Company details
Name
Equatorial Coca-Cola Bottling Company
Industry
Beverage Industry
Website
Summary
Equatorial Coca-Cola Bottling Company (ECCBC) partnered with Waterplan to develop a Water Security Roadmap (WSR), Coca-Cola’s standard framework for turning its global water strategy into market-specific action. A WSR brings together a snapshot of current water use and watershed conditions, an assessment of near- and long-term risks, and a transformation action plan that turns those insights into a prioritized set of projects with clear progress tracking to secure water availability for the future.
With Waterplan’s digital platform, this process moves beyond static reports to become a dynamic, continuously updated system for monitoring risks and outcomes. This case study highlights one of the WSRs developed by ECCBC with support from Waterplan, showing how the methodology supports its 2030 water goals.
Equatorial Coca-Cola’s Water Stewardship Goals and the Role of Water Security Roadmaps
Equatorial Coca-Cola Bottling Company is one of the Coca-Cola system’s largest partners in Africa. Headquartered in Casablanca, Morocco, ECCBC operates in 13 countries across North and West Africa, reaching more than 160 million consumers. With more than 5,000 employees and a portfolio spanning 24 beverage brands, ECCBC plays a vital role in Coca-Cola’s ability to serve diverse markets across the region.
Sustainability is central to ECCBC’s business model. In 2020, the company launched its ESG Impact Strategy, where they committed to improving water-use efficiency by 20%, achieving 100% local replenishment of all water used in beverages by 2035, ensure availability of water from the watershed, and facilitate access to safe and drinkable water for surrounding communities. These goals require not only operational improvements but also collaborative action with communities, governments, and NGOs to secure long-term water availability.
As part of Coca-Cola’s global Water Security Strategy, bottlers like ECCBC are asked to develop Water Security Roadmaps (WSRs) — standardized frameworks that translate corporate water commitments into market-specific actions. WSRs provide a structured way to consolidate data, assess risks, and plan mitigation measures in alignment with Coca-Cola system requirements. For ECCBC, the WSR became the mechanism to address a set of systemic challenges that stood in the way of its goals.
To deliver on these ambitions, ECCBC needed to overcome several systemic challenges across its operations. These challenges included:
Limited visibility on long-term water availability: ECCBC required a forward-looking framework to anticipate how scarcity, climate variability, and shared basin pressures could affect future supply.
Fragmented and time-consuming data collection: Water-related data existed across multiple formats and systems — Source Vulnerability Assessments (SVAs), Facility Water Vulnerability Assessments (FAWVAs), replenishment project fact sheets, water accounting data, and stakeholder mappings. The lack of integration made it challenging to gain a consolidated picture of water stewardship or to align reports with Coca-Cola system requirements.
Identifying game-changer projects for long-term availability: Beyond efficiency measures, ECCBC needed clarity on what transformational initiatives would be required to secure water availability by 2035. Determining these strategic interventions was critical for aligning investments and partnerships with future risks.
Static reporting quickly became outdated: Previous water assessments were produced as one-off reports. This limited their usefulness in fast-changing environments and made it difficult to track progress against mitigation actions.
Clarity on Long-term Water Availability
As the global climate crisis intensifies pressures such as scarcity, droughts, and floods, ECCBC needed more than site-level snapshots. While SVAs, FAWVAs, or local utility records provided valuable information, they did not capture basin-wide dynamics like climate variability, competing demand, or transboundary issues. Without a consolidated framework to integrate these factors, it was difficult to anticipate how water risks might develop over time.
This is precisely the gap that the Water Security Roadmap (WSR) was designed to close: providing a structured, forward-looking framework that translates scattered data and global risks into actionable visibility. To support ECCBC in developing its WSR, Waterplan integrated ECCBC’s existing information with its own global and local water risk datasets. This integration enabled a structured end-to-end assessment of future demand and supply for 2025 and 2035, creating visibility on both immediate vulnerabilities and long-term scenarios. By combining watershed-level information, facility demand, and business planning data, the roadmap provided a clear view of where potential gaps could emerge and how they might affect operations and communities.
This forward-looking approach allowed ECCBC to move beyond isolated site assessments toward a market-wide perspective on long-term water availability. The roadmap not only highlighted where risks were most acute but also connected these insights to actionable planning. For example, for a site in Morocco, the roadmap modeled supply stabilization measures such as desalination, inter-basin transfers, and wastewater reuse, showing how government or collective initiatives could reduce future risks.
Through the WSR process, supported by Waterplan’s platform, ECCBC was able to translate uncertainty into structured scenarios and actionable strategies — aligning long-term business plans with its 2030 ESG goals.
Consolidation of Water Stewardship Information
ECCBC faced the challenge of water-related data being spread across multiple formats and systems. This fragmentation not only slowed down data collection but also made it difficult for teams to interpret results consistently and align them with Coca-Cola system requirements. Building a consolidated view of water stewardship required time-consuming manual work, limiting the speed at which insights could be translated into planning.
As part of developing its Water Security Roadmap (WSR), ECCBC worked with Waterplan to consolidate all relevant information into a single, standardized platform. This approach reduced the time and effort needed to gather, read, and interpret information, while also ensuring that outputs matched the standardized templates required by the Coca-Cola system.
Waterplan’s platform allowed ECCBC to consolidate data on already existing water use reduction initiatives, creating a repository of best practices and linking each initiative to measurable water savings. This ensured full traceability of efforts and allowed teams to evaluate whether existing projects were sufficient to reach efficiency and replenishment targets or if new initiatives would be needed. By integrating project performance with basin-level risk insights, ECCBC could also identify where to intensify ongoing actions or prioritize future investments for the greatest impact.
By turning fragmented information into a single source of truth, ECCBC gained a faster, more reliable way to track water stewardship. The roadmap ensured that data integration no longer became a bottleneck, freeing up resources to focus on what matters most: identifying risks, prioritizing projects, and measuring progress.
Prioritization of High-Impact Projects
Beyond efficiency improvements and ongoing replenishment activities, ECCBC needed clarity on what large-scale, high-impact projects would be required to secure water availability by 2035. Local teams were already engaged in a range of initiatives, but it was difficult to determine which of these could meaningfully shift long-term water balances and which were incremental. Without a clear prioritization, there was a risk of resources being spread too thin or focused on efforts that would not address the most pressing basin-level challenges.
To address this gap, Waterplan supported ECCBC by quantifying potential water benefits, modeling different scenarios, and comparing the expected impact of interventions. This enabled ECCBC to differentiate incremental measures from high-impact projects and to prioritize the initiatives most capable of shifting long-term water balances.
For example, in Morocco, the roadmap examined large-scale interventions such as desalination, inter-basin transfers, and wastewater reuse as potential high-impact measures. By modeling these options within Waterplan’s platform, ECCBC was able to understand how government or collective initiatives might reduce long-term risks and where its own projects could best complement those broader efforts.
With Waterplan’s platform, ECCBC was able to apply the WSR framework more effectively, gaining a clearer view of risks and a structured basis for deciding which projects to advance. This alignment between basin needs, corporate objectives, and measurable water benefits ensured that investments were directed toward the measures with the greatest long-term impact.
From Static Reporting to Real-Time Monitoring
ECCBC’s water assessments were often produced in the form of static reports. These provided valuable insights at a given point in time, but their usefulness diminished as local conditions evolved and new pressures emerged. More critically, static formats made it difficult to track progress against the mitigation actions recommended in those reports. As new projects came online or external factors shifted, there was no way to dynamically update the risk picture or measure whether interventions were closing the gap.
In order to comply with the requirements of the Water Security Roadmap (WSR), ECCBC worked with Waterplan to move from static reporting toward continuous monitoring. Waterplan’s platform integrated risk assessments, water accounting data, and project portfolios into a dynamic environment where results could be refreshed in real time. This allowed ECCBC to visualize risks and mitigation actions month over month, rather than waiting for the next reporting cycle, and ensured that progress could be measured directly against corporate water security goals.
By replacing static reports with continuous monitoring, ECCBC gained a living roadmap — one that adapts as conditions change, tracks progress against mitigation actions, and provides decision-makers with reliable, up-to-date insights. This approach not only increased confidence in reporting but also ensured that water stewardship strategies remain effective in the face of evolving risks.
Takeaways
Waterplan’s platform enabled ECCBC to turn Coca-Cola’s Water Security Roadmap (WSR) requirements into a dynamic process that strengthens resilience across its bottling network. By consolidating fragmented data, modeling future risks, and enabling continuous monitoring of mitigation actions, ECCBC replaced static reports with a living roadmap that adapts as conditions evolve.
With this support, ECCBC is not only aligned with Coca-Cola system expectations but also advancing its ESG 2030 water commitments in a more impactful way. Prioritizing high-impact projects and tracking outcomes in real time positions the company to safeguard long-term water availability for both its operations and the communities it serves.
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