Coca-Cola Ups Its Sustainability Plan with Capital Venture Fund

The Coca-Cola Co. and eight bottling partners from around the world are closing on a new, $137.7 million venture capital fund focusing on sustainability investments.

Greycroft, a seed-to-growth venture capital firm, will manage the Greycroft Coca-Cola System Sustainability Fund. The fund is the first of its kind for Greycroft, which invests in enterprise and consumer solutions across life cycles and industries.

The Coca-Cola system’s carbon footprint is a major priority for the fund, so it will focus on five key areas with the most potential impact to start:

“This fund offers an opportunity to pioneer innovative solutions and help scale them quickly within the Coca-Cola system and across the industry,” said John Murphy, president and chief financial officer of The Coca-Cola Co. “We expect to benefit from getting access to emerging technology and science for sustainability and carbon reduction.”

The fund will seek to invest in companies at the point of commercialization. For Greycroft, partnering with the Coca-Cola system presents an attractive opportunity to help scale innovations alongside some of the top bottling operations in the world.

“The market for sustainable supply chain and manufacturing technology has continued to grow as consumer brands rise to meet the demands of environmentally conscious customers,” said Dana Settle, Greycroft co-founder and managing partner. “Greycroft has an ‘invest anywhere’ approach that we believe allows us to identify promising startups with climate tech solutions ready to scale.

The fund’s $137.7 million in capital comes primarily from $15 million of committed capital from each of these companies:

Together, these bottlers represent nearly half of Coca-Cola system volume around the world.

The system has a long history of investment in sustainability-focused projects that continue to make a difference in issues of global importance.