New Bern druggist drops "Brad's Drink" for a new name: Pepsi-Cola
For nearly five years, customers at Bradham's Drug Store in New Bern, North Carolina, had known the fizzy blend of kola nut extract, vanilla, and rare oils simply as "Brad's Drink." On August 28, 1898, pharmacist Caleb Bradham gave it a new name: Pepsi-Cola, drawing on the terms pepsin and cola to echo his claim that the drink settled the stomach. The soda fountain drink now had a name built to sell.
A small-town North Carolina drugstore remedy became one of the soft drinks that would come to define American consumer culture for the next century. Bradham's decision to name his product after a digestive claim, rather than a place or his own name, reflected an approach many American brands would later copy: naming a product for what it promised to do.
QWhat exactly did 1902 advertisements promise a glass of Pepsi-Cola would do for you?
Early print ads carried the subtitle "The Pepsin Drink" and claimed the beverage could relieve indigestion, headaches, and drowsiness. A 1902 advertisement went further, telling readers that a single glass of Pepsi-Cola contained a full teaspoon's worth of the pepsin concoction Bradham had mixed up. Modern writers dispute whether actual pepsin was ever in the formula, but the marketing leaned hard on the medicinal claim regardless. The name did exactly what Bradham wanted: it sold a cure, not just a drink. A drugstore soda was being pitched with the specificity of a prescription label, teaspoon measurement included.
QWhy did a sugar bet destroy the company Bradham built, decades after he coined the name?
Pepsi-Cola Company went bankrupt on May 31, 1923, not from weak sales but from a speculative gamble on sugar prices after World War I. Bradham had wagered on where sugar costs would move as the postwar economy settled, and the bet went badly wrong. The company's assets were liquidated for just $30,000, a fraction of what the name would later be worth, before new owners bought the wreckage and reformulated the drink. Bradham lost the company he built on a digestive pun after the sugar bet failed. Pepsi-Cola outlived its founder's ownership by decades under entirely different management.
QWho was the very first person to taste the formula that became Pepsi-Cola?
Before there was a name, a company, or a bottle, there was James Henry King, Bradham's assistant at the drugstore, who tasted the untitled mix of kola nut extract, vanilla, and rare oils in 1893. His reaction went unrecorded, but the formula stuck around the soda fountain for five years afterward under the plain name "Brad's Drink" before Bradham ever thought to rebrand it. King's sip predates the Pepsi name by half a decade. King's sip happened behind a drugstore counter, with no ceremony attached.
