Coca-Cola Trivia
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98 free Coca-Cola trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
40 free Coca-Cola trivia questions with answers. Coca-Cola started as a five-cent pharmacy drink in 1886 and became the most recognised brand on Earth. This quiz covers the story: John Pemberton and Asa Candler, Frank Robinson's script logo, the cocaine years, the first bottlers, the contour bottle, Robert Woodruff's global expansion, Santa Claus and the polar bears, the Hilltop ad, New Coke's 79 days, Diet Coke, Fanta's wartime birth and the modern company with 500 brands in 200 countries. It starts with Coca Cola trivia anyone can answer and works up to the details of formula vaults and bottling contracts. Difficulty ratings are shown so you can pick your battles. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the drink, the company, the formula and the campaigns, and each question carries its source.
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Q 01Who invented Coca-Cola in 1886?
John Stith Pemberton
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.
Q 02Where was Coca-Cola first sold, for five cents a glass, on May 8, 1886?
Jacobs' Pharmacy in Atlanta
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.
Q 03Who created the Coca-Cola logo in its flowing Spencerian script?
Frank Robinson, the bookkeeper
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.
Q 04Which drink, launched in 1963, was The Coca-Cola Company's first diet soft drink?
Tab
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.
Q 05Which drug did Coca-Cola's original formula contain in small amounts until the early 1900s?
Cocaine
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.
Q 06Which businessman bought the rights to Coca-Cola from its inventor in 1888?
Asa Griggs Candler
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.
Q 07Coca-Cola was first bottled in 1894 by a candy merchant in which Mississippi city?
Vicksburg
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.
Q 08For how much did Coca-Cola sell the rights to bottle its drink across most of the United States in 1899?
$1
$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.
Q 09What inspired the shape of Coca-Cola's contour bottle, designed by Earl R. Dean in 1915?
A cocoa pod in an encyclopaedia
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.
Q 10Coca-Cola's 1915 bottle brief asked for a shape recognisable by feel in the dark or when what?
Lying broken on the ground
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.
Q 11Who became president of The Coca-Cola Company in 1923 and took the drink worldwide?
Robert W. Woodruff
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.
Q 12Coca-Cola's 1906 slogan called it 'The Great National' what?
Temperance Beverage
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.
Q 13In which year did Coca-Cola first appear in cans?
1955
Coca-Cola first appeared in cans in 1955, supplied to U.S. troops overseas; cans reached the general public in 1960.
Q 21What code name is given to the secret flavouring ingredient in Coca-Cola's formula?
Merchandise 7X
Merchandise 7X is the secret blend of flavouring oils; inside the company the ingredients are said to go by number rather than name.
Q 22Which US public radio show claimed in 2011 to have found Coca-Cola's original recipe in an old newspaper photo?
This American Life
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.
Q 23Which figure did illustrator Haddon Sundblom paint for Coca-Cola's winter adverts from 1931?
Santa Claus
Q 14On what date was New Coke introduced?
April 23, 1985
New Coke launched on April 23, 1985, after its sweeter formula beat both the old Coke and its main rival in taste tests.
Q 15Accused of staging New Coke as a stunt, Coca-Cola's president said the firm was 'not that dumb' and not that what?
Smart
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.
Q 16Under what name did Coca-Cola's original formula return to shelves in July 1985?
Coca-Cola Classic
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.
Q 17Which Netflix series prompted a limited return of the New Coke formula in 2019?
Stranger Things
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.
Q 18Which rival's blind taste tests, launched in 1975, pushed Coca-Cola toward reformulating?
The Pepsi Challenge
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.
Q 19Which drink, launched in 1982, was the first new brand since 1886 to carry the Coca-Cola trademark?
Diet Coke
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.
Q 20Where has Coca-Cola kept the written copy of its secret formula since December 2011?
A vault in its Atlanta museum
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.
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.
Q 24Which elfin mascot did Coca-Cola introduce in its advertising in 1942?
Sprite Boy
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.
Q 25Where was the 1971 'Hilltop' commercial, I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke, filmed?
On a hill outside Rome, Italy
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.
Q 26Which group took 'I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing', born as a Coca-Cola jingle, to UK number one?
The New Seekers
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.
Q 27Which television drama used the Hilltop commercial to end its final episode in 2015?
Mad Men
Mad Men's 2015 finale cut from a meditating Don Draper to the Hilltop ad, implying he went on to create it.
Q 28As of 2012, which two countries were the only ones with no official Coca-Cola sales?
Cuba and North Korea
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.
Q 29What does a yellow cap on a bottle of Coca-Cola indicate?
It is kosher for Passover
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.
Q 30What does Coca-Cola's Chinese name roughly mean?
To allow the mouth to rejoice
The name Kekoukele, adopted after shopkeepers' improvised phonetic signs produced readings like 'bite the wax tadpole', means roughly to allow the mouth to rejoice.