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January 3

Examples of establishments with blanket contracts with certain soft drink manufacturers

Last month, I read one of our articles related to McDonald's (I can't remember which one, but it was either the list of McDonald's products or our main article for McDonald's itself), which stated that McDonald's usually serves Coca-Cola products except for branches located in certain establishments (including, but not limited to, the Mall of America and the Staples Center) where they serve Pepsi products instead because the establishment they are located in have an overall contract with Pepsi. Since then, I have been wondering about this practice. I have two questions regarding it:

1. Is the practice of contracts where every restaurant in a multi-restaurant establishment such as a mall/stadium/university/airport/etc. must serve a certain soft drink (such as Coke, Pepsi or even RC Cola) common outside of the United States or North America? In my country (the Philippines) at least, while the big mall chains do have contracts with drink companies to serve their products in foodcourts, cinemas, or other stores they own, the other restaurants in the malls are free to serve whatever drinks they normally sell (for example, SM Supermalls has a contract with Coke and Robinsons Malls has a contract with Pepsi, but Jollibee still serves Coke products in both malls while Pizza Hut still serves Pepsi products in both malls due to each respective chain's soda contracts). The only place I can recall with a blanket contract was a wet market with some nearby restaurants; all of the restaurants served Pepsi products.

2. Aside from those I mentioned in the beginning (as well as those places mentioned in the relevant McDonald's article), what are other examples of malls/stadiums/universities/airports etc. with blanket contracts where all restaurants in that location are required to sell that establishment's preferred soft drink, regardless of what soft drink they normally serve? The only examples I can think of are amusement parks such as Six Flags, but this doesn't really count because the restaurants there usually only exist or are owned by the park, rather than being independent chains such as McDonald's. If possible, examples outside North America are appreciated.

Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 19:09, 3 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Note that in the US, such contracts border on the line of legality. The reason is that they force out smaller competitors, so have a collusion/price fixing/oligopoly aspect about them. StuRat (talk) 15:36, 4 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yum!_Brands#Tricon_Global mentions a few situations where their franchises serve Coke products despite their Pepsi contract. The Taco Bell at Western Michigan University served Coke because of the school's contract with Coke. Katie R (talk) 13:00, 6 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]