Finding the competitors

A very effective way to discover who else might be making soft drinks is to use the Census website.

Click on the middle of page where you will see "NAICS"... This is the North American Industrial Classification System. Every business has one or more of these codes.

Search for terms like "soft drink" or whatever your group decides.

You can then take the codes that your group agrees on and use them as keywords when doing a company search in Lexis Nexis or Mergent Online. Remember, Lexis will have private (businesses that are not traded on a stock exchange, like Hank's for example) data as well. Mergent is only public companies, like Coca-Cola.