Fizz (25 page)

Despite the attacks, Thums Up thrived. In 1991, two years after Pepsi's launch in India, the drink held a 60 percent share of the soda market, a base so strong that when Coca-Cola returned to India it decided to pay $50 million for the rights to Thums Up rather than try to topple it. Today, Thums Up remains India's number-one soft drink, ahead of Sprite, Pepsi and the number-four brand, Coca-Cola—making India, along with Peru and Scotland, one of just three places in the world where neither Pepsi nor Coke rule.

In Peru, Coca-Cola's hopes of becoming the South American nation's favorite soda were thwarted by Inca Kola, a lurid yellow-gold fizz made from a mixture of local flavors, including the herb lemon verbena. The drink was created in 1935 by José Lindley, the son of an English immigrant family that opened a soda company in Lima in 1911. Lindley created the drink to mark the four hundredth anniversary of the Peruvian capital's founding. To promote the drink, Lindley appealed to Peruvian nationalism, pushing the idea that to drink it was a sign of loyalty to the nation. By the 1970s Inca Kola had become as tied up with Peru's national identity as Coca-Cola's was with America's. It pushed itself as “the flavor that unites Peru,” a message that plenty of Peruvians agreed with. As one Inca Kola fan told the
New York Times
in 1995 while drinking it with his daughter in a Lima chicken restaurant, “I tell [my daughter]: ‘This is our drink, not something invented overseas. It is named for your ancestors, the great Inca
warriors.'” Eventually, after years of almost but not quite toppling it as Peru's number-one soda, Coca-Cola resorted to paying an estimated $200 million to gain control of the beverage. When Coke president Doug Ivester toasted the 1999 deal with a glass of Inca Kola, the Peruvian press published photos of the Coca-Cola boss drinking it and hailed the moment as a defeat for the American giant, even as its national soda became part of the American beverage giant's portfolio.

A similar appeal to national pride also lay behind Scotland's preference for Irn-Bru, a vivid rust-colored soda with a taste as unique as Dr Pepper, which one carpet-cleaning company claimed in 2012 caused more persistent carpet stains than red wine or curry. Irn-Bru started life in 1901 as Iron Brew, one of numerous sodas produced by the Glasgow-based soft drinks company A. G. Barr, which opened its doors in 1875 as an offshoot of a cork-cutting business. The company promoted Iron Brew as a strength-giving drink, backed with endorsements from Scottish sportsmen such as champion caber tosser Alex Munro who called it “a grand pick-me-up after a tussle.” By the 1950s it had changed its name to Irn-Bru to comply with changes to UK food labeling laws that made it illegal for the drink to be called Iron Brew because it didn't contain iron and wasn't brewed.

While it had long been popular in Scotland, the link between Irn-Bru and Scottish identity really took off in the 1970s, on the back of the rapid growth of the Scottish independence movement. A. G. Barr adopted slogans that played up the drink's Scottishness, such as “Made in Scotland from girders” and, in a reference to the country's love of whiskey, “Scotland's other national drink.” By 1975 Irn-Bru had edged ahead of Coca-Cola to become the best-selling soda in Scotland. By the 1990s Irn-Bru was as much a part of Scottishness as Inca Kola was part of being Peruvian, and it was keeping Coca-Cola at bay with a series of brash and often controversial ads that were shot through with sentimental nods to Scotland.

Complaint-inspiring posters showed a photograph of a cow accompanied with the line “When I'm a burger I want to be washed down by Irn-Bru”; a TV ad featured a balaclava-wearing granny on a mobility scooter who rams a shop's Irn-Bru display so that the cans fall into her wire basket before making her escape; and a newspaper ad showed a woman kissing
a man next to words, “If I suck hard enough, maybe I can get my Irn-Bru back.” In a 1991 TV commercial, the company offered a pastiche of Pepsi and Coca-Cola's all-American advertising to appeal to a rain-swept nation where it was hard to relate to bouncy US teens hanging out on sun-kissed Californian beaches. Over scenes of white-teethed smiling youths and break dancers, the ad's soft rock soundtrack sang, “Wouldn't you know it, it's one of those ads, lots of kids with white teeth and giant shoulder pads, it's not a drink by those crazy Yanks, it's made right here, you know it's tougher than tanks,” before ending with a customer getting headbutted by an Irn-Bru vending machine. As Scotland embraced the independence, Irn-Bru became an obvious and highly visible way of buying into Scottishness.

But for all their domestic popularity Irn-Bru, Inca Kola, and Thums Up barely registered outside their home nations, and that they stand out so much as competition for Coke and Pepsi merely underlines just how successful Pepsi and Coca-Cola's race for the global market was. Beginning with a minimal global reach at the start of World War II, the American cola superpowers conquered the world's taste buds. They changed drinking habits, weaned people off local favorites, encouraged the consumption of cold drinks, spread American culture, paved the way for better relations with China and the Soviet Union, boosted economic growth, and helped create US presidents. The age of soda diplomacy might have ended with Ronald Reagan, who in 1976 accused President Ford of having “a foreign policy whose principal accomplishment seems to be our acquisition of the right to sell Pepsi-Cola in Siberia,” but when the Cold War ended, Coca-Cola's dream of a world united by Coke had largely come true.

The world had united around cola, usually Coca-Cola, and nothing said it more than the night the Berlin Wall fell—November 9, 1989. As East Germans poured into West Berlin that momentous evening, they were greeted by red Coca-Cola trucks handing out free Cokes. Almost none of the East Germans who crossed the border that night had ever tasted it before, but they all knew what it was, and knowing what it represented, they all wanted one. At the Brandenburg Gate alone, Coca-Cola gave away seventy thousand cans of its drink to joyous East Germans. One witness to the celebrations recalled seeing wide-eyed East Germans getting drunk while stuffing
themselves with McDonald's and Coca-Cola at Checkpoint Charlie and being bruised by the twenty-four-can cases of Coke that people were triumphantly carrying around with them.

In the days following the opening of the wall, Coca-Cola dished out more free cases of Coca-Cola to East German visitors, who flocked to the company's West Berlin warehouses in their plastic Trabant autos. As Heinz Wiezorek, the regional manager of Coca-Cola in Germany at the time, recalled in Coke chief Neville Isdell's biography
Inside Coca-Cola,
“There were thousands of cars per day just circling the warehouse, which showed very clearly the hunger they had for Coca-Cola.”

Them and the world, Heinz. Them and the world.

Soda fountain equipment on display at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, where Charles Hires launched his pioneering root beer.

The man who tickled our taste buds: John Pemberton, the inventor of Coca-Cola.
Courtesy of the Coca-Cola Company

An artist's impression of Jacobs' Pharmacy in Atlanta, the first place in the world to sell Coca-Cola.
Courtesy of the Coca-Cola Company

Asa Griggs Candler, founder of the Coca-Cola Company.
Courtesy of the Coca-Cola Company

The world's first promotional coupon, the marketing trick that turned Coca-Cola into a runaway success.
Courtesy of the Coca-Cola Company

The 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, the $50 million extravaganza that exposed millions to the fizzing pleasures of Coke, Dr Pepper, and Hires.