98 Fun Facts About Coca-Cola

Who invented Coca-Cola in 1886?

John Stith Pemberton, a Confederate veteran and morphine addict, adapted his French Wine Coca into a non-alcoholic syrup when Atlanta went dry in 1886.

Where was Coca-Cola first sold, for five cents a glass, on May 8, 1886?

Jacobs' Pharmacy in Atlanta sold only about nine glasses a day in that first year, and the drink's inventor ended it with a loss.

Who created the Coca-Cola logo in its flowing Spencerian script?

Frank Robinson, the bookkeeper, also named the drink, reckoning that the two Cs would look well in advertising, and then wrote the name out in the flowing script bookkeepers of the day used.

Which drink, launched in 1963, was The Coca-Cola Company's first diet soft drink?

Tab was the company's answer to Royal Crown's Diet Rite, and by the early 1980s it had become America's best-selling diet soft drink.

Which drug did Coca-Cola's original formula contain in small amounts until the early 1900s?

Cocaine came with the coca leaves in the original recipe and was cut to a trace in the early 1900s; a New Jersey plant still strips the drug out of the leaf extract that flavours Coke today.

Which businessman bought the rights to Coca-Cola from its inventor in 1888?

Asa Griggs Candler had sole ownership by 1891 for a total of about $2,300, then spread the drink by handing out thousands of coupons for a free glass.

Coca-Cola was first bottled in 1894 by a candy merchant in which Mississippi city?

Vicksburg candy merchant Joseph Biedenharn bottled the drink so that he could sell it to farms and lumber camps along the river, far from his soda fountain.

For how much did Coca-Cola sell the rights to bottle its drink across most of the United States in 1899?

$1 was the price in the contract two Chattanooga businessmen, Benjamin Thomas and Joseph Whitehead, talked the company's owner into signing; their franchises grew into the worldwide Coca-Cola bottling system.

What inspired the shape of Coca-Cola's contour bottle, designed by Earl R. Dean in 1915?

Earl Dean modelled the bottle on a cocoa pod in an encyclopaedia illustration, after the Root Glass Company team failed to find the drink's real ingredients pictured.

Coca-Cola's 1915 bottle brief asked for a shape recognisable by feel in the dark or when what?

Lying broken on the ground was the test the bottlers set, because they wanted a bottle no copycat could imitate; Root Glass of Terre Haute, Indiana, won with a ribbed design.

Who became president of The Coca-Cola Company in 1923 and took the drink worldwide?

Robert W. Woodruff, president from 1923, pushed Coca-Cola overseas and introduced the six-pack carton so people would drink Coke at home as well as at the fountain.

Coca-Cola's 1906 slogan called it 'The Great National' what?

Temperance Beverage was a pitch to a country turning against alcohol, and it fitted: the drink had been devised as an alcohol-free version of a coca wine when Atlanta went dry.

In which year did Coca-Cola first appear in cans?

Coca-Cola first appeared in cans in 1955, supplied to U.S. troops overseas; cans reached the general public in 1960.

On what date was New Coke introduced?

New Coke launched on April 23, 1985, after its sweeter formula beat both the old Coke and its main rival in taste tests.

Accused of staging New Coke as a stunt, Coca-Cola's president said the firm was 'not that dumb' and not that what?

Smart was the president's word: 'we're not that dumb, and we're not that smart', he said after the original formula came back 79 days after New Coke's launch and was soon outselling it.

Under what name did Coca-Cola's original formula return to shelves in July 1985?

Coca-Cola Classic went on sale in July 1985 and within months was the top-selling cola again, a comeback so strong that some suspected the whole switch had been a stunt.

Which Netflix series prompted a limited return of the New Coke formula in 2019?

Stranger Things' third season is set in the summer of 1985, and Coca-Cola brought back New Coke for a limited run tied to its release.

Which rival's blind taste tests, launched in 1975, pushed Coca-Cola toward reformulating?

The Pepsi Challenge kept showing shoppers picking Pepsi in blind sips; when a sweeter recipe then won Coca-Cola's own tests on nearly 200,000 people, the company switched to it in 1985.

Which drink, launched in 1982, was the first new brand since 1886 to carry the Coca-Cola trademark?

Diet Coke broke a taboo: a diet version had been talked about inside the company for two decades, but putting the famous name on a second drink was thought too risky for the trademark.

Where has Coca-Cola kept the written copy of its secret formula since December 2011?

A vault in its Atlanta museum, the World of Coca-Cola, took the recipe after 86 years in a bank across town; the vault is now the centrepiece of a public exhibit, but the formula stays locked inside.

What code name is given to the secret flavouring ingredient in Coca-Cola's formula?

Merchandise 7X is the secret blend of flavouring oils; inside the company the ingredients are said to go by number rather than name.

Which US public radio show claimed in 2011 to have found Coca-Cola's original recipe in an old newspaper photo?

This American Life aired the claim in February 2011 and posted the recipe so that listeners could mix a batch at home; it came from a 1979 Atlanta Journal-Constitution picture of an old recipe book.

Which figure did illustrator Haddon Sundblom paint for Coca-Cola's winter adverts from 1931?

Santa Claus as Sundblom painted him was modelled first on a retired salesman friend and later on the artist's own reflection in a mirror; the red suit was already standard before the adverts began.

Which elfin mascot did Coca-Cola introduce in its advertising in 1942?

Sprite Boy appeared in print adverts through the 1940s and 1950s and had nothing to sell but Coca-Cola: the lemon-lime soda of the same name did not arrive until 1961.

Where was the 1971 'Hilltop' commercial, I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke, filmed?

Hilltop was shot on a hill outside Rome, Italy, only after three days of rain wrecked a first shoot on the cliffs of Dover; the final bill topped $250,000.

Which group took 'I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing', born as a Coca-Cola jingle, to UK number one?

The New Seekers had sung the original radio jingle, then topped the UK chart with the rewritten song once its Coke references were removed; the Hillside Singers scored a rival American hit.

Which television drama used the Hilltop commercial to end its final episode in 2015?

Mad Men's 2015 finale cut from a meditating Don Draper to the Hilltop ad, implying he went on to create it.

As of 2012, which two countries were the only ones with no official Coca-Cola sales?

Cuba and North Korea were the two holdouts once Myanmar came off the list in 2012; U.S. sanctions kept Coca-Cola from selling officially in either.

What does a yellow cap on a bottle of Coca-Cola indicate?

A yellow cap means it is kosher for Passover: the batch is made with sucrose instead of corn syrup; Atlanta's Rabbi Tobias Geffen first certified Coke kosher in 1935.

What does Coca-Cola's Chinese name roughly mean?

The name Kekoukele, adopted after shopkeepers' improvised phonetic signs produced readings like 'bite the wax tadpole', means roughly to allow the mouth to rejoice.

Fanta was created in 1940 in which country, when Coca-Cola syrup could no longer be imported?

Fanta was born in Germany in 1940, when Max Keith's Coca-Cola GmbH, cut off from syrup by the war, made a drink from whey and apple pomace; orange Fanta followed from Naples in the mid-1950s.

By the usual account, Fanta's name was clipped from a word meaning what?

Imagination, or Fantasie, is what the drink's creator is said to have told his team to use at a naming session, at which salesman Joe Knipp blurted out 'Fanta!'.

Coca-Cola launched its lemon-lime soda in 1961 to take on which established rival?

7UP was the target, and the hunter became the hunted: the newcomer overtook it in sales, and in 1997 7UP's makers changed its recipe to compete.

Which Hollywood studio did The Coca-Cola Company buy in 1982?

Columbia Pictures released Tootsie and Ghostbusters under Coca-Cola, which folded its film business into Tri-Star in 1987, two years before Sony bought the studio.

Which British café chain did Coca-Cola agree to buy for £3.9 billion in 2018?

Costa Coffee had cost its owner Whitbread just £19 million in 1995; Coca-Cola agreed to pay more than 200 times that 23 years later.

As of 2024, which company was The Coca-Cola Company's largest shareholder?

Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett began buying the shares in 1988; in 2017 Coca-Cola put his face on Cherry Coke cans in China, and he took no fee for it.

What is The Coca-Cola Company's ticker symbol on the New York Stock Exchange?

The Coca-Cola Company trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker KO; Coca-Cola Consolidated, a separate bottler, uses COKE on the Nasdaq.

In which year did the original World of Coca-Cola museum open in Atlanta?

The original World of Coca-Cola opened in 1990 beside Underground Atlanta and drew about nine million visitors before the museum moved next to the Georgia Aquarium in 2007.

Which bitter Italian aperitif soda became the notorious dare at Coca-Cola's free tasting stations?

Beverly was dropped in Italy in 2009 after 40 years on sale, yet Coca-Cola still makes it for its tasting stations, where its bitterness has made it the sample visitors dare each other to try.

The 'Share a Coke' campaign, printing first names on bottles, began in 2011 in which Southern Hemisphere country?

Share a Coke began in Australia as a summer campaign to win back young adults, swapping the logo for the country's 150 most popular first names; it then spread around the world.

Which Pittsburgh Steeler tosses his jersey to a boy in Coca-Cola's 1979 'Hey Kid, Catch!' commercial?

Mean Joe Greene's ad first aired in 1979 and was shown again during the Super Bowl in January 1980, a game his own Steelers won.

The Coca-Cola Freestyle fountain's dispensing technology was designed by the inventor of what?

Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, designed Freestyle's microdosing system through his firm DEKA, in return for Coca-Cola distributing his Slingshot water purifier.

Cherry Coke was first tested on visitors to the 1982 World's Fair in which city?

Knoxville's fairgoers were given lime, lemon, vanilla and cherry mixes of Coke to try, and cherry won; soda fountains had been adding cherry syrup by hand for decades.

Which 2005 launch was designed to taste like original Coca-Cola?

Coca-Cola Zero arrived in 2005 and was relaunched in the United States in 2017 as Coca-Cola Zero Sugar, with the recipe tweaked to taste even closer to the original.

Clear 'White Coke' disguised as vodka was made after World War II for which Soviet marshal?

Georgy Zhukov is said to have acquired the taste from his American counterpart and, unwilling to be seen with a symbol of the West, to have asked for a colourless version that would pass for vodka.

Which yellow soda outsold Coke in its South American homeland, leading The Coca-Cola Company to buy into it in 1999?

Inca Kola, Peru's bubblegum-sweet 'golden kola', was created in Lima in 1935 by the Lindleys, a British immigrant family who ended up as Coca-Cola's partners in 1999.

Who was Coca-Cola's first advertising spokeswoman, a young Boston actress featured from 1895?

Before Santa Claus, Coke sold itself with smartly dressed young women. The red-suited Santa came in the 1930s, and White Rock ginger ale had used him first anyway.

Where was a specially built Coca-Cola fountain dispenser tested in February 1995?

The Space Shuttle Discovery carried the dispenser, which let astronauts pour fizzy drinks in weightlessness while researchers studied how their sense of taste changed in orbit.

Which animal from a 1922 French Coca-Cola advert became the brand's animated mascot in 1993?

The polar bear came back in 1993 because ad creator Ken Stewart thought his Labrador retriever looked like one. His film showed the bears gathering to watch the northern lights with a Coke.

In which 1980 comedy does a Coca-Cola bottle dropped from a plane upend life for a Kalahari tribe?

The Gods Must Be Crazy makes the bottle so useful that the villagers begin to fight over it, and the hunter Xi sets off on a pilgrimage to drop it off the edge of the world.

Which general cabled from North Africa in June 1943 to request three million bottles of Coca-Cola?

Dwight Eisenhower also wanted complete equipment to bottle, wash and cap the same amount twice a month, shipped on an early convoy before the invasion of Sicily.

Which 1965 animated TV special was commissioned by Coca-Cola and produced in only six months?

A Charlie Brown Christmas began as an outline that Charles Schulz and producer Lee Mendelson dashed off for Coca-Cola's executives in less than a day.

Coca-Cola's curvy contour bottle picked up a nickname honouring which Hollywood star of the 1930s?

Mae West gave the bottle its nickname thanks to her famously curvaceous figure. Allied aircrews in the Second World War named their inflatable life vests after her for the same reason.

The pale green tint of Coca-Cola's glass contour bottle is officially named after which US state?

Georgia Green is a tribute to the company's home state. The glassmakers' contract had listed the colour under a different name before the homage took over.

Which band's singer crossed the Atlantic in 1970 to re-record a Coca-Cola mention the BBC had banned?

The Kinks had to take the brand name out of Lola because BBC Radio barred product placement, so Ray Davies broke off an American tour for a 6,000-mile round trip to change two words.

Coca-Cola's 1915 bottle brief wanted a shape recognisable by feel in the dark and in which other state?

When broken, the bottle still had to give itself away at a glance. Copycat colas sold in near-identical straight-sided bottles had pushed the company to demand something unmistakable.

Mexican Coke, a glass-bottled favourite of American fans, uses which sweetener instead of corn syrup?

Cane sugar is the selling point, and some drinkers swear it tastes better, although blind tastings have also found people unable to tell the two versions apart.

Judges on which TV talent show sat behind Coca-Cola-branded cups for its first thirteen seasons?

American Idol counted Coca-Cola and Ford among its very first sponsors in 2002, and the cups stayed on the judges' table until the deal ended as ratings slid in the mid-2010s.

Coca-Cola's inventor, wounded in the Civil War, sought a substitute for his addiction to which drug?

Morphine had eased the pain of a sabre wound to his chest in 1865 and left him dependent, so the pharmacist spent years testing painkilling tonics in search of a way off it.

What forced Coca-Cola's inventor to rework his coca wine tonic into an alcohol-free syrup in 1886?

A local prohibition law passed by Atlanta and Fulton County put his wine-based nerve tonic out of bounds, so the recipe was reborn without alcohol and sold as a temperance drink.

Coca-Cola's 1880s tickets for a free glass of the drink are the earliest documented example of which marketing device?

The coupon worked so well that by 1913 an estimated one in nine Americans had claimed a free Coca-Cola, some 8.5 million glasses in all.

Which pop artist painted Green Coca-Cola Bottles, a 1962 canvas now in New York's Whitney Museum?

Andy Warhol saw the drink as a great leveller: he liked that presidents, film stars and ordinary shoppers all bought exactly the same thing, and that being rich could not buy a better one.

Since 1978, Coca-Cola has sponsored which sporting event, whose youth trophy once bore the drink's name?

The FIFA World Cup deal ran so deep that the trophy for FIFA's World Youth Championship was officially called the FIFA – Coca-Cola Cup for twenty years from 1977.

Which orange juice brand, the first to market frozen concentrate, did Coca-Cola acquire in 1960?

Minute Maid grew out of a wartime contract to make powdered orange juice for the US Army. When the war ended first, the business switched to frozen concentrate and took a name promising quick preparation.

Which bottled water did Coca-Cola pull from Britain in 2004 after it was exposed as treated tap water?

Dasani lasted only weeks in Britain: once the press learned it was processed tap water from Sidcup, a contaminated batch forced a recall of half a million bottles.

Coca-Cola quit which country in 1977 rather than reveal its formula and sell most of its business there?

India went without Coca-Cola for sixteen years. The homegrown cola Thums Up filled the gap so well that the company bought the brand when it returned in 1993.

Which Harper's Weekly cartoonist dressed Santa Claus in red decades before Coca-Cola's famous Santa adverts?

Thomas Nast drew Santa for some thirty years from the Civil War onward and changed his coat from tan to red, which undercuts the myth that the soft drink's advertising chose the colour.

Coca-Cola paid $4.1 billion in 2007 for the maker of which enhanced-water brand endorsed by 50 Cent?

Vitaminwater had made 50 Cent a part-owner: he was given a minority share in 2004 in exchange for becoming its spokesman, three years before the sale.

ABC's Peter Jennings broke into which daytime soap in 1985 to announce the return of Coca-Cola's old formula?

General Hospital viewers got the news as a special bulletin, a measure of how loud the New Coke backlash had become. A senator even hailed the reversal on the floor of the US Senate.

Under what name was the 1985 reformulation of Coca-Cola still on sale when it was discontinued in July 2002?

Coke II was the label later given to the sweeter recipe, which outlived the 1985 uproar by seventeen years before the company quietly dropped it.

Which US state gave its name to Coca-Cola's secret project to develop the recipe that became New Coke?

Kansas was a nod to a photograph of Kansas journalist William Allen White drinking a Coke, an image used widely in the company's advertising that hung on several executives' walls.

Which chemical engineer ran Coca-Cola from 1980 to 1997, launching both Diet Coke and New Coke?

Roberto Goizueta got his start by answering a help-wanted newspaper ad for a job with a Coca-Cola bottler in 1954, and at 35 became the company's youngest vice president for research.

Which Atlanta school is nicknamed after Coca-Cola thanks to gifts from the company's leading families?

Emory University was a small-town college in Oxford, Georgia, until the company's founder offered $1 million and land in 1914 to re-establish it in Atlanta.

Two lawyers who won Coca-Cola's bottling rights in 1899 opened their first plant in which Tennessee city?

Chattanooga was the two lawyers' home town. The loosely worded contract they won troubled the company for decades, and its boss never even collected the token fee.

In 1953 Coca-Cola asked which government body to mint a 7.5-cent coin so it could raise its nickel price?

The Treasury was unsympathetic, so the company toyed with leaving one vending-machine bottle in nine empty, an official blank that would have nudged the price up. It never tried it.

Which Detroit Tigers legend, a Coca-Cola pitchman from 1907, grew rich on its stock and bottling plants?

Ty Cobb held more than 20,000 Coca-Cola shares when he died, and his early investments in the company helped him endow a college scholarship fund in his home state.

Coca-Cola's contour bottle shares a nickname with which women's fashion of the 1910s?

The hobble skirt was so narrow below the knees that it hobbled the woman wearing it, a tapered look echoed by the fluted bottle of 1915.

The Root Glass Company, designer of Coca-Cola's 1915 contour bottle, was based in which Indiana city?

Terre Haute's winning design was patented without the famous script lettering on it, and in the name of plant superintendent Alexander Samuelsson rather than the man who sketched it.

Which Surrealist was the first popular artist to put a Coca-Cola bottle in a painting, in a 1943 work?

Salvador Dalí slipped the bottle into Poetry of America in 1943, almost two decades before pop art turned the shape into a gallery fixture.

The adman behind Coca-Cola's 1971 Hilltop commercial had the idea while stranded at an airport in which country?

Ireland's Shannon Airport was where Bill Backer saw fellow passengers, furious after a forced layover, joking together over bottles of Coke the next morning. He jotted the idea on a napkin.

Who played a Coca-Cola executive posted to Berlin in Billy Wilder's Cold War comedy One, Two, Three?

James Cagney made it his last film appearance for twenty years: he did not return to the screen until Ragtime in 1981.

The illustrator of Coca-Cola's Santa Claus adverts took his inspiration from an 1823 poem by which writer?

Clement Clarke Moore described a warm, friendly and pleasantly plump St Nick, which gave the painter his template in place of the gaunt or elfin Santas of earlier drawings.

Coca-Cola staff sent overseas to run bottling lines for US troops in World War II held which title?

Technical observers was the label for the company's own employees who went out to help when the army in North Africa asked for bottling machinery in 1943.

The Coca-Cola 600, the longest race on NASCAR's schedule, is run each Memorial Day weekend at which track?

Charlotte Motor Speedway opened with this very race in 1960, when it was called the World 600. The sponsor's name was not added until 1985.

Coca-Cola's short-lived MagiCan promotion sealed what inside randomly chosen cans in place of the drink?

Prize money of up to $500 sprang out of the opening on a spring, while a sealed chamber of foul-smelling chlorinated water made each rigged can weigh the same as a full one.

Coca-Cola withdrew 30 million units in 1999 after a health scare, mainly among schoolchildren, in which country?

Belgium's scare is often cited as a possible case of mass psychogenic illness, perhaps fed by a dioxin food scandal that helped topple the country's government that same month.

Wartime Fanta was first made from leftovers including sugar beet, apple pomace and which dairy by-product?

Whey and other scraps were all the cut-off branch could find once Coca-Cola syrup stopped arriving. Its chief, Max Keith, later described his ingredients as the leftovers of leftovers.

Which Coca-Cola soda was first sold as Peppo in 1972 until a lawsuit from Dr Pepper forced a new name?

Mr. Pibb was the replacement name, and one of its first two test markets was Waco, Texas, the birthplace of Dr Pepper.

Which highly caffeinated citrus soda did Coca-Cola launch in 1979 to compete with Mountain Dew?

Mello Yello had its big-screen moment in Days of Thunder, when Tom Cruise's Cole Trickle drove a car in its colours to victory in the Daytona 500, though nobody in the film says the name.

Which grapefruit diet soda, launched by Coca-Cola in 1966, counted President Lyndon B. Johnson as a fan?

Fresca takes its name from the word for fresh in Spanish and Portuguese, and it arrived late in Johnson's term as a sugar-free bottled soda.

Coca-Cola Life, a lower-calorie cola first sold in Argentina in 2013, paired sugar with which sweetener?

Stevia leaf extract made its debut in a Coca-Cola variant with this drink, though critics dismissed the whole idea as a marketing gimmick.

Which acid gives Coca-Cola and most other colas their sharp tang, where fruit sodas usually rely on citric?

Phosphoric acid supplies the bite, and it has drawn scrutiny: studies linking heavy cola drinking with lower bone density in women once pointed to it as a possible cause.

A Stepan Company plant in which US state is the only one licensed to import coca leaves for Coca-Cola's flavouring?

New Jersey's Maywood plant brings in about 100 tonnes of dried coca leaf a year, mostly from Peru, and supplies Coca-Cola with an extract that is free of cocaine.

Which future president of Mexico started as a Coca-Cola route supervisor in 1964 and rose to run its Mexican arm?

Vicente Fox drove a delivery truck in his first job with the company. Under him, Coke became Mexico's best-selling soft drink.

Which sparkling mineral water, bottled in Monterrey since 1895, did Coca-Cola buy for $220 million in 2017?

Topo Chico takes its name from Cerro del Topo Chico, a mountain in the Mexican city where the water is sourced and bottled.

Where does the cocaine go once it is stripped from the coca leaves that flavour Coca-Cola?

To a pharmaceutical firm: the St. Louis drug maker Mallinckrodt buys the extracted cocaine and purifies it for legitimate medicinal use.

Which sports drink did Coca-Cola create in 1988, a brand whose primary competitor is Gatorade?

Powerade was Coca-Cola's answer to the sports-drink boom. Its target, Gatorade, has belonged to arch-rival PepsiCo since 2001, turning the contest into a cola war by proxy.

Coca-Cola bought a first stake in which British smoothie maker in 2009 and took majority control a year later?

Innocent began at a London music festival in 1998, where customers binned their empties to vote on whether the three founders should quit their jobs. The yes bin won.