Brief soft drink history

07Mar08

What’s in a name? Certainly a lot if it has become a leading global brand. We bring you the origins of four international beverage names to “slake your thirst”

Pepsi
The name was devised in 1898 by Caleb D Bradham, a drugstore manager in New Bern, North Carolina. His new elixir was patterned after Coca-Cola and was intended to relieve dyspepsia which is chronic or recurrent or discomfort centered in the upper abdomen, hence the name.

7 Up
In the village of Price’s Branch, Missouri, a Mr. C.L. Griggs invented a popular orange drink in 1920 called Howdy. Aiming to improve on it, Griggs marketed another drink as Bib-label Lithiated Lemon-Lime soda. The drink was tasty but the sales were bad (with that name, hardly surprising), so he tried to think of a better name. The story goes after six tries he came up with “7-up”, and this was the name that made the drink the bestseller it is today.

Coca Cola
As one of the best known and most “international” of trade names, Coca-Cola was created in May 1886 by Frank M. Robinson, bookkeeper to the creator of the drink itself, Dr. John S. Pemberton, a druggist from Atlanta, Georgia, and was registered as a trade mark on 31 January 1893. The name was based on two of the drinks constituents: extracts from coca leaves and from the cola nut. The name itself is a remarkably successful one as a memorable and easily pronounceable trade name, having alliterations and three desirable “k” sounds. Coca cola gained popularity rapidly it was first bottled in 1894 second element of the name is not a registered trade mark, so that ‘cola’ drinks exist on the market in a number of varieties. Among names of rival brands (imposter’s) were coca, cola, Fig Cola, Candy Cola, Gold Cola, Cay-Ola and Koca-Nola. All these were outlawed by the courts in 1916.

Schweppes
Another happy coincidence. In spite of the obvious onomatopoeic possibilities of the name just right for an effervescent drink, and exploited as such by the manufacturers the origin is in the name of Jacob Schweppe, a German who settled in Geneva as a jeweller in about 1768. In 1780 he turned his attention to the manufacturer of artificial mineral waters, and in 1792 went to London to start his business there. In 1798 he took three Englishmen into partnership and formed the firm of Schweppes & Co., which name lasted until 1834 when it was restyled as Schweppes Ltd. The company merged with Cadbury Brothers Ltd in 1969 to form Cadbury Schweppes.

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