The history of Fanta
Coca-Cola is one of the most sold drinks in the world, but for some reason, it has never been my personal favourite. While this isn’t going to be on my favourite soft drink, it will be the one that I find has the most interesting history. The name of this drink is Fanta. While it may seem like just any other drink on the shelf, Fanta has an interesting story about how it came to be and when and where it was first produced.
Coca-Cola was the biggest soft drink brand, even in World War two, but because of the war, it was actually difficult to get the ingredients needed to mass-produce the popular drink into the country of Germany where it was to be made. So they had to come up with a solution, a way to make and mass-produce a drink for the German citizens that would fill the gap left by Coca-Cola. They would mix Whey and apple fibre, as well as whatever fruit was seasonal at the time to produce to make a drink that tasted something like ginger ale. The head of local operations in Germany, Max Keith, decided to name the drink Fanta after the German word ‘fantasie’, meaning fantasy. Although this was sort of an invention made in Germany, the profits still went back to Coca-Cola after the trade was able to open again, after which this drink stopped being produced and Max Keith went back to producing Coca-Cola.
That is not the origin of the Fanta that we know and love today. This drink originated in Naples Italy when Coca-Cola started using the local citrus fruits in their drinks to make what is the modern version that we know today, in its most primitive form. Raymond Loewy came up with the ‘twin peaks’ design as one of the twenty-five concepts for the design that he pitched to the people at Coca-Cola, who then released it for sale in 1960, with it becoming one of the most popular flavours by 1969, which has now reached the title of the second most popular soft drink in the world. And to think that this all possibly came from a shortage of shipping supplies because of a horribly trying time for the world.
I believe that this sort of thing can prove that the wondrous can come out of the times that we may feel are the most trying. We always hear the phrase ‘history repeats itself’ and so why should that not apply to the positives such as these things as well as the negatives. Maybe what we should think of now that we are beginning to come out the other side of this global pandemic is that soon enough, we will see the many great things emerge.
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