The one exception was the work of Harry Hollingworth, a young psychology professor at Columbia University, and his wife and research assistant, Leta, who designed and performed the first comprehensive double-blind experiments on the effect of caffeine on human health. These studies are still being cited in journal articles today. For example, a 1989 study published in the American Journal of Medicine referenced the Hollingworths’ 150-page 1912 study,8 to the effect that “a total day’s caffeine dose of 710 mg was necessary to lessen subjective sleep quality.” Their careful work demonstrated that caffeine in modest doses improved motor performance and did not disturb sleep. In sum, their work failed to support Wiley’s concerns; although in fairness it must be added that in large part it also failed to address them in any significant way.
Coverage of the trial was frequently sensationalistic, with one headline reading, “EIGHT COCA-COLAS CONTAIN ENOUGH CAFFEINE TO KILL.”9 Wiley himself never testified, leading us to speculate that his group of young food tasters had not experienced any harmful consequences from their exposure to the drink. The case was finally decided on technical grounds that have little to do with caffeine and make little sense. The District Court judge Sanford, who later was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, directed a jury verdict in favor of Coca-Cola, ruling that their drink was not mislabeled, because it did contain minute amounts of both cocaine and cola, and that, furthermore, because caffeine had been part of the original formula or recipe for the beverage, it could not be legally regarded as an additive. Generous in victory, Coca-Cola voluntarily agreed never to feature any child under twelve in their advertisements, a forbearance they relaxed only in 1986.
Cartoon of Wiley admonishing an innocent public about the evil goblins lurking unseen in a glass of Coca-Cola. (Good Housekeeping, 1912)
Wiley did not give up. He used the publicity from the case to try to push through provisions adding caffeine to the federal list of habit-forming and harmful substances that must be named on product labels. Still shy of promoting the presence of caffeine in their products, Coca-Cola successfully fought the amendments.
Meanwhile the government successfully appealed the District Court’s ruling to the Supreme Court. It was now determined that caffeine was an added ingredient after all, and the case was remanded to Judge Sanford for retrial on the issue of caffeine’s safety. This time the case was settled out of court, and Coca-Cola agreed to cut the amount of caffeine in its soft drink by half. In return there was an unwritten accord that the Bureau of Chemistry, by then operating under new leadership, would, from then on, leave Coca-Cola in peace.
Coca-Cola has not relied on that ancient truce to protect its interests from those meddlers, newborn in every generation, who would use the law to control what ostensibly free adult citizens are allowed to eat or drink. In the 1970s, largely as a response to reformational grumblings stirred up by concern over an unsubstantiated link between caffeine and pancreatic cancer, Coca-Cola and other purveyors of dietary caffeine set up and funded the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) and its public relations arm, the International Food Information Council (IFIC), both based in Washington, D.C., to help forestall any efforts to regulate or ban caffeine. The heart of these groups was their Caffeine Committee. In the last twenty years ILSI has sponsored and IFIC has publicized dozens of reputable research projects and international conferences of scientists to evaluate the role of caffeine in human health. Naturally, the Caffeine Committee is careful to search out and support those researchers who see caffeine as a relatively harmless compound and to avoid supporting those who would like to see it removed from the market. Nevertheless, the ILSI studies are good scientific efforts, and their results have made important contributions to the inadequate understanding of caffeine’s pharmacological effects.
Cola as Cultural Icon
“Caffeine is caffeine,” the logician might observe, bringing to bear the powerful insight of sovereign reason. Yet with respect to caffeine, coffee and tea, its major natural sources, differ in at least one important way from caffeinated colas and other caffeinated soft drinks, to which caffeine has been added: Coffee and tea are primarily the drinks of adults, while soft drinks, as Wiley admonished, are as commonly or more commonly consumed by children, even small children.
It is strange to say, but the twentieth century, the time of unmatched enlightenment in education and medical science, has witnessed the first widespread acceptance of the general and unmonitored use of a psychoactive stimulant drug by the juvenile population. In fact, except for khat, widely used by adolescent Yemenis, we know of no other mood-altering drug whose use anywhere by the young is or has been not only legal, but approved and fostered by adults.
Sundblom Santa advertisement for Coca-Cola. This is one of many Sundblom paintings that created the American icon of Santa Claus. The fat, red-nosed, red-cloaked, jolly Coca-Cola-drinking version of Santa Clause became a defining image of American cultural life.
Coca-Cola, the forerunner of all commercially caffeinated soft drinks, was, during its first years, an elixir sold in pharmacies. After the turn of the century, the CocaCola Company had to make a choice as to whether to continue promoting the drink as a tonic, which might suggest it was a strong stimulant with a limited application, or to advertise it as a simple beverage, suitable for everyone, including children. Some Coca-Cola leaders had reservations about the latter strategy, partly because they were concerned over the potential danger to children. However, the simple beverage theory won, even though it meant sacrificing any claim, in the words of executive correspondence, for “excellency or special merit,” and Coca-Cola faced the future as one of many soft drinks.
With this strategy in place, it remained for the company leaders to ensure their product a distinctive place in the arcana of common soda fountain options. One of their central problems remained how to inveigle children into becoming lifelong Coca-Cola drinkers while observing their pledge never to show a child under the age of twelve in an advertisement. While the advertising of Coca-Cola is an epic tale, no single feature stands out as clearly or has had such a broad impact on popular culture as Coca-Cola’s most brilliant response to this apparent dilemma: the invention of the modern Santa Claus.
Santa Claus, as we all know, is a portly, white-haired gentleman with a snowy beard, broad smile, rosy cheeks, red nose, wearing a costume somewhat resembling bright red flannel underwear with a broad belt and big black boots, happily busy with the delivery of toys on snowy Christmas Eves. What many may not realize is that this image of Santa is an American, twentieth-century invention, created by Haddon Sundblom, a Swedish artist in the employ of Coca-Cola, and promoted relentlessly into the apotheosis of a folk hero. Before Sundblom’s work, Santa Claus was represented in a variety of ways. In Europe he had traditionally been a serious, even severe, tall, thin man wearing any of the primary colors. In the popular recitation piece “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” written by Clement Moore, a Columbia University professor, in the 1920s, Santa became a jolly elf only a few inches high.
In their book Dream of Santa, Charles and Taylor relate how in 1931, posing his friend Lou Prentice, a retired salesman, as his first model, Sundblom painted the first depiction of the Santa Claus we know in America today. After Prentice’s death, Sundblom used himself as a model, refining his creation further. The Coca-Cola Company built a small advertising industry around Sundblom’s Coke-guzzling saint, who was invariably aided in completing his eleemosynary labors by the lift provided by sugar and caffeine—an advertising effort aimed, obviously, primarily at young children who would, in the course of things, grow into succeeding generations of CocaCola consumers. New Sundblom productions were used on billboards and in magazine advertisements year after year, until his last two paintings were completed in 1964.
The Buzz Beyond: Supercolas and Other High-Dose Caffeinated Soft Drinks
In February 1996, Beverage Marketing Corporation, which offers consulting and information services to the global bevera
ge industries, reported that Coca-Cola Classic was the best-selling soft drink in America, followed by Pepsi-Cola, Diet Coke, Dr Pepper, Mountain Dew, Diet Pepsi, Sprite, 7-UP, Caffeine Free Diet Coke, and Caffeine Free Diet Pepsi.10 Insiders in the soft drink industry and outsiders trying to get in have noticed that the top six brands have one thing in common: They all contain caffeine. Following the maxim “If a little is good, then a lot is better,” a number of companies have offered or are preparing to offer some soft drinks containing more caffeine and others in which the presence of caffeine is a more emphatic component of their market identity.
The first of these high-caffeine soft drinks was Jolt Cola. In a brief company history posted on the Internet, called “Where did Jolt Come From?,” Jolt represents its founder, C.J.Rapp, as a pioneer. In 1985, when Jolt Cola was introduced, their story runs, most beverage companies were pushing a “less is more” approach to new products: fewer calories, less sugar, and less caffeine. Rapp had the vision to buck this trend and put the slogan “Twice the Caffeine” on every bottle and can. What they don’t mention in this article is that Jolt originally boasted “Twice the Sugar” as well. But even though more caffeine might seem to call for more sugar to counteract the increased bitterness, Jolt today has trimmed its sugar to standard levels, but kept the caffeine content as high as ever, which gives the drink a disrinctive “bite” that some people find pleasant.
Rapp says that his product was inspired by college students who were “concocting elixirs to help them study for exams,” perhaps a veiled reference to the use of methamphetamine, dexamphetamine, and caffeine pills. He sees a tie-in between Jolt’s success and the renaissance in coffeehouse culture: “Just as coffee bars began showing up in every city from Boston to Seattle, Jolt, the espresso of colas, took the soft drink market by storm.”
In the 1990s many new high-caffeine soft drinks are flooding the market worldwide. The triumph of Jolt is perhaps more apparent in Rapp’s mind than in the marketplace, as evidenced by the fact that most comments about the product consist of people asking each other if it is still being made and if so where it can be found. Recently we found a grocer in Philadelphia who stocked it. But on returning several weeks later, it was gone, and the owner explained that the distributor was not expected for an indeterminate period.
Another way of looking at it, however, is that, difficult to find as Jolt may have become, people still remember it and seek it out. There can be no doubt that highcaffeine soft drinks can have a distinctive flavor. Jolt itself is a superior product and easily the best-tasting cola on the market. The extra caffeine gives it “point,” a word used to designate piquant bitterness, such as that which is vital to fine coffee’s appeal. Significantly, Jolt, unlike Coca-Cola or Pepsi, is still sweetened with cane sugar, and the clarity of cane sugar, which is far less cloying than cheap corn syrup substitutes, combines with the additional caffeine to create a bittersweet flavor that is hard to beat.
The cola nut is not the source of either the flavoring for or the caffeine content of cola soft drinks. However, other carbonated caffeinated beverages, such as some made from the guarana berry, actually depend for their flavor and stimulant power on the high caffeine content of the fruit or nut itself.
Brazilians consume more than six billion quarts of soft drinks a year, making Brazil the third-largest soft drink market in the world, after Mexico and the United States, and guarana-based drinks make up 25 percent of this market. Antarctica, a local company, and Coca-Cola currently sell the brands that dominate guarana beverage sales, but PepsiCo has announced plans to take them on with a new line of drinks flavored with plain guarana and guarana mixed with peach, passion fruit, and acerola, a citrus-flavored Brazilian berry. Pepsi is also test marketing a guarana drink in the United States called “Josta,” for which guarana is the primary flavor and source of caffeine.
In the late 1990s a new soft drink was created by Steve Gariepy to advance his ambition to market guarana, which he describes as a natural energy source. He hits every questionable note, from vulgarity, pandering to children’s interest in drugs, false historical puffing, and scientific misinformation:
Whatever your reaction may be to the name, you won’t forget it, and you certainly won’t forget the effect this drink will have on you!
…GUTS is geared toward consumers from ages 12 to 24, but it will appeal to anyone who is interested in tapping into a natural energy source. The main flavor of this amber-colored drink is the Paulina Cupana fruit, also known as Guarana, praised by the Andiraze aboriginals of Brazil for thousands of years as a stimulant on both mind and body. Today, Guarana is one of the most sought-after ingredients in “smart drinks,” a new category of beverages consumed by youth at “Rave parties” (drug and alcohol free) all across North America. The Guarana berry has 2.5 times the caffeine per ounce as coffee, giving GUTS almost twice the jolt as a regular cola. Pepsi, for example, has 3.2 mg of caffeine per fluid ounce, compared to GUTS that has almost double that amount. The fruit extract is 100% organic, which places GUTS in the burgeoning category of “New Age” beverages.
Note that if GUTS has twice the correctly stated 3.2 mg per ounce caffeine content of Pepsi, it would have only about a third the caffeine per ounce of average coffee. The drink may be “New Age,” but the snake oil sales tactics are as ancient as the imaginary Andiraze Indians are supposed to have been by the author of this release.11
An interesting phenomenon is the Austrian dominance in the production and consumption of European high-caffeine “energy drinks,” including Red Bull, Blue Sow, Dark Dog, and Flying Horse, to name a few. Austrians, often stereotyped as slow moving and hypochondriacal, consume more than one-third of such beverages produced in Europe. Red Bull, for example, sold 150 million cans in 1996, more than a third in Austria alone.
The use of colas, especially trendy high-caffeine soft drinks such as Kick, Nitro Cola, Semtex, GUTS, Afri-Cola, and the old, original Jolt Cola, are enjoying a kind of cult upsurge among computer programmers. The reason was explained in a recent article by David Ramsey in MacWEEK responding to a reader’s query, “Why do programmers drink so much cola?”12 Some of the answers to this question are discussed in chapter 16, “Thinking Over Caffeine.”
President and Mrs. Clinton gulping Coca-Cola straight from the bottle during a visit to the Moscow Coca-Cola plant, May 1995. (Reuters/ Jim Bourg/Archive Photos)
The biggest news in the area of highly caffeinated soft drinks is the entry of the giant Coca-Cola Company into the $4-billion-a-year “heavy citrus” soft drink market, 80 percent of which currently belongs to Mountain Dew, with the brand Surge. The specter of Wiley’s concerns about the propriety of selling caffeinated soft drinks to young consumers arises in connection with this highly spiked drink, because the company intends to market this high-caffeine, high-calorie beverage to twelve- to thirtyfour-year-olds, especially boys and men. The first television advertisement for Surge was aired during the 1997 Super Bowl. The marketing of Surge marks the first time caffeine itself has been brought to center stage by the manufacturer of a comestible product with a large international market. To a certain extent, what constitutes a highcaffeine soft drink is in the mind of the regulator. Consider that while Mountain Dew is an ordinary soft drink in the United States, it is too supercharged with caffeine to be legally sold on the British market.
The Straight Dope: Vivarin, NoDoz, and Other Caffeine Pills
As the purveyors of caffeine indefatigably repeat, caffeine is the only alertness aid approved for sale by the FDA. This means that companies like SmithKline Beecham, the makers of Vivarin, the largest-selling caffeine pill, and Bristol-Myers Squibb, the makers of NoDoz, and their competitors are in the enviable yet problematic position of being the legal producers and sellers of one of the only over-thecounter psychoactive stimulant drugs outside the matrix of a food or beverage.
Vivarin, which dominates sales, boasts about two-thirds of an estimated $50 million to $60 million market for caffeine pills t
hat are sold through food, drug, and mass merchandise outlets. Additional, hard-to-track sales not included in this market estimate are made through health food stores, convenience stores, rest stops, and college campuses.
Selling drugs, that is, “drugs” in the sense of compounds that can change your mood or even get you high or addicted, may seem like a great business in many ways. But because of increasing concerns about drug use in general and the health of children in particular, the manufacturers of caffeine pills and tablets face a delicate marketing problem: how to promote the responsible use of their products without ever seeming to promote their use by those under eighteen or the abuse of stimulants by adults.
One of the first things marketers do to solve their problems is to determine the profile of their potential consumers. The makers of Vivarin, after many years of experience, have isolated three distinct groups that are good prospects for their product: college students, truck drivers, and bodybuilders. Accordingly, Vivarin’s marketing efforts primarily target them. Irrespective of which of these three groups to whom any given promotional material is addressed, all the claims made on behalf of Vivarin have this common thread: Caffeine can significantly improve mood, briefly deter fatigue, and improve performance as a consequence of these effects. Noticeably absent are any claims that caffeine can augment specific human physical or mental capacities, such as increasing endurance or improving learning skills. The maker’s cautionary remarks to all three groups are also of a piece: that caffeine is no substitute for sleep and that individual responses vary widely, so each person must learn through experience how caffeine affects him.
The World of Caffeine Page 29