Soft drink

"When John Pemberton, a pharmacist from Atlanta, Georgia, began to mix together the ingredients that would later become Coca-Cola, his intention was not to create a soft drink at all but a tonic for headaches. Working in the back of his shop in 1886, Pemberton mixed fruit syrup, extracts of the cola nut and the coca leaf, and other ingredients, in a three-legged brass pot, stirring and heating them until they formed a sticky brown syrup. After sampling his tonic, Pemberton decided to take it to Jacobs' Pharmacy, the largest drugstore in Atlanta, where the manager agreed to mix it with water and sell it at his soda fountain for five cents a glass. Before the new drink could be promoted, however, it needed a name, and Pemberton's business partner, Frank Robinson, suggested "Coca-Cola," because he the two Cs would look good in advertisements. He carefully penned the beverage's name in flowing script—the same that is used today—and the partners placed their first ad for the beverage in the Atlanta Journal, proclaiming that Coca-Cola was "Delicious! Refreshing! Exhilarating! Invigorating!""

"I hope you come to this year’s meeting, which will be held on May 20 in Omaha. There will be only one change: after 48 years of allegiance to another soft drink, your Chairman, in an unprecedented display of behavioral flexibility, has converted to the new Cherry Coke. Henceforth, it will be the Official Drink of the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting."

"This Coca-Cola investment provides yet another example of the incredible speed with which your Chairman responds to investment opportunities, no matter how obscure or well-disguised they may be. I believe I had my first Coca-Cola in either 1935 or 1936. Of a certainty, it was in 1936 that I started buying Cokes at the rate of six for 25 cents from Buffett & Son, the family grocery store, to sell around the neighborhood for 5 cents each. In this excursion into high-margin retailing, I duly observed the extraordinary consumer attractiveness and commercial possibilities of the product. I continued to note these qualities for the next 52 years as Coke blanketed the world. During this period, however, I carefully avoided buying even a single share, instead allocating major portions of my net worth to street railway companies, windmill manufacturers, anthracite producers, textile businesses, trading-stamp issuers, and the like. (If you think I'm making this up, I can supply the names.) Only in the summer of 1988 did my brain finally establish contact with my eyes."

"The start of the rivalry between the Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola companies in the 1940s is legend in business. Less known is that a bigger, more important battle was being fought on the front lines of the cola wars at the same time: the struggle of African-Americans to gain access to white Corporate America. Underdog Pepsi-Cola—under the direction of an astute businessman with a keen sense of his role as a leader—joined forces with a group of striving African-American professionals. Their union made history, and taught American businesses a lesson in the value of a diverse workforce. To the ranks of the unsung civil rights pioneers, add Pepsi's first special-markets sale staff. Instead of schoolrooms or lunch counters, their struggles and victories took place in offices, storefronts, and factory floors. You haven't heard the names of these men in the myriad books written about the cola wars over the decades. They were workers whose talents were hidden in plain sight because of their race; their stories played out before the civil rights revolution. Businesses were just awakening to the potential of a diverse work place and untapped markets."

"Thomas Henry, a Manchester apothecary, is generally credited to have been the first commercial manufacturers of artificially carbonate water in the late 1770s. He improved and developed Nooth's design to make an apparatus capable of carbonating batches of up to 12 gal (54 l). The product was sold in tightly corked glass bottles."

"That the drink was more than a century old and was still not being sold absolutely everywhere hounded Ivester. People close to him claimed that he could not sleep at night if he knew that a store somewhere in the depths of the nation, any nation, was not selling Coca-Cola. Maybe it was the pizza parlor in Omaha that Warren Buffett, the legendary investor and Coke director, visited one day with his grandson, only to report back that it served nothing but Pepsi."

"Assuming that carbonated drinks are readily available, with production centers established and the supply of raw materials organised, the factors which appear to influence per capita consumption are: • personal wealth (disposable income) • climatic conditions • availability of an alternative liquid refreshment (drinking water supply) • severity of liquor laws (licensing regulations and drink/drive restrictions)."

"Georgia businessman Asa Candler bought the [sole] rights to Coca-Cola from John Pemberton in 1889. To expand the business Candler began to sell Coca-Cola syrup to wholesalers, who in turn sold it to drugstores. There it was mixed with carbonated water and served at soda fountains. Candler also dreamed up the idea of serving Coke in the shapely little glasses that are now collectibles, and he sold these to wholesalers as well."