Fizz (30 page)

Clicquot Club's experience made many in the soda business wary of cans, but in 1949 Mack figured that the can's time had come. Cans were stronger and linings better than in 1936, after all. Mack tried to get Pepsi bottlers interested in canning the drink, but the high cost of the equipment needed to produce the unproven container caused them to refuse to help. Mack was a man unused to taking no for an answer, so he had Pepsi build a canning plant of its own, and in February 1950 the first Pepsi cans went
on sale in New Rochelle, New York. It was a disaster. Not only did the company's cone-top cans suffer the same leakage and taste problems that had dogged Clicquot Club back in 1936, but Pepsi's independent bottlers were furious that Mack had infringed on their exclusive geographical right to produce the drink. With cans leaking cola, bottlers threatening to sue, and the company heading down the tubes, Pepsi's board decided enough was enough. Less than two weeks after the launch of the Pepsi can, they moved Mack into the chairman's role and installed Al Steele, a former Coca-Cola executive, as president. By September Mack had quit.

Mack still believed the future of soda lay in the can. In 1953 he returned to the soda business in a blaze of publicity by buying Cantrell & Cochrane, the company that had popularized ginger ale in the 1800s. The company launched a range of canned sodas enriched with vitamin C that Mack christened Super Beverages. Mack pushed the can as the beverage container of the future, free from deposits, returns and chipped glass. Cans, the company's ads proclaimed, also cool faster, take up less refrigerator space, and are “super-sanitary” since “as many as 30 people may drink out of the bottle before it comes to you.” Despite the hype surrounding the launch of the Super Beverages and some lucrative deals with US military bases, Mack's comeback failed to bring in the big money that he hoped for and leaking cans continued to dog the business. But by the end of 1954, most of canned soda's leakage problems had been fixed, and the likes of Canada Dry, Nehi, Vernor's, and White Rock were busy exploring the potential for canned fizz. A year later Coca-Cola also started some small-scale experiments with canning its cola.

Breweries also got in on the act, hoping to capitalize on the soda industry's slow embrace of cans and the canning facilities they had already built for their beer operations. Among them was the Sheridan Brewery Company of Sheridan, Wyoming, which launched the Can-a-Pop range of soda in July 1953. Can-a-Pop was the first soda to be packaged in easier-to-stack, flat-topped cans as opposed to the cone-top design that Pepsi had used, and the small-town brewery's innovative cans proved an instant hit. Within a month of launch the company was selling sixteen thousand cans of soda a week, enough to convince it to quit the beer business to focus on taking
Can-a-Pop nationwide. Can-a-Pop's success was, however, short-lived. As the 1950s became the 1960s, soda's big players, including Pepsi, were moving into canning en masse, and it didn't take long for Sheridan Brewery to find itself hopelessly outgunned by the superior marketing and distribution of the larger companies. By then the only thing holding back the canned soda revolution that Mack had envisaged back in 1950 was a simple opening mechanism, a problem soon overcome by the invention of the pull tab in 1962. Three years later some 3.8 billion cans of soda were being sold worldwide every year.

This, of course, was all to come when Steele replaced Mack as the boss of Pepsi. The new Pepsi chief was a refugee from Coca-Cola. Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Steele managed a circus before joining Coca-Cola's advertising agency D'Arcy. Impressed by his advertising work, Coca-Cola hired him, and by 1945 he had risen to vice president level. But Steele's flamboyant style clashed with the staid hierarchical culture of Coke and, after a falling out with Woodruff, he found himself sidelined. So when Pepsi's board asked him to come to New York and save the company, he leapt at the chance. Coca-Cola was furious. It expected Steele to quit but not to go to “the imitator,” as Coke had begun calling Pepsi internally. It was nothing short of treason as far as Coca-Cola was concerned, and when Steele poached a cabal of Coke's rising stars to join him, his name became as unmentionable at the company's Atlanta headquarters as the word Pepsi.

Steele worked fast to get Pepsi back on track. He shut down the canning operation and, in a push to decentralize operations, created regional offices across the United States, farming out many of the company's national divisions to these offices, including the work of the Negro-Market Team. He standardized the use of the Pepsi logo—now a bottle cap that displayed the words Pepsi-Cola in script within a white middle topped and bottomed with waves of red and blue—and created a team of mobile chemists to roam the nation carrying out spot checks on the company's 650 bottlers to make sure the drink was the same wherever it was purchased. To get the bottlers back on his side after Mack's canning experiment and years of falling sales, he made them a bold promise: “The time has come for you to stop driving around in lousy Fords. I'm going to put you in Cadillacs.”

Steele also upped the price of Pepsi and adopted a new advertising theme, “More Bounce to the Ounce,” that emphasized Pepsi as a source of energy. It was a theme that plenty of soda companies had embraced before. From Coca-Cola's wartime claims of productivity-boosting Coke breaks to Dr Pepper's pseudoscientific “Drink a Bite to Eat at 10, 2 and 4” claim, soda companies had long pitched themselves as energy replenishing drinks. “More Bounce to the Ounce” tried to do the same, making a virtue of the sugar in Pepsi in TV advertising that showed teenagers doing the jitterbug while singing “Go get Pepsi for the Pepsi bounce” with a stunningly handsome first-time actor named James Dean at center stage. The ad launched Dean's career, but the campaign failed.

It turned out that postwar America didn't want calories. American society was changing fast. The postwar economic boom led to an explosion in car ownership, and as Americans became motorists they left the inner cities and headed for the greenery, space, and peace of the suburbs. To supply their needs came new types of retail environments: shopping malls, supermarkets, drive-in movie theaters, fast-food chains, and gas stations—all offering convenience and copious parking. Main Street with its soda fountains and mom-and-pop stores was left behind as America headed for the highway. By the middle of the 1960s the once ubiquitous soda fountain was in steep decline. Before the war every small town had a soda fountain, but in 1965 only half of them did. In the cities the shift was even more marked. Drugstores dumped the fountains and new fast-food chains like McDonald's nabbed their customers. The birthplace of the American soda industry turned into a relic, the fountains that survived becoming little more than museum pieces. The new American society was one of greater affluence, labor-saving devices, TV dinners, and extra leisure time. Yet it was also a society that constantly fretted about its weight even as its increasingly sedentary lifestyle increased its jean size.

The idea that to be thin was to be beautiful took root in the 1920s and embedded itself deeper in people's minds during the postwar years. This cultural shift in attitudes to attraction could be seen in the changing shape of Psyche, the topless mascot of the mineral water and soda company White Rock. In 1894 the Wisconsin company first adopted Psyche, a
mortal of Greek legend who was so beautiful she made the goddess of love, Venus, jealous. Back then its vision of the legendary symbol of beauty had a five-foot-four frame and a 37-27-38 figure, but in 1947, to reflect changing attitudes, Psyche went on a crash diet, shedding two inches from her bust and waist plus a full three inches from her hips. She also grew a couple of inches taller. The trend would continue. By the end of the 1970s, White Rock's Psyche had slimmed down to a twenty-four-inch waist and thirty-four-inch hips.

Pepsi quickly realized that it had misjudged the national mood with its talk of extra calories and did a spectacular u-turn. “More Bounce to the Ounce” was out, replaced by “Pepsi-Cola, The Light Refreshment” in a campaign backed by newspaper ads aimed at weight-watching housewives that declared: “The modern woman owes a lot to today's good sense in diet. She eats light, drinks light, and keeps her youthful figure longer. She looks better, feels better. Men like her better. And so does her insurance company. For her, today's Pepsi-Cola is refreshment made to order.”

This was Pepsi as a diet drink, not a calorie-packed soda. The trouble was that nothing had changed but the ads. After seeing Pepsi's change in direction, Coca-Cola ordered its chemists to find out how the Pepsi formula had changed. The results were surprising. Pepsi's formula hadn't changed noticeably. In 1950 Coke's chemists reported that Pepsi averaged 13.67 calories per ounce. In 1953 the newly christened light refreshment had an average of 13.41 calories in every ounce. Coca-Cola averaged 12.7 calories. One Coca-Cola employee tried to find out more by calling a local Pepsi bottler and pretending to be a fat man who hoped Pepsi might help him lose weight. The bottler cheerfully replied that there were just 10 calories per ounce in a Pepsi, providing a lower calorie count than Coca-Cola's scientists were reporting and neatly fudging the fact that it came in twelve-ounce bottles.

While Pepsi's attempt to woo housewives by presenting itself as the lightweight option was largely smoke and mirrors, this and Steele's other reforms did the trick, bringing the company back from the brink of ruin and transforming it, once again, into a fast-growing threat to Coca-Cola. By the middle of the 1950s Pepsi's revival became threatening enough to finally
persuade the increasingly conservative Woodruff that Coke would have to be sold in larger bottle sizes if the company was to win over supermarket shoppers looking to buy cola for their entire family. Soon soda companies were locked in a bottle size arms race to win over car-driving housewives who homed in on larger bottles that offered a lower price per ounce.

But the concept of a diet soda was already becoming more than advertising fiction by the time Pepsi relaunched itself with its “Light Refreshment” campaign. Diet soda originated in 1951 when Hyman Kirsch became vice president of the Jewish Sanitarium for Chronic Disease in Brooklyn. Born in the Russian city of Simferopol in 1876, Kirsch moved to America sometime around 1900 and in 1904 founded Kirsch Beverages to produce a range of bottled sodas that included grape, lemon-lime, celery, and black cherry flavors. A year after taking the position at the sanitarium, Kirsch began thinking about how patients with diabetes or cardiovascular problems had to go without soda. He thought it was a shame that they couldn't enjoy a refreshing drink of fizz, and together with his son Morris, he began looking into creating a sugar-free soda for them. The father-son duo asked Kirsch Beverages' chemist Dr. Samuel Epstein to research the world of artificial sweeteners to see what sugar substitutes could be used.

The best-known synthetic sweetener at that time was saccharin, discovered in 1879 by a German chemist who spilled some on his hands before tucking into a piece of bread only to find that it now tasted incredibly sweet. Although it was calorie-free, saccharin's intense sweetness—about three hundred times that of sugar—also came with an unpleasant metallic aftertaste that was nearly impossible to conceal, so Epstein passed over saccharin and continued his search. One chemical laboratory he spoke to told him about a new form of artificial sweetener: cyclamates. Created at the University of Illinois in 1937, cyclamates could be used in two forms— sodium cyclamate and calcium cyclamate—but the result was the same: a sweetener thirty times as sweet as sugar, but with zero calories and a better taste than saccharin. And, in a fluke of timing, cyclamates had just been approved for use in food and drink.

Using the new sweetener, Kirsch and his team developed two sugar-free sodas—a ginger ale and a black cherry flavor. They named the drinks
No-Cal, and they proved popular with the sanitarium patients, but there weren't enough patients to sustain production. So Kirsch decided to sell the range more widely and added root beer and chocolate soda flavors to it. Chocolate sodas had been a big fad in the soda fountains during the late nineteenth century, but while the rest of the United States had lost interest by the mid-1900s they remained popular in New York, especially in the form of the New York or Brooklyn egg cream, a frothy mix of soda water, milk, and chocolate syrup that contains neither egg nor cream. The drink's roots are thought to lie in soda fountain egg creams or early chocolate milkshake recipes of the late 1800s, which often contained egg, cream, and soda water. In the 1920s cost-conscious New York fountain owners took out the egg and swapped cream for milk to save money. The result was the modern-day egg cream, a soda enduring enough among New Yorkers for Lou Reed to write a song about it for his 1996 album
Set the Twilight Reeling.

Armed with his new flavors, Kirsch started selling No-Cal in stores across the New York City area, pitching it as a sugar-free soda for weight-conscious women. By the end of 1953 Kirsch's innovative diet sodas were racking up sales of more than $5 million a year, and No-Cal could be found in nearly three-quarters of New York grocery stores.

It didn't take long for other soda companies to latch onto the diet drink idea and start releasing their own sugar-free beverages, including Canada Dry, which launched a zero-calorie ginger ale called Glamor in 1954. By 1957 around 120 million bottles of diet soda were being sold in America every year. The wider diet industry wouldn't take off until the 1960s but the soda companies were already laying the groundwork with their no-calorie sodas. Popular as these drinks were in the late 1950s they were but a drop in a soda ocean, but that was all about to change.

In 1958 Royal Crown joined the diet pop bandwagon with Diet-Rite. Initially the company promoted it as a drink for diabetics and sold it in the medical section of drugstores. But in 1961 the company decided to see if it could break Diet-Rite out of its diabetic niche by launching it in Chicago's supermarkets and promoting it as a cola with all the taste but none of the calories. It was a decision that sparked a revolution.