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Comment by Cyph0n | Hacker News Reader

> Japan's most popular drink is a brand of canned coffee which is on sale everywhere and in the vending machines that line the streets. Coca Cola's brand of this coffee accounts for an outsize proportion of their global profits (something like 12%, only sold in Japan).

Yet another strange Japan-related fact. That is an insane amount of coffee.

For anyone curious, the Coca Cola beverage is called "Georgia": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_(coffee).

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Yep, it has about 20 different SKUs, from Emerald Mountain Blend (the common, all Garden classic version) to Georgia Black to Georgia Max Coffee (basically an iced Caramel Machiatto). The insane profitability is largely due to the distribution model - Coke just has to strike a deal with the vending machine bottlers and it can get 200m units to market quickly. Recently the market share has been eroded by the likes of Kirin and Suntory, who run their own competing brands. I know this as Georgis is one of the accounts I worked on.

It's interesting that canned coffee is very popular in Asia (or that's my experience from SE Asia, Nestle seems to be the most popular there), but not in the western world.

It's actually quite good. I used to look sideways at people who drink iced coffee in general, but now I've embraced the dark side :P

Isn't it? I wouldn't say it's uncommon in Europe.

I've never seen canned coffee in Poland, Czech Republic, Greece or England, but I can't speak for other countries.

Canned and cartoned(!) coffee is all over the place now in the UK. Starbucks make a lot of it, and there seems to be quite a few smaller brands popping up.

It's all full of sugar though, more like slightly coffee flavoured milkshakes. Combination of the sugar and caffeine really works though...

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