Coca-Cola, PepsiCo to drop controversial ingredient

Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are to remove a controversial ingredient from all their drinks.

Brominated vegetable oil had been the target of petitions on Change.org by a Mississippi teenager who wanted it out of PepsiCo’s Gatorade and Coca-Cola’s Powerade.

In her petitions, Sarah Kavanagh noted that the ingredient has been patented as a flame retardant and is not approved for use in Japan and the EU.

Coca-Cola and PepsiCo have stood by the safety of the ingredient, which is used to distribute flavours more evenly in fruit-flavoured drinks. But their decisions reflect the pressure companies are facing as people pay closer attention to ingredient labels and try to stick to diets they feel are natural.

PepsiCo had said last year it would remove brominated vegetable oil from Gatorade. On Monday, the company said it has since been working to remove it from the rest of its products. The company did not provide a timeline for when it expects the removal to be complete.

Earlier, Coca-Cola had also said that it is removing the ingredient from all its drinks to be consistent in the ingredients it uses around the world.

In addition to Powerade, Coca-Cola uses brominated vegetable oil in some flavours of Fanta, Fresca, and several citrus-flavoured fountain drinks. It said the ingredient should be phased out in the US by the end of the year.

Coca-Cola said it would instead use sucrose acetate isobutyrate, which it noted has been used in drinks for more than 14 years, and glycerol ester of rosin, which it said is commonly found in chewing gum and drinks.

Josh Gold, A Coca-Cola spokesman, noted that the product isn’t used in many other countries, but said it would be also phased out in Canada and Latin America.