I have been wondering this. Cola is by far, the most popular flavor, and both major soda manufacturers named the companies after the colas. How did cola become the flagship? They sell lots of other flavors, and IMO cola is okay, but it’s not in a league by itself or anything.
Maybe it established its predominance back when it contained cocaine, or maybe it serves as a common default taste hoped to appeal to majority of soda drinkers. It’s been quite awhile since I drank it on a regular basis, though I will drink it if I’m thirsty and there’s nothing else available.
Moved to Cafe Society.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Maybe it has something to do with the hamburger being our go-to fast food. I mean, I like 7-Up and Sprite, but I tend to drink them along with fish or chicken sandwiches and not burgers, which is what I order most of the time at places like McD’s.
I like root beer too, but I normally drink it along with A&W-type food (e.g., barbecue beef, chili dogs).
I find the the only fast food ginger ale is good with is Chinese take-out. I’ll drink it on its own, but only when I’m in the proper mood.
Soda pops like Dr Pepper and Mountain Dew go with … basically nothing, though I guess you can make floats with them. I wouldn’t pair grape, orange, or cream soda with anything other than ice cream either.
In addition to complementing hamburgers, cola goes best with just about any type of sandwich or picnic food. Its main competitors there are lemonade, iced tea, and beer, straight out of the cooler.
My two cents’ worth.
The invention of the American hamburger sandwich, BTW, is usually credited to one Louis Lassen of Newhaven, CT, sometime between 1895 and 1900. This was around the same time soda fountains serving up Coca-Cola (and I presume Pepsi as well) were catching on among the public.
Advertising. Coke was a pioneer in advertising and marketing, far outspending every other manufacturer of sodas. They blanketed the country with signage and made deals with every possible seller of beverages - many of whom had never sold beverages before. Coke wasn’t the first to bottle pop, but when they did they muscled all competitors to reduce their shelf space. They also developed a network of bottlers in every area, with enormous incentives to sell big. They took a chuck of those enormous profits and plowed it back in more awareness campaigns. Quite successfully.
There’s a library of books on the Coca-Cola story, but probably the most comprehensive account is Mark Pendergrast’s 1993 For God, Country, and Coca-Cola. Which contains the original Coke formula, BYW, from the Coke archives. William Poundstone famously “revealed” the secret formula in his Big Secrets, but he was only close to the truth.
If you want to see it for yourself - pinky swear that you’ll never tell - here it is in Appendix 1.
On preview, the success of Coke has virtually nothing to do with hamburger stands. The hamburger existed, but wasn’t a dominant fast food until decades after Coke’s preeminence.
You order white soda with fish and chicken, and brown soda with beef…?
(Frank Booth voice) “SUAVE! GOD DAMN, you’re one SUAVE fucker!!!”
The caffeine, pure and simple. Cola became the hot-weather, summertime version of coffee in terms of a universal beverage (also including having a large amount of sugar in it). ‘Cola’-flavored is just a synonym for ‘caffeine’-flavored. Taste a ‘caffeine-free’ version of Pepsi or Coke sometime (regular or diet). It tastes ***nothing ***like cola. It tastes like slightly bitter, slightly sweet club soda…
I’d say in many 3rd world countries orange soda is bigger than cola. Dont know why.
Actually, “cola” flavor is actually more of a spiced citrus flavor than anything else, with the kola nuts originally added for the caffeine.
Caffeine is just bitter- enough that it’s been used as a bittering ingredient once upon a time. As far as I know, it doesn’t taste like anything much on its own.
Caffeine-free colas tend to be overly-sweet to me; that bitterness of the caffeine rounds the flavor out some. But at least to me, they taste the same otherwise.
Yeah… mileage varies on all of that. Also, you spend entirely too much time thinking about how to match up soft drinks with fast food.
Might’ve had something to do with being an alternative for the root beers and sarsaparillas of bygone days? Quick to make(root beers actually used to be BREWED once upon a time) Acting as a stimulant, as has been mentioned above. Quicker to drink than hot coffee, perhaps?
And at least one now nonexistent volcanic island.
Not sure how much of what I am about to say is true but here goes.
On the show American Restoration, (where a guy fixes up old junk to “new” condition), the guy, Rick, loves to restore old soda machines and he has a bunch laying around in his junkyard.
A customer came to him with an old small Coca-Cola cooler. Kind of like these:
Actually that site has a lot of good examples of the old smaller ones.
Well Rick always has a bit of background history to tell the customers about their items, well duh, it is on The History channel so I’m sure that’s in the contract.
Well anyways Rick tells how back in the day The Coca-Cola salesmen would travel the country and just go to a random gas station right off the highway, or whatever, and try to get them sell Coke in their store. If the store didn’t have a way to keep the coke cool the salesmen would give the store, for free, the little coke coolers. As you can see in the link that some of them have legs so they could be put out in front of the store as a way to advertise to the cars driving by. So customers knew that that store had coke.
I suspect that giving out the coolers for free went a long in convincing the store owner to accept the offer to sell coke at their store.
Yep, that’s a story told in many Coke histories. They did that and a hundred other things. Some of it came from Coke headquarters. Bottlers developed numerous other innovations that spread across the rest of the company. Coke wanted the iconic images displayed on every flat surface in the country. We live so surrounded by them today that it’s hard to understand how much they stood out when fewer products had universal appearances.
I thought that Coke, before corn syrup, was ambrosia in a seven ounce bottle. The perfect serving size because it stayed cold until you were done. Then you got another out of the cooler at the gas station for the road.
Technically Dr. Pepper was the first brand-name soda, before both Coke and Pepsi. And although Dr. Pepper is certainly ‘cola-like’ in taste it’s also definitely different. I’d say closer to root beer, sweeter and more cream soda-like. Maybe that’s why Coke and Pepsi became the standard, they have a more ‘adult’ taste.
Uh oh. You just gave yourself away.
Here on our planet, the classic Coke “hobbleskirt” bottle was 6 oz. from its introduction in 1915 through the mid-50s when it increased slightly to 6 1/2 oz. It was never seven ounces.
Beam up now, while you still have a chance.
I always was told it was because the “cola” taste masked the medicine people took it with that’s why the pharmacies pretty much made it them selves before coke came along
Funny thing tho the old style pharmacy we used to have sold official bottles of plain coke syrup in the old brown cough syrup bottles and it said it was used to flavor medicines and used for upset stomachs
and on the side was all the normal trade dress to show you it was a real coke product
Basically, the flavors of Coke are primarily cinnamon, vanilla, and citrus. Cola and caffeine have little to do with the flavor.
Coke did have six ounce bottles; Pepsi made a point of mentioning it:
“Pepsi Cola hits the spot
Twelve ounce bottles – that’s a lot
Twice as much for a nickel, too
Pepsi Cola is the drink for you.”
(Pepsi was originally marketed as a bargain cola.)