Soda Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
109 free Soda trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
57 free soda trivia questions with answers. Soft drinks have a stranger history than the vending machine lets on. These 109 questions cover the whole fizzy family, not just Coca-Cola: the pharmacist's tonic that became Pepsi, the Waco drugstore where Dr Pepper was first poured, the mood stabilizer once advertised in 7 Up, the wartime German improvisation that produced Fanta, and the 79 days in 1985 when New Coke replaced the original. You will also meet the regional and international favorites: Moxie's gentian bite, Vernors and the Boston cooler, Big Red, Irn-Bru's forced name change, Inca Kola, Jarritos, ramune and its marble, plus the science of Joseph Priestley's first carbonated water, the pull-tab can, caffeine counts and the great pop-versus-soda-versus-coke divide. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and company history pages before publication, so the dates, names and figures hold up. Play it at a trivia night, share it with a friend who still says pop, or use it to settle an argument about what Mountain Dew originally meant.
30 of 109 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Pepsi-Cola was first sold in 1893 at a New Bern, North Carolina drugstore under what name?
Brad's Drink
Brad's Drink was named for Caleb Bradham, the druggist who mixed it at his soda fountain; renamed Pepsi-Cola in 1898, it soon outgrew the pharmacy and became his full-time business.
Q 02Pepsi-Cola's name, adopted in 1898, is usually linked to early claims that the drink aided what?
Digestion
Digestion was the selling point: the name echoes pepsin, a stomach enzyme, and dyspepsia, an old word for indigestion, though whether the drink ever contained pepsin is disputed.
Q 03Depression-era Pepsi promised 'twice as much' as its rivals in a 12-ounce bottle costing which coin?
A nickel
A nickel bought twelve ounces of Pepsi when Coca-Cola's nickel bought six and a half, and the radio jingle 'twice as much for a nickel, too' helped double Pepsi's profits between 1936 and 1938.
Q 04PepsiCo won the right to sell Pepsi in the USSR in a 1972 barter deal for Western rights to which product?
Stolichnaya vodka
Stolichnaya vodka stood in for cash because Soviet roubles could not be exchanged abroad, so PepsiCo took the rights to sell it in America in return for its cola syrup.
Q 05In which country did the 1992 'Pepsi Number Fever' promotion's 800,000 winning caps spark deadly riots?
The Philippines
The Philippines erupted after Pepsi announced 349 as the winning number and found it on 800,000 ordinary caps; the company blamed a computer error and offered holders about $18 each instead of a million pesos.
Q 06Which Hollywood star joined Pepsi's board in 1959 after the death of her husband, the company's chairman?
Joan Crawford
Joan Crawford had spent four years promoting Pepsi around the world beside her husband, Alfred Steele, so the company elected her to its board, where she stayed until 1973.
Q 07Pharmacist Charles Alderton first mixed Dr Pepper at Morrison's drug store in which Texas city?
Waco
Customers at the soda fountain originally ordered the drink by asking for a 'Waco'.
Q 08Dr Pepper is advertised as a blend of how many flavors?
23
23 flavors is the boast on every can, but the recipe is a trade secret, said to be split in two and locked in separate Dallas banks so that no one person holds it all.
Q 09A rumor since the 1930s claims Dr Pepper contains which ingredient, something the company flatly denies?
Prune juice
Prune juice has never been in Dr Pepper, the company says, yet the belief has lasted since about 1930; one guess blames a rival's deliveryman out to scare shops off stocking it.
Q 10According to a classic promotion, 'Dr Pepper Time' came at which three times of day?
10, 2 and 4
10, 2 and 4 came from 1920s research claiming that energy sags at about 10:30, 2:30 and 4:30; Dr Pepper's 'Drink a bite to eat' ads pitched a sugar lift just before each slump.
Q 11After Dr Pepper sued in 1972 over a Coca-Cola soda called Peppo, what name did Coke switch to?
Mr. Pibb
Mr. Pibb was Coca-Cola's fallback after Dr Pepper went to court in 1972, arguing that the name Peppo, on a rival 'pepper-type' soda, infringed its trademark.
Q 12Before it was a soft drink, 'Mountain Dew' was Southern and Scots-Irish slang for what?
Moonshine
Moonshine was the in-joke: the makers bottled their soda as a mixer for whiskey, and its first labels showed a barefoot mountaineer with a rifle and a jug.
Q 13The Hartman brothers first developed Mountain Dew as a whiskey mixer in which state?
Tennessee
Tennessee is where Barney and Ally Hartman ran a bottling business in Knoxville; unable to get their favourite mixer for whiskey there in the 1940s, they made their own.
Q 21The orange version of Fanta now sold worldwide was first produced in 1955 in which city?
Naples
Naples had what wartime Germany lacked: citrus. A local bottler used the region's own oranges in 1955, and that recipe, not the German original, became the Fanta sold worldwide.
Q 22In the usual telling, Charles Hires renamed his 'root tea' as 'root beer' to appeal to which group?
Pennsylvania coal miners
Pennsylvania coal miners would never drink a 'tea', a friend is said to have warned; the teetotal Hires took the hint, then sold his root beer as 'the temperance drink'.
Q 23The FDA's 1960 ban on a cancer-linked flavouring oil ended root beer's traditional reliance on which plant?
Sassafras
Q 14In what year did the Pepsi-Cola company acquire the Mountain Dew brand?
1964
Pepsi-Cola bought the Tip Corporation of Marion, Virginia in 1964; Tip had relaunched the drink in 1961, and Pepsi took it across the US and Canada.
Q 15In 1989 PepsiCo took which unusual payment from the Soviet Union for its cola?
Decommissioned warships
Decommissioned warships, 17 old submarines plus a cruiser, a frigate and a destroyer, passed through Pepsi's hands and went straight to a Norwegian firm for scrap.
Q 16Early 7 Up labels advertised a salt of which metal?
Lithium
Lithium, now a mood-stabilizing medicine, gave the drink its early name, 7 Up Lithiated Lemon Soda; the word was dropped in the 1930s, and one theory even ties the '7' to lithium's atomic mass.
Q 17From the late 1960s, 7 Up's ads set it apart from Coke and Pepsi by calling it what?
The Uncola
The Uncola was 7 Up's way of making a virtue of not being a cola; its ads held up a lemon and a lime and called them 'Uncola nuts'.
Q 18Which lemon-lime soda began life in West Germany in 1959 as Fanta Klare Zitrone, or 'clear lemon Fanta'?
Sprite
Sprite was the name Coca-Cola gave the drink when it brought it to the United States in 1961 as its answer to 7 Up.
Q 19Fanta's name was born when Max Keith told his German team to use their what?
Imagination
Keith told them to use their imagination, 'Fantasie' in German, and salesman Joe Knipp shot back 'Fanta!'; the drink was created when wartime trade embargoes cut off Coca-Cola syrup to Germany.
Q 20Wartime German Fanta, made without imported fruit, got its flavour mainly from the pressed leftovers of which fruit?
Apples
Apples, as fibre left over from cider presses, went in with whey from cheese-making; with sugar rationed, some bottles ended up sweetening soups and stews.
Sassafras root bark, the traditional root beer flavouring, contains safrole, which the FDA banned in 1960 as a carcinogen; most makers switched to artificial flavouring or safrole-free sassafras extract.
Q 24Which state made Moxie its official soft drink in 2005?
Maine
Maine claims Moxie because its inventor, Augustin Thompson, was born there, in the town of Union; the brand name went on to become American slang for nerve and energy.
Q 25Which Red Sox slugger endorsed the New England soda Moxie?
Ted Williams
Ted Williams lent his name to Moxie when it was a New England staple; the drink gets its medicinal bite from gentian root, which its creator said came from South America.
Q 26Canada Dry's popularity as a cocktail mixer took off during which period of American history?
Prohibition
Prohibition made the pale, dry ginger ale a hit as a mixer, because its flavour helped mask the taste of homemade liquor.
Q 27The watchmaker Johann Jacob Schweppe founded his soda-water company in 1783 in which city in today's Switzerland?
Geneva
Geneva was where the German-born Schweppe worked as a watchmaker and jeweller before he found a way to bottle fizzy water; he took the business to London in 1792.
Q 28Joseph Priestley discovered how to make fizzy water in 1767 by hanging a bowl over a vat at what kind of business?
A brewery
A brewery beside his Leeds home gave Priestley a steady supply of gas from fermenting beer; water held over the vats soaked it up, and he served it to friends as a refreshing drink.
Q 29Priestley's 1772 pamphlet told readers how to impregnate water with 'fixed air', the 18th-century name for which gas?
Carbon dioxide
Carbon dioxide was 'fixed air' to chemists of the day; Priestley made his by dripping oil of vitriol, now called sulfuric acid, onto chalk.
Q 30Priestley gave Captain Cook's second voyage a method for making soda water, wrongly hoping it would cure what?
Scurvy
Scurvy went uncured, since fizzy water did nothing for Cook's sailors on the 1772 voyage, but the work on airs behind it won Priestley the Royal Society's Copley Medal.