The cola war is far from getting over. While Coca-Cola filed petition in Kerala high court challenging ban on manufacture and sale of its soft drinks and revocation of its license by the state government, its cola cousin PepsiCo also followed suit.
PepsiCo was to file a petition in the same court on Friday challenging the Kerala government's August 11 order banning the sale of some of its products in the state.
"It is unfair to ban the sale of our products on the basis of findings of a non-governmental organisation. We are challenging the ban," company Chairman Rajeev Bakshi told reporters on Friday.
He said Pepsi's products were "absolutely safe" and dubbed the findings of the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, which had claimed presence of pesticide residues above permissible limits in Pepsi and Coca Cola softdrinks, as wrong.
Bakshi said he was prepared to subject his products to all sorts of tests to prove that they were absolutely safe.
Complete coverage: Soft drinks, hard truths
With the standards for carbonated soft drinks yet to be developed, the company was prepared to subject itself to checks for residue levels in each of the input, which went into the soft drink, he said.
"We are open to work with the CSE or any other interested parties to establish stricter science based standards on the finished products of the soft drinks sector, which is not available in the world so far", he said.
Asked whether PepsiCo would challenge the findings of CSE in a court, he said "time is not appropriate for this now. Our first priority is consumer safety," he said.
PepsiCo had no objection for banning the sale of its soft drinks in primary schools. "In fact, we do not encourage the sale of our products at primary schools. We do not even employ child artistes below 12 years for our adverstisement campaign," he said.
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