I hope it's okay to start commenting over here.

Rory was so kind to respond to a rather rambling comment of mine over at the Attacking Water-Borne Diarrheal Illnesses thread.

Something I'd thrown into the pot was the idea of a triple bottom line. From Wikipedia: "In practical terms, triple bottom line accounting means expanding the traditional company reporting framework to take into account environmental and social performance in addition to financial performance."

From the perspective of businesses most are antithetical to the notion. But I think the idea has widespread appeal to consumers.

The idea of Dansai Love, as I understand it is for the Coca Cola Company to launch a new product, Dansai Love, which will cost ten cents more, with the money going to help fund solutions to water-borne illnesses. The revenue side of this proposal is quite sound. Implicit in the proposal is that Coke use it's distribution network to make re-hydration salts available wherever Coke is sold. I think this is a trickier proposition.

I mentioned before that businesses in general are careful to prune away anything not part of their core product. Dansai Love is a brand of water and part of their core product line in several markets; making re-hydration salts a core Coke product is another matter. Imagining a core product with little profit potential seems far-fetched. My point here is from a consumer's perspective Dansai Love makes sense, but through the business lens it looks quite different.

Coke might be willing to commit to Dansai Love for a time and the money set aside for making grants to organizations working on solutions to water-borne illnesses. But one of the values in the Dansai Love proposal is using Coke's distribution network to distribute re-hydration salts more widely.

I'm not sure I really understand Coca Cola as a business. Coke makes good profits from their popular brands. But a business challenge for them has been in innovating new brands--for example non-carbonated beverages. One of the reasons for their relative slowness is their products are actually made by Coca Cola bottlers.

Dansai is a product that is in some markets and not others. The product got off to a rocky start because it's just purified tap water and in the UK bromine was found in the bottled water, apparently a result of the purification process. Anyway, Dansai has a mixed record of providing Coke with positive PR about the wholesomeness of their products.

I'm not absolutely sure, but I see no mention of the Dansai line for example in Coca Cola Sabco the largest bottler of Coke in Africa.

If the important thing is to leverage Coke's supply chain to make re-hydration salts more available, arrangement with regional bottlers may make the most sense. It may be that funding the project through Dansai Love in the USA and Europe is a good idea. But seeing the idea from Coke's perspective will be essential to getting this off the ground.

"People. Planet, Profit" is the triple bottom line. I'm convinced that going forward this approach for measuring business success will become more common. I think it's enormously important that it does. Right now, however, business as a core value sees profit as the bottom line. Profit is maximized at the expense of people and the planet. So it seems wise not to underestimate how horrible doing good seems from a business perspective: doing good is bad because it take away the focus from the profit bottom line.

The decision of Google.org http://www.google.org/ not to be a non-profit could be a watershed event for making a triple bottom line respectable in business circles.

There's a very solid core to the Danasi Love idea. Tying the distribution of life saving re-hydration salts to a common consumer seems like a "no-brainer." I want the idea to succeed. But I'm pointing out that how very sensible the idea is distracts from reasons it's not already being done.

In order to get this off the ground we're going to have to be very clever. Maybe it won't be Coke who runs with this, maybe Google could launch a brand. Or maybe regional bottlers could implement the idea. Mecca Cola http://www.mecca-cola.com/ already gives 20% profits to charity, maybe they'd be interested.