Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey emphasized the company’s resilience today as it reported first-quarter earnings amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Here are initial takeaways from today’s earnings release and company-hosted calls with Wall Street analysts and media:

Late last year, Coca-Cola Bottling United opened a new $86 million sales and distribution center in the metro Atlanta town of Union City, just south of Coca-Cola headquarters. The 456,000-sq-ft facility serves 10,000 retail customers in metro Atlanta, covering 2.8 million consumers. As many as 750 employees will manage the warehousing, picking and delivery of 36 million beverage cases per year. Manual order picking has been converted to an automated process built by System Logistics. Marketed as “Vertique,” the system is “an organized, more ergonomic and efficient sequential operation, with less stress on associates and not as labor intensive,” according to Coke United (click HERE for a video of the system). The Union City facility is among a series of investments by Coke United to modernize its distribution system since acquiring new territory, including Coke’s flagship metro Atlanta market in 2017. Last month, Coke United broke ground for construction of a $60 million, 300,000-sq-ft warehouse and sales center in the South Georgia town of Tifton, about an hour’s drive from the Georgia-Florida line. The facility will consolidate inventory from eight older and smaller facilities into a single automated order picking location when it opens by the end of 2021. Birmingham, Alabama-based Coke United, with franchise roots dating back to 1902, covers territory in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee. The company is Coca-Cola’s fourth largest US franchise bottler (after Coke Consolidated, Reyes Holdings and Arca’s Coke Southwest Beverages). United distributes 11% of Coca-Cola system bottle/can carbonated soft drink volume in US. Last week, Coke United CEO John Sherman and East Region VP Mike Succo joined officials at the new Union City center for a grand opening attended by Coca-Cola North America President Jim Dinkins. BD sat down for an interview with Sherman.

The following has been edited for clarity and space:

BD caught up with Celsius and A Shoc during the recent NACS show in Atlanta. Celsius CEO John Fieldly said the company has embarked on aggressive plans to...

This year's NACS trade show in Atlanta, with exhibits that covered the space of almost two football fields, offered a first look at innovation being sold into retailers for 2020. The products pictured are some of the newest innovations from Coke, PepsiCo, Keurig Dr Pepper and Nestle. These products mostly launch late this year and early next year.

PepsiCo brought together executives from its US bottling system in August to review new product and marketing plans for 2020. The company hosted the meeting at its Purchase, New York headquarters. Attendees included company-owned and independent franchise bottling executives. The gathering came six months after PepsiCo reorganized its North America beverage business into five divisions, four in the US and one in Canada. The meeting’s theme was...

Randall Goins, the former president and COO of Coca-Cola Beverages Florida, has settled into a new role with a key Pepsi bottler, he told BD this week...