Soft drink

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Soft drinks are the most widely consumed category of non-alcoholic beverage on earth, sold everywhere from fast food restaurants and movie theaters to vending machines and dedicated soda stores. They come in cans, glass bottles, and plastic containers of every size. They come in dozens of flavors. But almost all of them trace their chemistry to a single experiment conducted in 1767, when an Englishman named Joseph Priestley suspended a bowl of distilled water above a beer vat at a local brewery in Leeds, England. What he discovered in that Leeds brewery launched an industry that would eventually touch every country on the planet. How did a curious scientific method become a daily ritual for hundreds of millions of people? And why, after nearly 250 years of growth, are consumers in many countries now drinking less of it? Those are the questions this documentary will explore.

• 2. Before the Bubble

  ›

  Fruit-flavored drinks date back at least to the medieval Middle East, where beverages known as sharbat were sweetened with sugar, syrup, and honey. Common additions included lemon, apple, pomegranate, tamarind, jujube, sumac, musk, mint, and ice. These drinks traveled west and became popular in medieval Europe, and the English word "syrup" itself derived from Arabic. In Tudor England, a sweetened, lemon-flavored drink called "water imperial" was widely consumed, along with a sweetened cordial called 'Manays Cryste', which was flavored with rosewater, violets, or cinnamon. The first drink formally recognized as a marketed soft drink was lemonade, sold in Paris in 1676 by the Compagnie des Limonadiers, which held a monopoly on the trade. Vendors carried tanks of the drink on their backs and dispensed cups directly to Parisians on the street. This lemonade contained no carbonation at all. The fizz would come later, from an unlikely source: a brewery in northern England and a chemist who was simply curious about the gas rising from the vats.

• 3. Priestley's Accident

  ›

  Joseph Priestley published his findings in 1772 in a paper titled Impregnating Water with Fixed Air, describing how he dripped oil of vitriol, now called sulfuric acid, onto chalk to produce carbon dioxide gas and then dissolved that gas into agitated water. Priestley found that water treated this way had a pleasant taste and offered it to his friends as a refreshing drink. He was not alone in pursuing the technique. Another Englishman, John Mervin Nooth, improved Priestley's apparatus and sold it to pharmacies for commercial use. Swedish chemist Torbern Bergman invented a separate generating device that produced carbonated water from chalk and sulfuric acid in large amounts. Thomas Henry, an apothecary from Manchester, was the first to sell artificial mineral water to the general public for medicinal purposes, beginning in the 1770s. His recipe for something called 'Bewley's Mephitic Julep' called for three drachms of fossil alkali to a quart of water. Pharmacists seized on the opportunity. They began adding herbs, birch bark, dandelion, sarsaparilla root, and fruit extracts to unflavored mineral water, laying the foundation for the flavored carbonated drinks that would follow. At the time, drinking mineral water was considered a healthy practice and was promoted by advocates of temperance.

• 4. Schweppes and the Bottle Problem

  ›

  Johann Jacob Schweppe founded the Schweppes Company in Geneva in 1783 to sell carbonated water, then relocated his business to London in 1792. His drink found an early and notable admirer in Erasmus Darwin. The Schweppes company commercialized Malvern Water at the Holywell Spring in the Malvern Hills in 1843 and received a royal warrant from King William IV. By the 1820s, London alone had around ten soft drink manufacturers. By the 1840s, that number had risen to more than fifty. For the Great Exhibition of 1851 at Hyde Park in London, Schweppes was named the official drink supplier and sold over a million bottles of lemonade, ginger beer, Seltzer water, and soda-water, with a dedicated soda water fountain positioned directly at the entrance to the exhibition. But a fundamental problem threatened the industry's expansion: carbonated drink bottles are under intense pressure from the gas inside, and no one had yet invented a reliable seal. Bottles could explode if the pressure built too high. In 1870, a man named Hiram Codd devised a solution while working at a small mineral water works on Caledonian Road in Islington, London. His patented Codd-neck bottle enclosed a marble and a rubber washer in the neck. The bottles were filled upside down; the gas pressure forced the marble against the washer, sealing in the carbonation. A pinch in the bottle's shape created a chamber that kept the marble from blocking the neck as the drink was poured. By 1887, R. White's, by then the largest soft drinks company in London and south-east England, was selling its full range, including strawberry soda, raspberry soda, cherryade, and cream soda, in Codd's glass bottles.

• 5. The American Soda Fountain

  ›

  In 1806, Yale University chemistry professor Benjamin Silliman began selling soda waters in New Haven, Connecticut, using a Nooth apparatus. Businessmen in Philadelphia and New York City followed in the early 19th century. In the 1830s, John Matthews of New York City and John Lippincott of Philadelphia both began manufacturing soda fountains and built large factories to supply them. The soda fountain became a fixture of American daily life. Problems in the U.S. glass industry meant that bottled drinks remained a minor share of the market for much of the 19th century, making the fountain the primary way most Americans drank soda. In 1892, a Baltimore, Maryland machine shop operator named William Painter patented the Crown Cork Bottle Seal, the first bottle top to reliably keep carbonation in the bottle. In 1899, the first patent was issued for a glass-blowing machine capable of producing glass bottles automatically. That machine was first operated by Michael Owens, an employee of Libby Glass Company, and within a few years glass bottle production climbed from 1,400 bottles a day to about 58,000 bottles a day. During the 1920s, the familiar six-pack cardboard carton, then called a "Home-Pak", was invented, and vending machines began to appear as well. The major brand names that defined the industry were also taking shape. R. White's Lemonade launched in 1845, Moxie in 1876, Dr Pepper in 1885, and Coca-Cola in 1886.

• 6. Global Consumption and Decline

  ›

  As of 2014, the top per-capita consuming countries were Argentina, the United States, Chile, and Mexico. Annual average consumption in the United States reached 153.5 liters per person, roughly twice that of the United Kingdom at 77.7 liters or Canada at 85.3 liters. By one estimate, per-capita soda consumption in the United States peaked in 1998 and has fallen every year since. A study in the journal Obesity tracked adults and children from 2003 to 2014 and found that the proportion of Americans who drank a sugary beverage on a given day fell from approximately 62% to 50% for adults, and from 80% to 61% for children. Researchers attributed the decline partly to growing awareness of obesity risks and partly to government efforts to improve diets. In a 2019 study of 451,743 Europeans, people who consumed two or more soft drinks per day showed a greater chance of all-cause mortality compared to those who drank fewer than one per month. The health concerns are specific: over-consumption is associated with obesity, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, dental caries, and reduced nutrient levels. A 2006 study of several thousand men and women found that women who regularly drank three or more cola-based sodas per day had bone mineral density at the hip roughly 4% lower than women who did not drink colas. A 2013 study published in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology concluded that soft drink consumption was linked to a 23% higher risk of kidney stones. Meanwhile, soda consumption has grown in lower- and middle-income countries including Cameroon, Georgia, India, and Vietnam as manufacturers have targeted those markets and discretionary incomes have risen.

• 7. Regulation and Taxation

  ›

  On the 3rd of May 2006, the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, Cadbury Schweppes, the Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo, and the American Beverage Association jointly announced voluntary guidelines to remove high-calorie soft drinks from all U.S. schools. On the 13th of December 2010, President Obama signed the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act of 2010, effective in 2014, which mandated that schools receiving federal funding must offer healthy drinks and barred the sale of soft drinks to students. The act set portion sizes by age: eight ounces for elementary schools, twelve ounces for middle and high schools. In March 2013, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed banning the sale of non-diet soft drinks larger than 16 ounces except in convenience stores and supermarkets. A state judge struck down the ban, calling it "fraught with arbitrary and capricious consequences", and the state appellate courts upheld that ruling, leaving the ban unenforceable as of 2021. Tax measures have taken a different form in other parts of the world. In 2017, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain imposed a 50% tax on soft drinks and a 100% tax on energy drinks. The food and drink industry spent more than $50 million lobbying legislators in the United States since the year 2000, reflecting the scale of the regulatory battles still ongoing. In 2022, the Mexican state of Oaxaca enacted a ban on sugary drinks including Coca-Cola amid soaring rates of obesity and diabetes, though enforcement remained weak.