Toast - Dasani Water
Sliced Bread
BBC
4.6 • 695 Ratings
🗓️ 4 December 2025
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dasani water, a bottled water from Coca-Cola, proved a big hit in the U.S.A so why did it last for less than 6 weeks in the UK?
The BBC Business journalist, Sean Farrington, investigates how it ended up toast, in the company of resident business expert and entrepreneur, Sam White.
In the early 2000s, Coca-Cola had entered the growing bottled water market and was hoping to turn its hit new brand in America into a global sensation.
But shortly after Dasani water was launched in the UK, things quickly went awry, derailing plans for expansion into Europe.
To help explain what happened, Sean and Sam delve into the BBC archives and hear from expert guests including Graham Hiscott, the journalist whose story shone a new light on to the brand, and Conor Carroll a lecturer and marketing expert who has written about the Dasani debacle.
They also hear from Toast listener, Chris Leversha, who remembers buying Dasani water and suggested we cover it on the show.
At the end, Sam has to come up with her own professional conclusions about the fate of Dasani UK based on what she has just heard.
If you have a good idea for an interesting Toast topic then tell us about it - email toast@bbc.co.uk
Produced by Jon Douglas, Toast is a BBC Audio North production for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:07.4 | This is the story of a book. |
| 0:09.8 | It's a wonderful book. |
| 0:10.9 | She's an immensely valuable writer. |
| 0:13.1 | Award winning, commercially and critically successful. |
| 0:16.6 | Then, cancelled. |
| 0:18.3 | It just infuriates me. |
| 0:19.9 | You're reinforcing stereotypes. |
| 0:22.0 | I remember feeling sick by page 8. |
| 0:24.5 | A culture war about race, class, and who has the right to say what? |
| 0:28.9 | I do not think that I wrote in any way a racist book. |
| 0:32.7 | Shadow World, anatomy of a cancellation. |
| 0:35.5 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.9 | You're about to listen to the latest series of Toast. |
| 0:40.2 | Episodes will be released weekly wherever you get your podcasts. But if you're in the UK, |
| 0:44.7 | you can listen to the latest episode seven days earlier than anywhere else, first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:52.6 | Hello, you're listening to Toast, the BBC Radio 4 series that looks at amazing businesses |
| 0:58.4 | that soared, then stumbled and ended up toast. |
| 1:03.1 | I'm Sean Farrington, a BBC business journalist, and with me is the entrepreneur Sam White. |
| 1:08.7 | Sam doesn't know what we're about to discuss. So her reactions |
| 1:12.2 | are off the cuff, authentic. She hears what you hear. And at the end, she'll give us her |
| 1:16.8 | professional verdict on why this business went bump based on what she's heard. This time, |
... |
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