How Coke filled the world’s cups

New York

During the World Cup, I would run into them in the elevators of the hotel where I was staying in lower Manhattan: men and women wearing tags with a logo more recognizable worldwide than just about any of the flags of the 48 teams competing in the tournament.

The logo—a ribbon-like red-and-white script—is that of a company whose namesake product has a global reach as vast as soccer’s. It is manufactured and sold in more than 200 countries and territories, yet its story began with a tiny introductory advertisement in the Atlanta Journal of May 29, 1886: “Coca-Cola. Delicious! Refreshing! Exhilarating! Invigorating!”

Coca-Cola was at first sold in one place—Jacobs’ Pharmacy in downtown Atlanta. In its first year, sales averaged nine drinks a day. Today the company sells more than 1.9 billion of its beverages each day, and the firm has about 70,000 employees worldwide.

Some rode in my hotel’s elevators. The men and women of Coke—one of the longest-standing World Cup corporate partners—had come to New York as part of the company’s multicontinental marketing effort during the tournament. As we chatted on our way to and from the lobby, I thought about a long-ago Coke business trip—a wartime journey to North Africa—that eventually led to the company’s planetary dominance.

It began during World War II, when Coca-Cola Co. President Robert Woodruff vowed that for the sake of the morale of homesick soldiers, “every man in uniform” should be able to have Cokes for a nickel, “wherever he is and whatever it costs the company.”

But transporting filled bottles across oceans to Americans fighting overseas was daunting. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s North African headquarters put forward an audacious plan: Construct war-zone Coca-Cola bottling plants near the soldiers. One of Woodruff’s top logistics engineers was dispatched on that initial trip to Algiers to build the first such facility.

Soon he was followed by 148 more of the company’s logistics men, who set up 64 mobile bottling plants near the fighting in Europe, North Africa and the Pacific. During the war, service members consumed more than five billion bottles of Coke. Troops affectionately referred to the civilian logistics engineers supplying the beverages as “Coca-Cola colonels.”

According to contemporaneous accounts, German prisoners of war in U.S. camps were sometimes offered Cokes at the commissary. The intended message from the Americans to their detained enemies was: We’re the good guys.

When the war was won, the great boom in Coca-Cola’s international expansion began, fueled by a desire for the soft drink by people who had sampled it in far-flung places near the war-zone plants.

This summer at the World Cup, the ubiquitous Coca-Cola logo was recognized instantly by just about everyone who encountered it, wherever their home countries might be. Hydration breaks, all right—from battlefields to soccer fields.

Mr. Greene’s books include “Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen.”