A federal prosecutor is investigating allegations by a former Coca-Cola employee who accuses the soft drink giant of deceptive marketing, accounting fraud, and allowing some of its products to become contaminated.
"The company will cooperate with the inquiry," Coca-Cola said in a one-paragraph statement.
The probe by the US Attorney's office in Atlanta comes less than a month after the US Securities and Exchange Commission requested documents from Coca-Cola as part of an informal inquiry into the allegations by the former employee, Mr Matthew Whitley.
Mr Whitley, who was fired in March with hundreds of others during a restructuring of Coca-Cola's operations in North America, has alleged massive wrongdoing in the company's food services unit. He has filed a $44.4 million wrongful-dismissal lawsuit against his former employer.
His suit alleges, among other things, that Coke managers knew that malfunctioning frozen-beverage machines were allowing metal residue to enter some products.
Coke already has admitted that its employees tried to rig a marketing test three years ago in a bid to win business with fast food chain Burger King. But Coke has dismissed most of Mr Whitley's allegations, including his claims of product contamination, as baseless.
The company has described Mr Whitley as a disgruntled former employee and has vowed to fight his lawsuit vigorously.
The increasing federal interest in Coca-Cola's practices comes at a time when US corporations are under pressure from regulators and investors to become more honest and financially transparent.
It also is a setback to Coca-Cola Chief Executive Mr Doug Daft's efforts to improve the soft drink maker's image, which was tarnished in 1999 by a product contamination scare in Europe and a race-discrimination lawsuit in the United States.
At the time, the soft drink maker also was being investigated by anti-trust regulators in some of its more than 200 markets around the world.