Timothy Leveridge -- Vice President and Investor Relations Officer
Good morning and thank you for joining us today. Im here with James Quincey, our Chief Executive Officer; and Kathy Waller, our Chief Financial Officer.
Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that this conference call may contain forward-looking statements, including statements concerning long-term earnings objectives and should be considered in conjunction with our cautionary statements contained in our earnings release and in the company's most recent periodic SEC report.
We posted schedules under the Financial Reports & Information tab in the Investors section of our company website. These schedules reconcile certain non-GAAP financial measures, which may be referred to by our senior executives during this morning's discussion to our results as reported under generally accepted accounting principles. Finally, during today's call, when our senior executives refer to comparable performance, they are referring to comparable performance from continuing operations. Following prepared remarks this morning, we will turn the call over for your questions. (Operator Instructions)
Now, let me turn the call over to James.
James Quincey -- Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, Tim, and good morning everyone. We've had another solid quarter that has included a number of notable developments from M&A to changes in our leadership team, and I'll come to all of that shortly. But let me start by focusing on our quarter and our year-to-date performance.
We are gaining share in a growing industry. Industry growth has improved from last year, driven by better results across both developed and emerging markets. Some large emerging markets like China, India, and Brazil are clearly doing better. Others like Argentina, South Africa and the Middle East are not doing so well, but collectively we are seeing solid results.
We've been capturing more than our fair share of growth as we continue to execute on ad transformation as a total beverage company. And notably, the industry has seen better performance within the global sparkling soft drink category, delivering both volume and value growth year-to-date.
Turning to our operational performance. We are managing our business well across key dimensions. Organic revenue is up 5% year-to-date, driven by strength across all operating segments. Unit case volume is up 2% led by Trademark Coca-Cola, which grew 3% globally. Comparable EPS is up 8% year-to-date in line with our guidance of 8% to 10% for the full year. This is despite significantly stronger currency headwinds than we anticipated at the beginning of 2018. We accomplished this through a combination of top line growth and productivity initiatives as driving underlying margin expansion, even as we continue to invest back in the marketing and face a rising cost environment. Finally, our top and bottom line growth is broad-based. Developed markets have grown organic revenues low single digit year-to-date and our emerging and developing markets have grown double digits year-to-date.
Turning to our geographic performance in the quarter. In EMEA, we grew organic revenue 9%, benefiting from solid operational price mix as well as from geographic mix. During the quarter, we saw strong growth across Europe driven by Coca-Cola Zero Sugar, Fuze Tea and innocent, all helped by good weather. In some of the emerging and developing markets like Turkey and the Middle East, the macroeconomic environment is tough, but ongoing packaging and pricing initiatives are helping us deliver solid revenue growth while staying affordable.
Turning to Asia Pacific, despite cycling a more difficult comparison period, strong performance in China and India drove another quarter of mid-single-digit organic revenue growth for the segment. In Japan, a solid innovation pipeline was overshadowed by natural disasters in July and September, which included a flood that destroyed a production facility for our bottler, impacting our capacity. Looking ahead, we will continue working closely with our bottlers to minimize the impact and protect our position in the market.
In Latin America, we delivered 19% organic revenue growth for the quarter as we continued to execute against the fundamentals amid a variety of macroeconomic environments. Now worth noting, nine points of that growth is due to the timing of concentrate shipments in Brazil, which will reverse out in the fourth quarter. However, even after adjusting for this timing element, we still delivered double-digit top line growth in the quarter.
In Brazil, our business continued its recovery with volume growth accelerating to 3% in the quarter, driven by positive performance in all category clusters. Argentina on the other hand, faces increasingly challenging macro conditions. So we are focusing on expanding our returnable packaging infrastructure, adjusting our price pack architecture to maintain key price points and affordability, it's a playbook we understand, even one I personally managed before. Mexico, Mexico continues to perform well benefiting from new product launches and strong growth in Trademark Coca-Cola supported by solid execution from our bottling system.
Finally, North America. We continue to deliver strong performance in the marketplace and gain value share. During the quarter, our system took a price increase to address pressure from higher input and transportation costs. As a result, our price mix improved 3 points sequentially resulting in a slight positive price mix for the first quarter this year, and we continue to deliver strong performance especially within the Zero Sugar portfolio. This in turn led to accelerated organic revenue growth of 2% and comparable operating income growth of 5% in the third quarter.
Now let's talk a bit about how we are driving disciplined growth in the business. Of course, it all starts with the consumer. Over the last few calls, we've discussed how we've been leveraging innovations like coke with coffee to grow our portfolio by addressing key consumption occasions, and also how we are lifting, shifting and scaling successful brands like Fuze Tea across multiple markets. However, there are times when we need or want to look externally and leverage M&A to drive our total beverage portfolio. M&A, of course is not a strategy in of itself, it's an enabler of our strategy, and while the focus of M&A continuously evolves, what's consistent is, we remain disciplined about our allocation of capital and about the mission of M&A as an enabler.
Over the last few months, we've announced quite a few acquisitions and investments. Each one is part of our larger strategy to broaden our consumer centric portfolio but don't read too much into the number of transactions in a single quarter and extrapolate that as the pace of activity going forward. We, of course, use M&A for many purposes to fill gaps in our portfolio, yes enter emerging categories or even obtained capabilities of platforms that complement our existing strengths, and we look for opportunities to create value by scaling brands to be bigger and better than they already are.
In North America, we invested in BODYARMOR, a premium sports performance and hydration brand. It's one of the fastest growing beverage trademarks in the United States. In Australia, we purchased Organic & Raw Trading Company, which gives us MOJO, our first company-owned kombucha brand and we invested in the Maid group which is known for products like cold-pressed juice and high protein smoothies.
In Europe, we purchased Tropico which gives our French business a strong foothold in the Still fruit-flavored beverages. We believe these brands that have strong edge will eventually allow us to gain quality leadership in the respective categories. And of course, our biggest announcement for the quarter was our pending acquisition of Costa. What we get with Costa is more than just a brand, it's a platform that will give us the ability to scale within the $500 billion global hot beverage category. Despite the size of Costa, our approach will be similar to the other deals like innocent and Honest. We will aim to preserve Costa's unique capabilities while adding the strength of the Coca-Cola system.
As with all our M&A, completing the acquisition is only the first step. What is critical is accelerating our results and executing with precision. To ensure we properly connect and globally scale key acquisitions, investments and partnerships, we have created a new group Global Ventures to be led by Jennifer Mann. In this newly created position, Jennifer and her team will focus on ensuring we get the maximum value from acquisitions and investments like Costa, our partnership with the Monster Beverage, et cetera. This Group will also partner with colleagues around the world to identify and nurture the next series of fast-growing opportunities.
As you'll recall, this was one of just, one of the -- just on the organizational changes we announced in mid-October. Now more than ever, we must constantly adapt our business to the changing marketplace. The leadership changes we are making over the coming months are significant and I believe that they will set us up for success in the years to come.
Beginning January 1, Brian Smith will become will become our President and Chief Operating Officer. In this role, Brian will bring an accelerated focus on the execution of our initiatives in the field while I'll focus on the overall success of the company as well as our long-term strategic direction. Brian is a valued business partner with tremendous experience, most recently as Group President for Europe, Middle East and Africa. At a time when our business is fast changing and more complex than ever, it's important to have a skilled executive who can focus intently on the success of our field operations. I can't think of a better fit than Brian.
We've also announced the succession plan for our Chief Finance Officer. Kathy, who had a tremendous 32-year career of the company will retire as CFO in March of next year. She will be succeeded as CFO by John Murphy, who will begin the transition to his new job of serving as deputy CFO starting January 1. John currently leads our Asia Pacific Group and it's a great choice for the vital work of overseeing our finance organization. John's extensive experience includes financial, strategy and operational roles, so he is a natural fit to step in.
And finally, we elected Nancy Quan as Chief Technical Officer. Nancy will join my leadership team to focus on product supply, strategic sourcing and technical governance as we evolve as a total beverage company. These changes led to a number of others that we also announced and I'm pleased that our deep bench allows us to to move our group of diverse talented and experienced leaders into new roles quickly.
So in summary, the global economy is still growing but remains volatile. Some markets are getting better, where there are -- while others are struggling as the economic cycle moves to different phase. Our industry is growing, driven by both developed and emerging markets and we are winning with momentum in our business. So despite currency moving against us, we remain focused on delivering the earnings guidance, we laid out at the beginning of the year.
Finally, I'd like to thank Kathy. While Kathy will be with us through next March, I would be remiss not to take a moment to thank her and acknowledge her outstanding career. Over her 32 years here at the company, Kathy has made significant contributions to both our company and the system, working away from financial analysts, all the way to the most senior finance roles in the company, truly a testament to the value she has brought through every phase of the journey. And as CFO for the past five years, she executed the company's financials through the extremely complex refranchising process and she's leaving a strong foundation for John to build on. And finally, she has been a critical partner to me and I've appreciated all her valuable support. Thank you, Kathy.
Kathy Waller -- Chief Financial Officer
Thank you, James and good morning everyone. It has been a tremendous honor to serve as the Chief Financial Officer of the Coca-Cola Company. During my tenure with the company, I've seen our business evolving growth from a sparkling beverage company with three principal brands to a total beverage company with numerous billion-dollar brands that span across all beverage categories. It is also been a pleasure working for first Muhtar and now James. I'm excited for the future of the company. We have a great leadership team that will continue to build on and execute the company's strategy, and I'm particularly excited about the incoming CFO, John Murphy. John's experience and capabilities will allow him to be a great partner to James and a great leader for the finance organization. So I'm looking forward to working with my team as we close out the rest of 2018 and I look forward to working with John to ensure a smooth transition as he takes over in 2019.
So now, turning to our performance in the quarter. As James mentioned, we saw a strong underlying growth, building on a solid first half. We delivered 6% organic revenue growth, driven by 4% concentrate shipments and 2% price mix. Concentrate shipments outpaced unit case volume growth by 2 points in the quarter. This is due largely to Brazilian bottlers building inventory as a precaution to any further supply disruptions in the country around the Presidential Elections and ahead of changes in local tax regulation. We anticipate this inventory build will reverse in the fourth quarter as elections are now completed and the tax regulation has been phased in.
The strong organic revenue growth combined with ongoing productivity measures and the timing of expenses drove 20% underlying operating income growth in the quarter. While the underlying results are strong as you know, our reported financials continue to be affected by accounting changes enacted at the beginning of this year and from cycling bottler refranchising activity from last year. Our comparable operating margin increased 575 basis points due to refranchising and strong underlying performance, partially offset by an approximate 130 basis point impact from new accounting standard and currencies.
Productivity helped drive the roughly 400 basis point expansion in underlying operating margin with actions across all of our operating segments. However we saw a particular benefit in our North America and corporate segments due to lean enterprise initiative. The accounting impact and the change in revenue recognition was roughly in line with our expectations. It's important to note that the impact varied significantly by operating segment. For example, Latin America saw over a 400 basis point benefit in its margin while North American's margin was impacted by roughly 250 basis points. So I recognize that there are lot of moving parts, but if you would realize each of these effects, our underlying operating margins expanded about 400 basis points in the quarter and about 200 basis points for the year-to-date period.
Below the line, we benefited from a lower tax rate. In order to bring our year-to-date effective tax rate in line with our revised full-year expectation of 20.3%, we recorded an effective tax rate of 19% in the quarter. So all in, good operational performance coupled with a timing benefit and a lower effective tax rate resulted in comparable EPS of $0.58 in the quarter, up 14%, which includes an 8% unfavorable impact from currencies.
So before turning to the fourth quarter, let me provide an update on bottler transactions. I'm happy to announce that with the sale of our company-owned bottler in Canada at the end of the third quarter, we have now completed our North America bottler refranchising process. We set ourselves up for the future with an energized bottling system that is bringing a renewed focus on their local market. In Asia, we expect to acquire 51% of our Philippines bottler for Coca-Cola FEMSA during the fourth quarter. This will become a part of our bottling Investment Group, which is now comprised primarily of South West and Southeast Asian bottler.
These two transactions should roughly offset each other resulting in a minimal structural impact in our P&L in 2019. In Africa, we are moving forward with the sale process for our company-owned bottler but we now expect to sell an equity stake in Coca-Cola Beverages Africa in 2019 rather than in the fourth quarter of 2018.
Now turning to the remainder of this year, considering our performance year-to-date and despite an increasingly challenging currency environment, we are maintaining our guidance on organic revenue and comparable EPS growth. Specifically, we continue to expect organic revenue growth of at least 4% and comparable EPS growth of 8% to 10%. However, there are two elements within the guidance that are changing and then as a third element that impacts phasing. While these balance together for the full year, due to the timing of each, they do result in a shift between quarters.
So first, we expect the third quarter inventory build up in our Brazilian bottlers to reverse in the fourth quarter. Second, we now expect the sell CCBA, Coca-Cola Beverages Africa in 2019 better than 2018. As such, a twopenny structural benefit that we expected to receive from this transaction will now shift on the fourth quarter '18 into our our 2019 earnings.
Third, we now expect an effective tax rate of 20.3% for the full year versus our original estimate of 21%. Now this will be a slight benefit to our fourth quarter earnings, it was a much larger benefit to our third quarter earnings. And this is because we needed to bring our year-to-date effective tax rate in line with our revised full-year expectation. So as such we recorded an effective tax rate of 19% in the third quarter. And taken together, these retained is representing $0.03 unfavorable impact to fourth-quarter earnings but the full year does not change. As always, our Investor Relations team will be happy to walk through each element in more detail as you build out your models for the year.
Turning to cash flow, we continue to expect to generate cash from operations of approximately $8 billion and we remain disciplined in our capital allocation. We continue to expect to reinvest $1.7 billion in the business through capital expenditures and we will return free cash flow to shareowners through dividends of approximately $6.7 billion and an expected $1 billion in net share repurchase. So in summary, we delivered solid financial performance in both the quarter and year-to-date period. And we remain focused on delivering full-year comparable EPS within our previously provided range of 8% to 10%. So, operator, we're now ready for questions.
Coca-Cola Co (KO) Q3 2018 Earnings Conference Call Transcript -- The Motley Fool
