Sunday, June 04, 2006
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It's not unusual to find strange international products in London shops, but what about strange international versions of familiar products? I must admit I'm an occasional consumer of Coca-Cola products, and quite often our local shops stock an import version rather than the readily-available British products. I quite frequently find bottles from Poland, which does make some sense as there have been loads and loads of new Polish shops opening around London. But more curious are the bottles from Georgia (not the US state), all written in that distinctive Georgian script, except for a UK import sticker. It's amazing to consider that someone could profit from transporting a product thousands of miles to sell it in the UK when that same product is readily available here already (thoughts of ice cubes and Eskimos come to mind).

I'm by no means the first person to notice this; see the following posts from Anders Jacobsen a couple years back: 1; 2. But it's still quite unclear to me how this could work. Perhaps the answer's out there already; it's just quite hard to sort out anything relevant from the masses of information about Coca-Cola and (US state) Georgia.

Sunday, June 04, 2006 11:02:46 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [2]  |  Related posts:
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Monday, June 05, 2006 9:35:37 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Just don't drink the "Coca Cola" from Kazan. That's some nasty stuff.
Tuesday, June 06, 2006 11:38:41 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I've wondered about this as well. It would be helpful if I could find some sort of Georgian retail price index that indicated how much it cost in Tbilis. I can't remember as I was mostly drinking unknown soft drinks like tarhun (tarragon) from the Lagidze Bros:

http://popgen.well.ox.ac.uk/eurasia/htdocs/baku31may/images/lagidze.JPG

There's an "official looking" Lagidze website, but I'm not sure it's actually your actual original Lagidze or not. The CIS being a blackspot for copyright infringement. The bottles in Tbilisi were a rather wonderful Art Deco style:

http://www.lagidze.ee/

When I was drinking soft drinks that is!

I suspect that there's some sort of grey import issue here, whereby the Coke is sneaking in to EU Poland from Georgia via Ukraine and thereby avoiding import duties. But then I've also had Georgian coke via Turkish establishments as well. Of course, I don't imagine costs are that high in Georgia either and there's quite possibly some hefty US subsidies as well.
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