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Jean Claude Tissot, president, left, and Canuto Martinez, director of manufacturing, right, talk during a tour at the Arca Continental Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages Northpoint Bottling Plant, 10475 Deer Trail Dr.,Thursday, Aug. 18, 2022, in Houston.
Reggie Harris, tech, works at a machine shrink wrapping cases of Dasani at the Arca Continental Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages Northpoint Bottling Plant, 10475 Deer Trail Dr., Thursday, Aug. 18, 2022, in Houston.
The Arca Continental Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages Northpoint Bottling Plant, 10475 Deer Trail Dr., is shown Thursday, Aug. 18, 2022, in Houston.
The Arca Continental Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages Northpoint Bottling Plant, 10475 Deer Trail Dr., is shown Thursday, Aug. 18, 2022, in Houston.
Coca-Cola in 100 percent plant-based plastic bottles are shown through a window of a machine being filled at the Arca Continental Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages Northpoint Bottling Plant, 10475 Deer Trail Dr., Thursday, Aug. 18, 2022, in Houston.
Coca-Cola in 100 percent plant-based plastic bottles are shown through a window of a machine being capped at the Arca Continental Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages Northpoint Bottling Plant, 10475 Deer Trail Dr., Thursday, Aug. 18, 2022, in Houston.
George Rodriguez, fork lift operator, moves products at the Arca Continental Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages Northpoint Bottling Plant, 10475 Deer Trail Dr., Thursday, Aug. 18, 2022, in Houston.
Jean Claude Tissot, president, talks at the Arca Continental Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages Northpoint Bottling Plant, 10475 Deer Trail Dr.,Thursday, Aug. 18, 2022, in Houston.
Jean Claude Tissot, president, talks at the Arca Continental Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages Northpoint Bottling Plant, 10475 Deer Trail Dr.,Thursday, Aug. 18, 2022, in Houston.
Susanne Brady-Lusk, general manager and vice president of south market unit, talks at the Arca Continental Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages Northpoint Bottling Plant, 10475 Deer Trail Dr.,Thursday, Aug. 18, 2022, in Houston.
Jean Claude Tissot, president, talks at the Arca Continental Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages Northpoint Bottling Plant, 10475 Deer Trail Dr.,Thursday, Aug. 18, 2022, in Houston.
Byron Berry, production tech, works at a palletizer the Arca Continental Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages Northpoint Bottling Plant, 10475 Deer Trail Dr., Thursday, Aug. 18, 2022, in Houston.
Jeff Joubert, package tech, works at the Arca Continental Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages Northpoint Bottling Plant, 10475 Deer Trail Dr., Thursday, Aug. 18, 2022, in Houston.
Jean Claude Tissot, president, talks at the Arca Continental Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages Northpoint Bottling Plant, 10475 Deer Trail Dr.,Thursday, Aug. 18, 2022, in Houston. Susanne Brady-Lusk, general manager and vice president of south market unit, is shown left.
A display of pre-form plastic bottles for blow molding is shown at the Arca Continental Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages Northpoint Bottling Plant, 10475 Deer Trail Dr.,Thursday, Aug. 18, 2022, in Houston.
Jean Claude Tissot, president, is shown at the Arca Continental Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages Northpoint Bottling Plant, 10475 Deer Trail Dr.,Thursday, Aug. 18, 2022, in Houston.
A lighted art work made of 100 percent recycled material including more than 700 bottles that is 22 foot tall is shown at the Arca Continental Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages Northpoint Bottling Plant, 10475 Deer Trail Dr.,Thursday, Aug. 18, 2022, in Houston.
Jean Claude Tissot, president, talks at the Arca Continental Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages Northpoint Bottling Plant, 10475 Deer Trail Dr.,Thursday, Aug. 18, 2022, in Houston.
Jean Claude Tissot, president, talks at the Arca Continental Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages Northpoint Bottling Plant, 10475 Deer Trail Dr.,Thursday, Aug. 18, 2022, in Houston.
Jean Claude Tissot, president, is shown at the Arca Continental Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages Northpoint Bottling Plant, 10475 Deer Trail Dr.,Thursday, Aug. 18, 2022, in Houston.
A lighted art work made of 100 percent recycled material including more than 700 bottles that is 22 foot tall is shown at the Arca Continental Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages Northpoint Bottling Plant, 10475 Deer Trail Dr.,Thursday, Aug. 18, 2022, in Houston.
Coca-Cola is one of world’s iconic brands — recognizable to billions — and the flagship of the portfolio of the world’s largest nonalcoholic beverage company.
But for Houstonians, Coca-Cola is, in a sense, a local company. The Coca-Cola-branded and Topo Chico products on store shelves here are bottled and canned in city limits, at the new Northpoint bottling plant owned and operated by Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages.
The plant, in north Houston’s Pinto Business Park, is the first Coca-Cola bottling plant built in the United States in over a decade, and represents a $250 million dollar investment by Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages. Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages, which employs about 1,300 people in the Houston area, covers parts of Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arkansas as well as Texas and serves some 31 million consumers in the region.
“We want to invest,” Jean Claude Tissot, the CEO of Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages. “The investment is going to represent opportunities, in terms of jobs. ”
Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages is a company of Arca Continental, a major bottler headquartered in Monterrey, Mexico, which contracts with The Coca-Cola Company to serve the region.
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The Coca-Cola Company has bottled in Houston for more than a century, executives said, beginning in 1902, with a facility on Berkeley Street. Starting in 1950, Houston’s Coke products were bottled at a plant on Bissonnet Street, just off of Kirby, before the Northpoint facility opened in 2020.
Employees moved into the new plant in February 2020, with a grand opening planned the next month, but that was not to be as the COVID-19 pandemic spread rapidly. Still, the plant stayed busy through the pandemic, with employees following social-distancing protocols as they kept the region supplied with Coca-Cola, Coke Zero, Diet Coke, Topo Chico, and other brands.
Several custom-made art installations brighten the plant. They include a quintet of supersized Coke bottles painted by artists from the United States, Mexico, Ecuador, Peru and Argentina, and a 22-foot-tall chandelier, made of 20 tiers of recycled Coke bottles, which casts a warm red glow over the business park when illuminated at night.
“What is important is not just to see a nice facility, but hopefully people that are smiling, doing their jobs,” Tissot said, before suiting up-hairnets, steel-toed boots, fluorescent vests for a tour of the plant.
Several production lines were in full opperation, filling 2,000 cans per minute with beverages of every variety. Lego comes to mind, looking over the warehouse — or Tetris, maybe — as forklifts shuttled down the aisles, stacking palettes with cases of beverages for distribution to Houston-area retailers.
Sprite bottles, ready to ship out, sported a new look, As of August 1st, the lemon-lime soda is sold in clear plastic bottles rather than the green bottles used since it was introduced in 1961. Clear plastic is more easily recycled than colored plastics. The change, announced in July, was part of Coca-Cola’s sustainability efforts as plastic waste chokes oceans and despoils landscapes. .
Coca-Cola Southwest Bottling has launched its own sustainability efforts. It’s the first U.S. bottler to use recycled plastic in half of every new bottle it produces, and its bottles themselves are 100 percent recyclable. The Northpoint facility is powered by renewable energy, thanks to solar panels on its roof, and operates as a zero-waste facility, meaning it sends no packaging waste to landfills.
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The company has reduced water consumption during the bottling process to 1.3 liters over per liter of beverage produced—a goal for The Coca-Cola Company overall, which reported using 2.7 liters of water for each liter of product when it began tracking water efficiency in 2004. Wastewater from the bottling process is recaptured via drains installed on the factory floor, and rainwater is gathered for landscaping operations.
The commitment to sustainability plays out in ways that a consumer might not notice immediately. The plastic wrap used to sheath cases of Dasani bottled water has been made thinner, for example, to reduce the amount of material that needs to be recycled.
“For us, the two biggest resources we’re using are the packaging and the water,” said Abraham Tueme, director of sustainability. “So we have to have solutions for both and we have to keep both at our top of mind all the time.”
Tissot said the Northpoint plant is just another chapter in Coca-Cola’s long-history in Houston and a commitment to a long future in the region.
“We came here to invest,” he said. “We came here to give opportunities and we are here to make sure that we are a good partner with the community.”
Erica Grieder is a business reporter for the Houston Chronicle.
She joined the Houston Chronicle, as a metro columnist, in 2017. Prior to that she spent ten years based in Austin, reporting on politics and economics, as the southwest correspondent for The Economist, from 2007-2012, then as a senior editor at Texas Monthly, from 2012-2016. In 2013, she published her first book, "Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right: What America Can Learn from the Strange Genius of Texas." An Air Force brat, Erica thinks of San Antonio as home. She is a member of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas's Emerging Leaders Council, and holds degrees from the University of Texas at Austin's LBJ School of Public Affairs and Columbia University, where she majored in philosophy.
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