When it comes to fizzy drinks, we’ve all got our favourites. But have you ever thought about how they came to be? Or what flavours people like to drink around the world? Or why the heck soda is called ‘soda’ in the first place? Turns out there’s a lot to know about pop – so we’ve rounded up some tastebud-tingling trivia to quench your thirst for soda-related facts.
Soda, pop, fizzy drinks… our favourite carbonated beverages go by many different nicknames. But while the term ‘fizzy drink’ is self-explanatory, have you ever thought about what ‘soda’ actually means? Etymology fans will be interested to know that it comes from the word ‘sodium’, which is a common mineral in natural spring water – while ‘pop’ refers to the sound the drink makes when it’s opened.
Not only is it the best-selling soft drink in the world, but Coca-Cola is also the most widely distributed product on the planet. In fact, if you took every single drop of Coke that’s ever been made, poured it into 8oz (227ml) bottles and stacked them all up, the bottles would reach to the moon and back over 2,000 times. That’s a pretty astronomical amount of soda…
Though they’re not exactly renowned for their health-boosting benefits today, many popular fizzy drinks originated in pharmacies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Back then, they were marketed as cures for all sorts of ailments – from stomach aches and indigestion to impotence and scurvy. Sarsaparilla – a root beer-like drink popular in 19th-century America – was even thought to be an effective cure for syphilis.
Got more pop in your fridge than you’re willing to drink? No problem – when push comes to shove, it can also be used as a cleaning product. Soda can also be used to remove rust spots from car bumpers, to loosen rusty bolts, to oust greasy (and bloody) stains from clothes, and to banish hard water stains from your toilet bowl. How many other drinks can do all that?
While it’s a myth that Coca-Cola is wholly responsible for Santa Claus’ modern image, the company did play a major part in popularising his red costume and jolly demeanour. Inspired by the poem A Visit from St. Nicholas (more commonly known as ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas), artist Haddon Sundblom put brush to paper to depict the friendly Santa we all know and love in Coke’s Christmas adverts from 1931–1964.
When you’re stocking up on fizzy beverages, do you reach for the plastic bottles or the glass ones? There’s a subtle difference between the two: glass is better for containing soda, as carbon can escape through plastic. Check the use by date on the bottle, and you’ll see that carbonated drinks stored in plastic bottles have a much shorter shelf life than their glass-bottled counterparts.
Coca-Cola has taken drastic measures to keep its secret formula under wraps – with the mysterious recipe supposedly locked in a high-security vault in Atlanta (pictured). However, in 2011, This American Life published what it believed to be the recipe, found in a 130-year-old notebook belonging to the inventor's best friend. According to the notebook, the drink's ingredients include cinnamon, neroli, nutmeg oil and… coriander.
Globally, we drink a lot of soda. In fact, we use about 180 billion aluminium cans every year. That’s a whopping 6,700 cans per second – enough to wrap all the way around the planet every 17 hours. Fortunately, aluminium is recyclable, and producing aluminium from recycled aluminium only takes 5% of the energy needed to make it from scratch.
Move over, mulled wine, mulled cider and hot chocolate. During the 1960s, Dr Pepper tried to market itself as a warm – yes, warm – beverage. Ads encouraged people to try something ‘truly different’ by heating their Dr Pepper up in a pan until steamy, then adding a few slices of lemon. Et voilà: one warming (though perhaps not very appetising) winter drink.
According to Coca-Cola, its name is the second most-understood term in the world – with more than 94% of people on the planet being able to recognise it (if you’re interested, the most-understood term is ‘OK’). Equally impressively, the red and white logo is reportedly recognised by more than 90% of the world’s population. Here it is on a billboard in Piccadilly Circus in London, England.
Back in the late 1920s, 7-Up was a patent medicine marketed as a hangover cure – and it went by the far less catchy name ‘Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda’. This is because the original formulation contained lithium citrate, a mood stabilising drug that’s usually used to treat manic states and bipolar disorder. The recipe was revised in 1948, when the use of lithium citrate in soft drinks was banned.
Coca-Cola was invented by John Pemberton, who was also responsible for creating an alcoholic product called ‘French Wine Coca’: an intoxicating blend of red wine and cocaine. When Prohibition was introduced in the United States, Pemberton ditched the wine in favour of developing Coca-Cola – but trace amounts of cocaine remained in the drink up until the late 1920s.
Diet soda may seem like a good way to lose weight while satisfying those niggling sweet cravings – but according to a recent study, drinking fizzy drinks with sucralose (an artificial sweetener) in them might actually increase your appetite. It’s all down to the sucralose tricking your brain into thinking you’re hungry, and it’s more common in women and people who are overweight.
The 1980s was a particularly exciting time for Coca-Cola, with the sugary brown stuff becoming the first soft drink to be consumed in space. Back in 1985, thirsty astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger sipped on the fizzy drink from out-of-this-world Coca-Cola space cans, whose interesting-looking drinking spouts were specially modified to make them suitable for space flight.
Pepsi-Cola started life as ‘Brad’s Drink’ way back in 1893. Named after its inventor, pharmacist Caleb Bradham of North Carolina in the US (pictured), the fizzy brew contained sugar, water, caramel, lemon oil, kola nuts and nutmeg – and it was served straight from the pharmacy’s soda fountain. The name was changed to Pepsi-Cola in August 1898, and trademarked a few years later as the company went from strength to strength.
Once you ‘pop’, you can’t stop. Many soft drinks are full of sugar, caffeine, or a combination of both – and these are two substances evidence suggests are addictive. Even if your favourite soda doesn’t have either ingredient listed in its recipe, any artificial sweeteners it may contain (aspartame or sucralose, for example) could also stimulate your brain to crave more.
During the 19th century, fizzy drinks were flavoured with all sorts of ingredients – from dandelions, ginger and birch bark to coca (cocaine) and kola. No prizes for guessing where Coca-Cola got the inspiration for its name. The famous logo hasn’t changed much since Coke came into being in 1886, with the most notable addition being the wavy underline that came along in 1969. This advert was published in Family Circle magazine, in July 1953.
In 1899, American inventor Michael Owens created the first-ever fully automatic glass blowing machine: a marvel of engineering which, by 1912, could produce a whopping 50 glass bottles per minute. Not only did the machine help make glass a commodity rather than a luxury, but it was also instrumental in increasing the popularity of fizzy drinks in the early 20th century, as its incredible output helped drive down prices.
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Urban legend has it that Pepsi’s popular ‘Come alive! You’re in the Pepsi generation’ ads of the 1960s didn’t fare so well in China – and it was all due to an unfortunate mistranslation. Rather alarmingly, when translated into Chinese, the slogan became, ‘Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave’. Pepsi soon realised their mistake, and – fortunately – the campaign didn’t last very long.
Ever fancied a soda first thing in the morning? In the late 1980s, Coca-Cola launched its ‘Coke in the Morning’ campaign in a bid to crack the caffeinated breakfast drink market. The campaign’s cornerstone was a catchy, arena rock-style radio jingle that aimed to convince people that trading their morning coffee for a morning Coke would help to ‘bring them alive’.
Far from being an all-American drink (as you might expect), Fanta was created in Germany during the Second World War – and it’s all down to trade embargos against the Nazis. Due to a lack of supplies during the war, bottling Coca-Cola in Germany became very difficult; as such, German bottling plants had to use their initiative and invent their own fizzy drink recipes instead, using ingredients that were more readily available. The rest is orange-flavoured history.
In the 19th century, root tea was brewed using sassafras bark, sarsaparilla root and a selection of other herbs. The drink gained popularity as a cure-all for a wide range of medical maladies, but it wasn’t until the late 1870s when pharmacist Charles Elmer Hires changed the name to root beer – to appeal to the everyday drinker. Root beer became a massive hit in the 1920s, when Prohibition made a nonalcoholic ‘beer’ a bestseller.
Back in 1915, Coca-Cola’s owner, Candler, launched a competition to dream up a unique bottle design – with the aim of distinguishing the cola drink from its competitors. The winner was The Root Glass Company, a firm based in Indiana, whose bottle’s bulbous design was modelled on a cocoa bean – an ingredient that they incorrectly believed to be present in Coke. This image shows how the bottle's design has changed from 1899 to 2007.
These days, it’s less about the soda itself, and more about the marketing – especially when millennials and gen Z-ers are concerned. While the concept of dieting is going out of fashion, ‘zero sugar’ has become the new buzzword for no-calorie beverages – and often, the variation in ingredients is minimal. Nutritionally, there’s no significant difference between Diet Coke and Coke Zero Sugar.
Over the years (and around the globe), soda flavours have sprung up to cater to practically every taste imaginable – from banana, shiso mint and curry flavours in Japan, to tamarind-infused creations in Mexico, a white-fungus-bird’s-nest-flavoured offering in Vietnam, and pickle, grass and turkey and gravy flavours in the USA. You name it, someone’s probably carbonated it somewhere.
There are only two countries in the world where you won’t find Coca-Cola on supermarket shelves (or anywhere, for that matter). Coke can’t be bought or sold – at least not legally – in both North Korea and Cuba, which are off-limits due to long-term US trade embargos. The fizzy stuff hasn’t been available in Cuba since 1962, while North Korea has gone without it since 1950.
The process of carbonating water was invented in 1767 by Englishman Joseph Priestley (statue pictured), who was inspired by the naturally effervescent spring waters of European spas. In his quest to artificially add a fizz to still water, he combined sulphuric acid and chalk to create carbon dioxide, collected it in a pig’s bladder, and hit upon a fool-proof carbonation technique – leading to the creation of the very first sodas.
Mountain Dew was originally made specifically to go with whiskey. The citrussy blend was created by Ally and Barney Hartman, whiskey-loving brothers who paired their favourite tipple with a lemon-lime mixer. Upon moving from Georgia to Tennessee, they found their go-to soft drink was unavailable – so they put their heads together and developed their own. ‘Mountain Dew’ is even a 19th-century slang term for moonshine.
Tab (pictured) – famous for its shiny pink cans and adverts featuring a bikini-clad Elle Macpherson – came out in 1963 and was Coca-Cola’s first diet soda. While Diet Coke was brought out in 1982 and has gone on to be wildly successful, Tab still has a cult following thanks to its unique light taste, though it's harder to find in stores.
You may be surprised to learn that the Coca-Cola Company doesn't only make Coke. Far from it; Coke produces around 4,000 different drinks, across a staggering 500 brands. In fact, Coca-Cola makes so many products that if you sampled just one product from its portfolio every day, it would take you almost 11 years to try them all. Sounds like a challenge to us…