The Hindu Business Line : CSE questions cola majors' sample data

EVEN as the Cola-bashing political bandwagon went from the Centre to States, the issue of pesticide-residue in soft drinks took yet another turn, late Thursday evening, with the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) striking back on the data put out by PepsiCo and Coca Cola India, in the companies' effort to build confidence among consumers.

"CSE did not respond to the name-calling by the soft drink companies, because we wanted to see the data that they had in their defence," Ms Sunita Narain, Director CSE told Business Line.

"On examining the data which PepsiCo and Coca Cola have made public, CSE finds their effort is to continue to convolute, confuse and take the Indian public for a ride," a communiqué from the organisation said.

CSE, the Capital-based non governmental organisation (NGO), had said in its study released earlier this week, that 12 brands of soft drinks belonging to the two global Cola companies contained pesticide-residues. A report that the top brass of the Cola companies had labelled "baseless". In fact, at a hastily scrambled media-interaction, company officials had said that they were looking at all options, including resorting to a legal recourse.

And while the report made good political currency in Parliament, the Cola companies sought to reassure consumers by claiming that their products were safe, by putting out print advertisements and questioning the credibility of CSE's laboratory where the soft drink samples were tested.

On analysis of the two sets of data - one by Pepsi on the Vimta laboratory report for 24 pesticides, tested in six cities of India and the other by Coke's data on tests done by the Netherlands based Nutrition and Food Research Laboratory TNO, for 12 different sites in India — CSE points out: "Coke's data pertains to Kinley, its bottled water product. The reason why they are putting out this data is because we forced them to analyse the pesticides residue on a regular basis and because of the new norms by the Government. This is not data related to soft drinks. It is not even data for the plants that manufacture soft drinks."

In the case of Pepsi, "the data relates to Aquafina plants and the tests have been done for raw water and treated water. On the Web site in the advertisement, PepsiCo has published results of tests on only one bottle of Pepsi from its Mathura plant. This confirms the statement of Vimta Lab's Director, Dr S.P. Vasi Reddy, to CSE that Vimta had received only two samples of Pepsi in March, this year. In fact, PepsiCo results in two cases say that pesticide residues in the source water were less than that found in the treated water!"

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