Daybreak - Diet Coke disappeared from shelves. For many factory workers across India, so did their work

Episode Date: April 28, 2026

Diet Coke disappeared from Bangalore's shelves, and a teenager's frustrated Reddit post accidentally explained why: the Strait of Hormuz.When the US-Israel war on Iran began in February, fuel shipments slowed. Aluminium furnaces went cold. PET resin prices jumped 75%. At least 25 plants shut completely. In one Odisha industrial belt alone, 700 of 1,500 workers lost their jobs.But the war only made an existing problem worse — India had already tightened import rules on aluminium cans, leaving beverage companies dangerously dependent on West Asian buffer stock.The shortage was always coming. The war just decided that it was now.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

About five years ago, Veer Das, the Indian comedian, read out a poem in Washington, D.C. It was a simple satirical piece presenting the contradiction between the two India's Das came from. He spoke about women's safety, Delhi's AQI, and because this was during the COVID-second wave about the state of affairs at the time, he drew equal amounts of praise and controversy for his performance. But the major theme of the poem remains undeniable. In a country as vast and diverse and historic as India, it's impossible to not have those contradictions at all. Today, a different crisis is making that contradiction very difficult to ignore. Since about early March, a certain item has been very difficult to attain.

Everyone has been talking about how diet coax have disappeared from dark store and physical store shelves alike. And considering how hot Bangalore summers are looking, everyone has been hoping. everyone has been hoping to get a sip of their preferred zero-sugar beverage. In fact, a Bangal Reddit user actually even made the physical trip to a bar, by the way, even though they were underage, and still came back empty-handed. They ended their Reddit post by asking, like, is the Diet Coke ship stuck in the state of Hormuz or what? With two crying emojis.

It's funny, but in a way, they'd pretty much actually hit the nail on the head. because you see the factories that process the aluminum that eventually becomes your cans or a foil or a medicine blister pack need intense levels of heat to shape metal and to create those levels of heat you need fuel and that fuel is what is stuck in the state of hormones so the teenager on the hunt for diet coke is on one side of the spectrum on the other are the people who work the very factories who suddenly have less or no fuel to work with The effect has been immediate and concerning. Gora of Mital, who is the CFO at a Delhi-based aluminum manufacturing plant, told business standard that their factory had been shut for a week in mid-March.

The worst part is he also had 300 to 500 workers sitting idle with no work. And it's not just the aluminium processing units that have been hit. If you're wondering why the plastic bottles of Diet Coke have also been tough to find, It is because even plastic manufacturing units have seen a huge dip in the raw materials they need to work with. You see, the PEP bottles that your soda and juice and bottle water come in are made from petrochemicals, which are derived from crude oil and natural gas. Again, both flow through the street. A contract worker from Odisha named Rattan Singh told business standard that a month before the war began,

the workers didn't even have the time to sit and relax. But now the machines have fallen silent and Singh was out of work by March just a month after the US-Israel war on Iran began. So these factories being idle and workers being in a livelihood crisis is the painful reality behind the Diet Coke story. And turns out, while the war on Iran looks like the cause,

it didn't create the problem. It just made an existing one worse. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Richard Ruggies, and every day of the week, my co-host Nita Shama and I will bring you one news story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Wednesday, the 29th of April. Last year, in April 2025, India issued a quality control order or QCO for aluminum cans. What that means is that aluminum cans would have to go through a certification process to get a BIS or Pioro of Indian standards mark and a valid license before they could be sold.

Now, about 20% of India's cans are actually imported from Sri Lanka, UAE, Germany, Thailand, Poland and Indonesia. Because of the certification, the suppliers in these countries now have to undergo inspection before their imports can be sold here. That inspection was going to take months. Meanwhile, the major can manufacturers in India called Ball Beverage Packaging India and Can Pack India were already running at full capacity before the QCO even happened. So you had a domestic supply that was maxed out while overseas suppliers were waiting for the go-ahead paperwork. Because of the genuine shortage, the government actually even ended up extending the deadline twice. And in the meantime, because it was summer, demand was also at a peak. So to make sure that there was no real disruption, before the QCO deadline could kick in,

beverage companies double their imports. And get this, specifically from Sri Lanka and West Asia. This was in January of this year. So when the war began in February, it hit the shipments that were already a buffer, the fallback option. And for the production that was happening in India, the fuel shortage caught up quickly. There wasn't enough gas to heat the raw aluminum enough to process it into the sheets that became the products that are recognizable on our shelves. It goes beyond just cans, by the way, to all kinds of aluminum plants. The result, Well, like I mentioned earlier, factories running at reduced capacity, workers out of jobs,

and output slashed by half. Ankurwal, the General Secretary of Alim Extrusion Manufacturers Association of India or ALEMAI, told business standards that at least 25 aluminium processing units have shut operations completely. Almost 200 others are running at a reduced capacity, some as low as 50 to 60%. And industry output has gone from 70,000 tons a month to nearly 45,000 tons. And while aluminium took the most visible hit, well, visible via Diet Coke, other packaging options also began to look stressed when the raw materials for plastics were affected. Also, if you're thinking of glass as an alternative, there isn't enough gas to heat the furnaces for that up either.

You see, every plastic product begins as crude oil or natural gas. They are processed into something called resin, which is a sort of powder that is then melted and molded into bottles, pouches, bags and those kind of things. So when the war began, the prices for these raw materials went up a lot. For example, the price for PET resin, PET by the way, is the kind of plastic that soda bottles are made of, went up by nearly 75%. What makes this worse is that these raw materials also make up about 70% of the cost of the 4% of the 4%. final product. And again, the impact of this extends across the plastic manufacturing industry. The thing is, obviously, small manufacturers can't absorb that kind of a price jump easily.

The Business Standard article had mentioned earlier reported that an industrial belt in Odisha had seen more than 40% of the smaller plastic manufacturing units shut down. Meanwhile, the remaining medium and large units have reduced their capacity by 50 to 70%. In all of this, though, the people who come out with the shortest end of the stick are the workers. Even the factory managers admitted that it's the contract labourers who are the first casualty when production is impacted like this. Out of the about 1,500 workers who work in this belt on a normal day, 700 have lost their jobs. A worker named Jabindra Sahu told Business Standard that he has been waiting for a call to join the factory again. And as he idles at a tea stall near his factory, he worries about how long he can manage this.

He fears that if the war goes on, his children will starve. In the same report, Karthik Chandrakar, a production in charge at a factory said that what was more frightening than the immediate loss of income was actually the uncertainty of it all. And as workers like Sahu wait for a call and others choose between returning home or looking for some other opportunity, The uncertainty of whether war goes on or not continues to hang. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings. A full subscription offers daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the Ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the

top of the Ken website. Today's episode was hosted and produced. by my colleague Rachel Vargis and edited by Rajiv Sien.