a priest then, or going to public life and work for people. So I decided to go to public life.

DB: He never forgets that moment with the Mexican president trying to nationalize Coke. And Vicente is thinking about how Echeverria tried to nationalize just about everything… he even tried to take Vicente Fox's family's land.
Fast forward to 2000.

NEWS: According to a tally from the final election, candidate Vincente Fox obtained the greatest number of votes in the presidential election of the United Mexican States.

DB: For the first time since the Mexican Revolution…. For the first time in seven decades, Mexico has a president not from the PRI.

DB: Did you use Coca-Cola in any of your campaigns in any way?

VF: On politics?

DB: Mhmm.

VF: No, but I can tell you that my first donations that I got to start moving in politics came from people of Coca-Cola, from bottlers of Coca-Cola or the company itself. So I got a lot of support, not only knowledge, not only great experiences but also they contributed to my campaign at the very beginning.

DB: Vicente was popular - he loved being in the public eye. And Vicente's very capitalist, kind of American and populist approach to politics made him a really attractive candidate… and voters saw huge promise in him.

YZ: I was so excited to have him as the opposition, as a real alternative to the 70 years of the official party. So I was so excited, and we had so much hope with him.

DB: Yatziri was studying abroad when he won the presidency in 2000.

YZ: When he was elected, I was living in Buenos Aires. I was in an exchange program, I was still in university, and I cried. I cried with all my Mexican friends. We were so moved and so full of hope, so we were celebrating, and I remember crying.

DB: What were some of your expectations for his presidency back then?

YZ: My expectations were like less corruption, above all. A fresher government to really cut this enormous power of some elites in Mexico. And it didn't happen. It didn't happen.

DB: Vicente had an ambitious agenda to eliminate corruption and make Mexico safer and richer. But by and large, he left Mexicans disappointed by how little he actually achieved.

Coca-Cola meanwhile, continued to boom...even surprising Coke.

In one of its annual reports, the company's Latin American president said no one thought they could top their consumption rates in 1999, just before Vicente took office.

Back then, the average Mexican was drinking 426 cups a year. Now, it's more like 720 a year. I asked Vicente what he makes of this growth.

VF: Well because Mexico was growing at 3.5% population every year. Mexico for example, tripled this population during the 20th century. We went from 15 million at the beginning of the century to 45 million about the fifties and to 90 million at the end of the century. We tripled. That will never happen again...

DB: This doesn't really explain it. Because we're talking about what each individual Mexican drinks, not the total population. The amount of Coke Mexicans drank in this period went up a lot faster than the number of people.

So what else could it be?

There's another factor at play we haven't spoken about yet: NAFTA.

And before you let NAFTA scare you off—the explanation's actually really simple.

Mexico joined the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994. And suddenly, it was way cheaper to buy Coca-Cola in Mexico.

And there was a lot more of it to buy.

U.S. investment in Mexican food and beverage companies went up by almost 8 billion dollars after NAFTA, and that money, plus lower import costs meant that Coke could sell for way less in stores.

And all this new investment led new stores to open.

MEET THE PRESS: Welcome again to Meet the Press. Our issue this Sunday morning? NAFTA.

NAFTA means we're going to join a new world economy. Open your markets. Let our products in, just like we're saying to Mexico and Latin America. Open your markets and let our products in.

DB: Coke was moving in on Mexico, and in some places, it became cheaper and easier to find than clean drinking water. Vulnerable and malnourished communities needed the calories, so they started drinking Coca-Cola.

Parents are then pleased their children look plump, and well-fed.

But the reality is many children are not healthy: between 2000-2007, diabetes rates double in Mexico.

The correlation with Vicente's presidency is just that - correlation. But there are very few signs he did anything to curb the effects of Coca-Cola.

A sticking point for Yatziri goes back to Chiapas - the place Vicente once drove trucks through poor villages...and where Yatziri now sees the effects today.

YZ: It is the mountain of Huitepec, the aquifer of Huitepec that is the source of water for many communities in the highlands of Chiapas. So we estimate, because they are not official numbers and the aquifer is not monitored, we estimate that Coca-Cola is extracting approximately 750,000 liters every day. That has caused water scarcity. The ex president gave this subsidy to the Coca-Cola company so they don't pay anything for the water they are getting.

DB: We tried to check this with Coca-Cola and other sources. Coke said they pay the "required fee" for water they extract but they did not tell us what that is.

Today in Mexico, all the soda is truly taking its toll.

NEWS: All of that has led to rocketing diabetes in the nation's young.

Nearly 16% of the population.

Complicating matters, half of those affected aren't aware they have diabetes.

Many of them in working class families.

And they do little to control its advance.

DB: Diabetes is now the leading cause of death in Mexico - it kills seven times more people than car accidents, and eight times more than homicides.

The Coca Cola Company told us they know diabetes is a huge problem—and they know sugary drinks are not helping. They agree that their customers should be careful about how much sugar they consume.

But, at the end of the day, Coca-Cola's job… is to sell Coca-Cola. And in Mexico, families like Yatziri's keep buying it...

YZ: All my uncles were diabetic and my cousins are diabetic, and it's just a disease that causes great pain. For the first time we were having type two diabetes amongst children, so this never happened before in the history of humanity, and definitely, now I know it is the consumption of soda.

Yesterday I went to a public hospital with my auntie, and it's just heartbreaking the amount of people in line to get this dialysis. People with ... it's just ... our health system is collapsed; it's absolutely collapsed. So, we know it's damaging for us, and we know we are suffering.

DB: But for all the arguments against it, Yatziri doesn't put the blame on Coca-Cola...

YZ: Their mission is to have profit.

DB: Right.

YZ: But, it is the civil society and the Mexican government that we should act. You would see in this administration, President Peña Nieto making agreements and partnering with Nestle, to fight hunger in Mexico, for example. And you can see the government of Mexico City thanking publicly to Coca-Cola for the drinking fountains they have set up in school.

DB: We asked Coca-Cola about this, and it's true… they did pay to have water fountains installed at over a thousand Mexican schools.

Coke told us the fountains aren't branded, butthe Wall Street Journal published a photo showing a banner hanging over a fountain at a school ….with the big, red letters… Coca-Cola.

YZ: Which, by the way, some of them don't work, or most of them don't work because I visited them. So, I think they don't get it. I feel ashamed.

DB: We went to Coca-Cola with a list of questions about their operations in Mexico. They told us they're "taking specific, meaningful actions to help people drink less sugar from our beverages. This starts with our support of the World Health Organization's guideline that people limit their daily calorie intake from added sugar to no more than 10 percent of their total calorie intake."

But when you go to buy a bottle of Coke, how would you know they support the World Health Organization's guideline? Especially since for many people, it only takes a single Coke to hit that limit.

When we asked what Coca-Cola does to reduce the incidents of diabetes caused by sugary soda, they said they were working to create more recipes with low sugar content.

And they have a business incentive to do that too: because in 2013, Mexico introduced tax on sugary sodas, to try limit how much people drink.

It's not a big one, but enough to attract international attention. Britain and India followed.

Since then, soda consumption has slowed marginally...but it's too early to know if it's having a big effect, health-wise.

We asked Vicente if he'd done any soul searching about his past with Coca-Cola, Chiapas, and how Coke now affects the population.

DB: How do you feel about that? People even having it in place of food?

VF: Well, today it sounds strange. Today even would sound aggressive, trying to sell so much sugar drinks to people but at that time it was not considered a bad to your health product. So people used to consume sugar without putting any attention to the amount that you would consume everyday. It was not related fat with sugar at that time, heavy weight on persons. On the contrary, it was supposed to be a drink that you would have it with your meals and you would get double the energy and double the nutrition, which it was false. The only regulation that Coke had at that time was not to advertise or make any commercials with people younger than 12 years old. Again, rules of the game at that time were totally different to the rules of the game today.

DB: Do you have any regrets about how much it's become part of it?

VF: Again, you can not use the same standards and the same philosophies and the same beliefs that we have today on what it was the world before. At that time you felt extremely well to sell more and more Coke. You felt extremely well creating more and more jobs. You felt extremely well returning to the investors their money...

DB: To be frank, it sounds like something a tobacco company might say. We didn't know any better! A different time!

All this has made Yatziri's job — getting people to eat and drink and live healthier — incredibly hard…

YZ: I think it's very difficult. I think it has to be in a non-direct way, LIKE not a personal way. I think that is an enormous challenge. Detaching from our culture, Coca-Cola is very difficult. My hope is that we drink more lemonade with Chia. We drink more mango juice without sugar, hibiscus water, Agua de Jamaica we call it.

DB: In New York, these are hipster drinks.

YZ: Yes, well, these are our traditional drinks. Unfortunately, it's become delicacies, become something for the elite. These flavors and these recipes, these techniques to process and preserve foods, this is traditional knowledge. And we are losing it. So my hope is that this is not just for the elite, but the people of Mexico can recover their traditional diets.

DB: Those traditional diets like you might find at the market in Chiapas. If you avoid the Coke.

The show's not over yet: after the break it's time for Customer Service.

ACT III

CUSTOMER SERVICE: Thank you for calling customer service, where we answer all your burning questions about brands. This call may be recorded for podcast purposes.

DB: Hi, Household Name customer service. Could I get your name please?

STEPHANIE: This is Stephanie from New York.

DB: And you have a question for us?

STEPHANIE: So I was wondering, yesterday I was looking at one of my tables in my room and I'm like a huge IKEA person, everything I know is from IKEA. So how exactly does IKEA get their names because their names are really weird and hard to pronounce and I've always been curious about it.

DB: Well I have no clue, so I'm going to try to find somebody who could answer that for you if you could just please stay on the line.

STEPHANIE: Sounds good!

DB: Hi Stephanie?

STEPHANIE: Yeah?

DB: I think I found the most qualified person in our office to answer your question.

SARAH WYMAN: Hi Stephanie! I'm Sarah.

STEPHANIE: Hi Sarah, nice to meet you.

DB: And Sarah can you please just give your credentials?

SW: I'm your intern, I'm half-Swedish and I dressed up as IKEA for Halloween when I was 14!

DB: We'll take it. So Stephanie's question is: how does IKEA get its product names. And you have some answers.

SW: I do. There's a simple answer and a more complicated answer. So I'll start at the beginning: when Ingvar Kamprad, who's the founder of IKEA, founded the company—

DB: You really are half-Swedish!

SW: (laughs) I have the pronunciation to prove it. But the founder of IKEA, it turns out he's dyslexic. So when he first founded the company and they started making products and storing them in a database it was really hard for him to remember the names of all the items and keep track of what was what, so instead of naming them the way other companies do with a series of numbers and letters, they decided to give them Swedish words as names to make it easier for him to keep track. And so born from that system of categorization are the names that you see on your products now and it's actually very organized and systematic for IKEA. They have different groups of words that belong to different items so for example all of the couches are named after places in Sweden.

DB: Wait so there actually is an Ektorp, Sweden?

SW: Yes!

DB: What about beds? Where do the beds come from?

SW: The beds are named after Norwegian places.

DB: I used to have a bed called Hopn—is there a Hopn, Norway?

SW: Presumably yes.

DB: [types] Oh my god, there is!

SW: (laughs) Yeah so this answer is actually only partly satisfactory to me and it's interesting, Stephanie, that you asked this question because it's something that I've thought about a lot before you callled. When my sister and I used to go to IKEA when we were kids, we'd noticed already that all of the products were named after Swedish words, but what's interesting is that those words often don't make any sense. So as an example, there was this Tupperware named "tjena!" Which is how you say "hey!" in Swedish.

DB: What does that look like to Americans when I see the letters?

SW: It's T-J-E-N-A.

DB: Oh wow ok.

STEPHANIE: Oh wow I would not have pronounced that right at all.

SW: And I think that's the case for a lot of their products for Americans actually so it's funny that they made them easier for the founder to remember when they made it more difficult for anyone else in any other part of the world. So yeah I was really curious about how they decided which names were assigned to which products because it didn't seem like there were any clear distinctions so I reached out to my family, I mobilized my Swede network, to see if there was anyone I knew who could shed some more light on that.

DB: You have a Swede network?

SW: Every Swede has a Swede network.

DB: What's a Swede network?

SW: Well I started with my mom who called my grandma who called her friend and neighbor whose son, it turns out, used to be a product developer for IKEA?

DB: Are there only like twenty people living in Sweden?

SW: Well you know how we have the Kevin Bacon thing in America? The six degrees of Bacon? It's the Swedish equivalent I think, everybody knows somebody who works at IKEA.

DB: So what'd you learn?

SW: So our family friend whose name is Janne Ahlsen he told me that these naming conventions go all the way back to when IKEA was founded. The founder's sister was actually in charge with filling up a database of Swedish words that would be ok to name furniture after. And according to Janne, she drew inspiration from all kinds of places, like atlases, dictionaries, and this is my favorite one: even birth announcements in the newspapers.

DB: So was there like a little baby named Billy that got turned into a bookcase?

SW: Well Billy was a real guy, you got that right, but he was actually an IKEA employee and the designer of that shelf, the Billy bookcase, he says that this guy Billy Liljedahl who it's named after, he complained to IKEA so many times that they didn't make enough bookcases that when he eventually designed another bookcase, he felt compelled to name it after him in his honor.

DB: I think you're just showing off your Swedish pronunciation.

SW: It doesn't come in handy in many other parts of my life so I have to—

DB: This is your big moment!

SW: Take these opportunities as they come. But I was really excited by this so I was asking Janne if he knew anyone else who had a piece of IKEA furniture named after him and he was like 'oh yeah that happens all the time.' And it turns out he worked on a storage bin that when it was released he named Gote in honor of his father.

DB: What a way to honor your father. Name a storage bin.

SW: I would love to have a storage bin named after me.

STEPHANIE: So you clearly know all of these words and I'm just wondering were there any other lost in translation issues that happened?

SW: Well it's interesting that you should ask that because it kind of works the other way around—IKEA has to worry about words that mean normal things in Swedish meaning completely different and inappropriate things in other languages and so an example of that is I guess a couple years ago they released this wooden box in the US that's called Dick after a Swedish boy's name, it's spelled D-I-C-K and it did not land super well in their US markets. And I guess they've had problems in the past, the word for speed in Swedish is "fart"—

DB: How do you spell that?

SW: F-A-R-T.

DB: Oh.

SW: And they had some products that I think were called full of speed in Swedish, fart full, which in English looks like full of farts.

DB: Not a great brand name.

STEPHANIE: No.

SW: So yeah they make an effort to avoid that and that's part of the reason this database they have is screened so carefully, to make sure things, problems like that aren't arising in other languages.

DB: Well thank you Swedish Sarah! Stephanie, are you satisfied with your customer service today?

STEPHANIE: Yes, I'll never look at another Antwerp the same.

DB: Well thanks so much for calling, if there's anything else we can help you with in the future, don't hesitate to call us back at 1 7313 BRANDS or email us at householdname@businessinsider.com.

STEPHANIE: Thank you guys!

CUSTOMER SERVICE: Do you have a question? Call us at 7313 BRANDS.

CREDITS

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Please leave us a rating and review at Apple Podcasts. It really helps people find the show. And let us know what you think. You can email us at householdname@businessinsider.com

This episode was produced by Clare Rawlinson, Anna Mazarakis, and me, Dan Bobkoff, who definitely does not work for Coca-Cola.

Mixing, sound design and original theme music by Casey Holford and the Reverend John DeLore.

Our editor is Peter Clowney.

Executive producers at Stitcher are Chris Bannon, Laura Mayer, and Jenny Radelet.

Special thanks to Tina Rosenberg, super deluxe, and our intern Sarah Wyman.

Household Name is a production of Insider Audio.