By: Anna Isaacs

It was a sweltering June day in 2008 when I graduated from Walt Whitman High School, and mostly we were just thankful for the free drinks. We were at Constitution Hall for our commencement ceremony and Seth Goldman, co-founder and president of the Bethesda, Md.-based Honest Tea, had carted in boxes full of bottled tea for about 500 high school seniors and their grandmas.

As our commencement speaker, Goldman told us inspirational tales of his rocky start building a client base for his drinks — filling empty bottles with the product and labeling them by hand, begging grocers to try them, that kind of thing.  Lots of talk about being natural and eco-friendly.

What he definitely didn’t mention was that just four months prior, Coca-Cola had taken a 40 percent interest for $43 million in what he’d described to a bunch of 18-year-olds as a grassroots, organic company that involved epic trips to exotic tea fields.

In large part due to Coke’s global distribution reach, Honest Tea brought in $47 million revenue last year.  But the success hasn’t been without its fair share of clashes, according to a recent New York Times article that ran as part of its regular “Case Study” series.

The article pits Coke’s corporate mentality against Honest Tea’s integrity. When Coke saw the “no high-fructose corn syrup” label on Honest Tea bottles as an affront to their own sugary sodas, they asked Goldman to change it to all manner of vaguer phrases –- “No fake stuff” being my personal favorite.  Goldman repeatedly refused those requests, according to the story.

Now, the New York Times says, Goldman’s hard work positioning Honest Tea’s brand in a very targeted way could soon face another test: Coke has an option to buy his company next year, which Goldman said is “very probable,” though not guaranteed.

Other entrepreneurs, including Zappos.com founder Tony Hsieh, offer their advice on getting along with a corporate parent. Which is something he’d know about — his online retailer was acquired by Amazon.com last year for $1.2 billion.