Exclusivity on Trial

BBD obtained a copy of one of the groundbreaking lawsuits filed last week by a group of independent bottlers against parent Coca-Cola and CCE, their big publicly traded bottler, regarding the latter's plan to sell Powerade to Wal-Mart through their central warehouse (see BBD 02-15-2006). This issue is dear to beer distributors' hearts as where the bottlers go with their franchise status with suppliers, often the beer industry is not far behind.The key sentence in the lawsuit: "The quintessential feature