The continent might have been the place where the secret of carbonation was cracked, but Europeans hadn’t fallen for fizzy pop with the same enthusiasm as their American cousins. Soda fountains were a rare sight in Europe, and carbonated drinks almost exclusively came in bottles. What’s more, little had changed in the way soda was made and promoted in Europe since the nineteenth century. Most of the fizz on sale in Europe was produced in small factories that still relied on horse-drawn carts for distribution, an approach that restricted their sales to local areas or regions. Instead of replicating Coca-Cola’s use of franchising to expand, European soda makers tended to build their businesses by opening new factories, an expensive approach that resulted in slower expansion.
The British soda maker Ben Shaws was typical. Founded in the Yorkshire textile town of Huddersfield in 1871, the company started out bottling mineral water from the Pennine hills before adding flavored sodas such as lemonade and cream soda to its range shortly after. Fifty years later, it was still working out of the same factory and only just starting to think about replacing its trusty horses with motorized trucks. It would take until 1959 before the company started to reach beyond its Yorkshire base after building Europe’s first soda canning plant.
There were a few exceptions. Schweppes, the grandfather of the soda industry, was doing brisk business in Britain and beyond with its tonic and mineral waters, which it continued to market as the refined fizz of choice for the upper classes. At the other end of the social scale was Tizer, a distinctive fruity British pop with a hint of carrot. Invented in 1924 by the Manchester-based mineral water businessman Fred Pickup, Tizer became a hit with children, and by 1936 Pickup’s company had opened a network of factories across England and Wales to keep the bright red soda flowing.
Another success story was the German citrus soda Sinalco. The drink emerged out of the Nature Cure movement that took Germany by storm in the 1870s with its claim that people were born with the ability to cure all ailments but needed to live wholesome lives to bring out this innate power. One of the leading lights of this Germanic branch of quack medicine was Friedrich Eduard Bilz, a self-proclaimed healer who in 1882 published Das neue Naturheilverfahren (The new natural healing), the first encyclopedia of Nature Cure treatments. The book became a runaway success, selling more than two million copies of its various editions by 1917 and turning Bilz into a celebrity.
Bilz used his fame to open Schloss Lößnitz, a luxury sanatorium in the town of Radebeul, near Dresden, that offered Nature Cure remedies to wealthy believers. The treatments revolved around the idea that people needed to be toughened up if their bodies were to drive out disease. Patients walked barefoot through the snow, stood knee-high in baths of cold water, and in the most serious cases, deprived themselves of water and other liquids on the grounds that it would flush out their illness. Eating and drinking healthily was another tenet of Bilz’s medical approach, and in 1902 this belief led him to create Bilz-Brause, a soda made from tropical and local fruits and natural mineral water.
Although Bilz created his beverage with the patients at his sanatorium in mind, he decided to sell it more widely, so he teamed up with industrialist Franz Hartmann to bottle the drink for mass consumption. By the end of 1903 the pair had sold ten million liters of Bilz-Brause across Germany, and in 1904 sales reached twenty-five million liters. The success of Bilz-Brause prompted a spate of copycats, so in 1905 Bilz and Hartmann decided the drink needed a more distinctive name and came up with Sinalco, based on the Latin sine alcohole (without alcohol). By the start of 1914, Sinalco was being exported all over Europe and could even be found in China, Brazil, Turkey, and the United States. But the outbreak of World War I stopped Sinalco’s growth in its tracks by forcing its production to stop. Sinalco returned after the war and, despite the setback of Bilz’s death in 1922, could be found in places as far afield as Buenos Aires, Istanbul, Chicago, London, and Warsaw by 1932.
But for all their success Sinalco, Schweppes, and Tizer were working in a continent that was much less partial to soda than Americans. While there are no figures allowing a direct comparison, the pre-World War II sales volumes reported by the bigger European soda makers suggest that carbonated drinks, while not unusual, were consumed far less in Europe than in America. The French continued to quaff their wine, the Germans kept drinking their beer, and the British retained their fondness for tea. What’s more, almost no one in Europe had any idea what a cola was. So when Coca-Cola started its push to win over European taste buds it faced not only the challenge of converting a continent to the taste of cola but also a market that had yet to fall in love with soda. It was an expansion fraught with difficulties, and Coca-Cola’s first European venture set the tone.
In 1919 the company granted the right to bottle its drink in Paris to an expat American and his French business partner. The pair knew little about bottling and even less about hygiene. They mixed Coca-Cola syrup with unsterilized tap water that they put into bottles and capped with bottle caps they failed to disinfect. The result were fizzy cocktails of bacteria that caused every Parisian who tried the new drink to become violently ill. The incident ruined the name of Coca-Cola in Paris. For years after restaurants and cafés refused to talk to the company’s salesmen. One restaurateur was so angered by the poisoning of his customers that he chased the next Coca-Cola salesman who came to his establishment through the streets of Paris while brandishing a butcher’s knife.
Despite such failures Robert Woodruff had stepped up Coca-Cola’s efforts to conquer the world. In 1926 he created the Coca-Cola Export Corporation, which was charged with giving the world a Coke. On the surface the new business got off to a flying start. Within three years of its creation, Coca-Cola was on sale in seventy-six countries and 15 percent of the company’s income came from outside the United States. But the truth was Coca-Cola was struggling to penetrate markets outside Canada, Mexico, and the American colony of Hawaii. Once again Europe was a source of pain. In 1940 all of Coca-Cola’s small European operations were racking up significant losses, even though more and more Europeans took to drinking soda during the 1920s and 1930s. All, that is, except one: Germany.
The idea of bringing Coke to the beer-loving nation came from an American named Ray Powers. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Atlanta, Powers first came to Europe in World War I as part of a machine gun battalion. But instead of returning home when the war was over, he decided to stay, convinced big bucks were to be made in postwar Europe. One such business opportunity, he imagined, would be bringing Coca-Cola to the Old World. He knew how big Coke was back home and believed it could be just as big in Europe. So the relentlessly optimistic expat badgered Coca-Cola to give him the bottling rights for Germany. In April 1929 he got the go-ahead and opened Germany’s first Coke bottling plant in the industrial city of Essen.
The Essen plant was a primitive operation with basic, hand-powered bottling machines and horse-and-cart deliveries, but it had no trouble meeting demand because there wasn’t any. By the end of his first year in the Coke business, Powers had burned through all his money and sold just 5,840 cases of the drink. Undeterred, Powers persuaded Woodruff to sink another $10,000 into the business. Sales doubled but business remained dismal. Yet Powers, full of puppy dog enthusiasm, remained as hopeful as when he started. It was just going to take a bit more time, that’s all, he told Woodruff in a 1930 letter. Oh, and don’t worry about that Adolf Hitler guy either: “If Hitler comes to power he may bring German signers of the Treaty of Versailles before a court martial and actually some heads may fall … but I do not believe that he stands for disorder, lawless violence or arbitrary repudiation of the documents German statesmen have signed.”
Powers was more worried about the German love affair with beer than the Nazis. He knew it was vital for people to have a cold rather than warm Coca-Cola when they tried it for the first time. But the only outlets with refrigeration were the taverns owned by the German breweries, which also owned the nation’s ice plants, and
they didn’t want this nonalcoholic beverage taking up valuable space in their iceboxes. Soft drinks, as far as Germans were concerned, were to be consumed warm and stored under the bar or in the cellar.
To convince bar owners to take the drink and keep it cold, Powers invented a special briefcase for his salesmen. The case contained a tin box filled with ice and Coca-Cola bottles so that when bar owners were introduced to the beverage it would be at the ideal temperature. The unlucky salesmen who had to lug this heavy case around with them called it the Seufzertasche—“the case of many sighs.”
Powers also produced a flyer called “Was ist Coca-Cola?” to introduce Germans to the drink. “We had millions and millions of these prospectus. An unbelievable amount,” Max Keith, who joined Coca-Cola Germany in November 1933 as an assistant manager, told Coca-Cola’s archivists several years later. “We went to restaurants on weekends because on Saturdays and Sundays they had the highest frequentation. We put this prospectus on every table. Sometimes the owner ran after us and took the prospectus off the table or asked the waiters to take them off, but we went back again and again. So that way people finally knew the name Coca-Cola and knew what it meant.”
By the time Keith joined the company, Powers’s leafleting campaign was paying off. Sales pushed through the one-hundred-thousand-cases mark in 1933 and kept rising, its growth greased with the economic boom that followed the Nazi Party’s seizure of power. In 1936 sales passed the million-cases-a-year mark, lifted by sales from the Berlin Olympics and ads that—in stark contrast to the drink’s embrace of temperance in America— appealed directly to beer drinkers with the words “Plagt dich der katzenjammer? Eiskaltes Coca-Cola hilft” (“Suffering from a hangover? Ice-cold Coca-Cola helps”).
But in an increasingly xenophobic Germany, success soon sparked trouble. The Nazi dictatorship ordered the company to declare its caffeine content on its bottles as part of Hitler’s puritan drive to wean Germans off tobacco, alcohol, and caffeine. Then came the leaflets created by Karl Flach. Born in Bonn in 1905, Flach first discovered Coca-Cola in 1929 while traveling in America and its popularity stuck in his mind. So in 1931 when he became the owner of Blumhoffer Nachfolger, a Cologne-based lemonade maker, he launched a cola of his own: Afri-Cola. To sell the drink Flach raided his American inspiration’s best ideas. He adopted the franchise bottling model that had powered Coca-Cola’s American growth and promoted Afri-Cola as a hangover cure. But he also sought to win over customers by emphasizing Afri-Cola’s Germanic origins with the slogan: “Always refreshing, good and German.”
This mix of nationalism and mimicry paid off. Soon Afri-Cola was doing enough business to keep Powers and his team looking over their shoulders. In 1936, while locked in this head-to-head struggle for cola dominance, Flach joined a group of businessmen on a tour of American companies organized by the German Labor Front, the Nazi trade union that replaced the country’s independent unions after Hitler took power. One of the stops on this US tour was the Coca-Cola bottling plant in New York City. While Flach was being shown around the plant, a bunch of bottle caps caught his eye. Unlike the usual Coca-Cola bottle caps, these had Hebrew writing on them, as they were intended to reassure New York’s Jewish population that Coca-Cola was kosher. But Flach saw an opportunity, and he slipped some into his bag.
On returning to Germany with the caps he wrote a leaflet warning the German people that Coca-Cola was a Jewish company. He distributed this leaflet to leading Nazi Party members, government officers, and the general public together with a photograph of the kosher bottle caps he collected in New York. The leaflet told how this suspect American business spent more than 4 million reichsmarks forcing its way into Germany in a “loud and arrogant manner,” adding that it would be miraculous if there wasn’t Jewish money behind such an expensive venture.
The leaflet ended with a call for all Germans to do their duty by refusing to drink this American-Jewish beverage. The accusations may have been false but it was dynamite in Nazi Germany. Throughout 1936 the Nazis had been attacking Germany’s Jews, banning them from politics and teaching, and revoking citizenship rights for anyone of Jewish descent. “They claimed we were an American-Jewish company, because to many of the Nazi people Americans and Jews were just identical,” said Keith. “Consequently, our salesmen had also quite a few battles in the taverns with party members.”
But while Coca-Cola salesmen ended up brawling with Nazi supporters in German bars, Flach’s leaflet didn’t spark the public backlash against Coca-Cola that Flach had hoped, and the Nazi state paid little attention to the claims. The incident did, however, underline how much things had changed in Germany since Powers’s initial dismissive attitude toward Hitler and his followers. As 1938 ended, Coca-Cola Germany was selling millions of cases every year but Powers was thinking about getting out of Germany. He thought about decamping with his wife and two children to Paris to start again, but that would mean leaving his Coca-Cola fortune behind because the Nazis had banned people from taking money out of the country. The fifty-six-year-old was still thinking about what to do when on Thursday, November 24, 1938, a large truck collided with his car in Berlin. Seriously injured, Powers spent the next three weeks in the hospital fighting for his life before dying on December 13. That same day the Nazis opened the Neuengamme concentration camp.
Keith inherited control of the business, but while sales were set to hit the five million cases mark in 1939, the threat of war loomed large. On September 1, 1939, the inevitable finally happened when Hitler’s forces invaded Poland. Two days later the British and French declared war on Germany, and World War II had begun. The British imposed a naval blockade to prevent goods and raw materials from reaching Germany, cutting off Keith’s supply of Coca-Cola concentrate from the United States. Eager to keep the Coca-Cola flowing, the company looked for ways to get around the British blockade. It looked at flying its concentrate into Switzerland, toyed with the idea of bringing it through Russia, and explored the possibility of smuggling it in via Romania. Eventually fears of a British backlash that could see the company shut out of Canada, Australia, and beyond prevailed, and the company gave up its hunt for a backdoor route into Germany.
Britain’s preparations for battle also hit Coke operations in the United Kingdom. In October 1939 the British froze sugar use by businesses at 1938 levels and told soft drink manufacturers to start using other sweeteners such as saccharin rather than sugar. As war progressed British restrictions on sugar got tighter, eventually forcing Coca-Cola to stop producing its drink in the country and Schweppes to take its popular tonic water off the market due to sugar and quinine rationing.
On May 10, 1940, after months of no direct conflict except at sea, the Nazi Blitzkrieg began. German tanks and troops swarmed west, marching into the Netherlands and Belgium as they raced to conquer France. As the German assault smashed through the Belgian forces with ease, Carl West, the head of Coca-Cola in Brussels, gathered his workers and asked if they would join him in fleeing to France. West’s homeland of Norway had already been conquered by the Nazis, and he had no intention of sharing the fate of his countrymen.
West’s employees agreed to go with him to Paris. They loaded trucks with their belongings, Coca-Cola syrup, and their families before racing out of Brussels as news of the Netherlands’ surrender was announced on the radio. Two days later Brussels fell too. The Coca-Cola convoy reached France, but by then the Germans had punched through the French defenses. So they turned west, heading for the coast, hoping to cross the English Channel and reach Britain. By the time they got to Boulogne, however, it was too late. The convoy spent two terrifying days trapped in the heat of the Battle of Boulogne as machine-gun fire peppered their trucks with holes and the Luftwaffe, the German air force, dropped bombs around them. When the fighting subsided they had, somehow, all survived but most of their cargo was lost along with all hope of escape. They gathered up what was left and began the long, ominous journey back to Brussels to face life under the Nazis.
It was into this mix of rationing, air raids, and blackened debris that the former US presidential candidate Wendell Willkie flew in early 1941 on a mission to represent Pepsi-Cola. Willkie owed Pepsi a favor. Back in the summer of 1940 when the corporate lawyer had been seeking the Republican nomination, every pollster and pundit had written him off. By the time the Republicans gathered in Philadelphia to make their choice that June, he was 18 percentage points behind the favorite Thomas Dewey. Then, as the third round of voting began, Walter Mack of Pepsi-Cola came to the rescue.
The Pepsi president had a grudge against Dewey, who had taken the credit for exposing the New York City vote-rigging that Mack had worked to uncover. Now it was payback time. Knowing that many Willkie supporters wouldn’t be heard because votes were counted by state rather than locality, Mack demanded a recount in which every local delegate had to name their choice. The recount revealed that Willkie was more popular than anyone had thought and as the rounds of voting continued, more and more people sided with the underdog. In the final ballot he pulled ahead of Dewey and won the presidential nomination.
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