Full Episode HERE.

In this episode, I sit down with cultural historian and journalist Tristan Donovan, author of Fizz: How Soda Shook Up the World, a book that starts with carbonated air and ends in war, marketing madness, and Soviet missile booths repurposed as Coke stands.

We dive deep into the weird, wonderful, and occasionally disgusting history of soda.

Expect to learn:

• How Coca-Cola built an empire through war, sugar, and street corner propaganda
• Why Pepsi almost died (and how essentially molasses smuggling saved it)
• The real reason soda bottles are dark-colored (spoiler: bugs)
• Why your taste buds might be lying to you
• The bizarre marketing choices behind Red Bull, Crystal Pepsi, and celery soda
• And why the entire soft drink industry almost hinges on one dead snail in a Scottish ginger beer

We also explore how soda parallels the wine world, the shady quack medicine roots of Coca-Cola, and what it all says about taste, capitalism, and how easily we buy into stories.

If you’ve ever drunk a soda (so, essentially, everyone), you’re going to love this one.

Links:

• Tristan’s book:⁠ Fizz: How Soda Shook Up the World ⁠
• ⁠Link to his Site⁠ (With all of his other work!)
• ⁠Business Wars⁠ (by Wondery) – check out their ⁠Coke vs. Pepsi episode⁠
• ⁠Spy Who⁠ (also by Wondery)

Service starts now.

Follow the show:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

I talk mostly to people in and around the service industry space. I’m looking to hear from the people I wish I could have talked to when I was coming up in restaurants. Said another way: I am trying to make sense of this wild, beautiful mess of a life, and help others that are feeling similarly confused and/or lost. You can find more of my work at⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠my blog⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, and all my social links are at the bottom of that page.

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-#14:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Dr. Shalini Bahl, mindful marketing⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

-#22:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Doug Frost MW MS⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

-#23:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jeffrey Morgenthaler⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

As always, I’m just here taking notes, trying to figure out what it all means.

Cheers

Tristan Donovan (00:02.37)

Hi, Andrew.

Andrew Roy (00:02.375)

Tristan, hey, how’s it going?

Tristan Donovan (00:05.4)

Going alright at how things.

Andrew Roy (00:07.169)

good, good. It’s funny. Anytime I talk to anyone across the ocean, I’m always like, man, isn’t the world so crazy we live in?

Tristan Donovan (00:18.702)

Yeah, the idea of doing this kind of when we were growing up, probably like, how could you even do this? Crackly phone calls, which…

Andrew Roy (00:25.933)

No, no. Yeah. Well, cool. So I always like to start off and just make sure there aren’t any time constraints I might need to know about.

Tristan Donovan (00:39.79)

No, do. We’ll need to kind of wrap up by 10 past five. That gives us about an hour and 10 minutes because I’ve got a call at half past. So as long as we’re wrapped up then that would be fine.

Andrew Roy (00:49.46)

perfect, yeah.

Andrew Roy (00:55.397)

I actually write at, I believe it’s five o’clock year time, I need to leave, because it’s the morning here, so I have to work still. So that works out actually really well. Yeah. Then I would just like to thank you for taking the time, trying to make it valuable for you, and yeah, it’s been a real pleasure to meet you.

Tristan Donovan (01:03.246)

So we both got a hard kind of deadline.

Tristan Donovan (01:16.302)

Yeah, no, Yeah, thanks for inviting me on. Yeah, see how much I can remember. I’ve had a quick flick through, but it’s like, oh wow, there’s much more in here than I recall.

Andrew Roy (01:22.948)

sure, yeah.

Andrew Roy (01:28.783)

my gosh, yeah, rereading it, was like, man, there’s a lot in here about like, I remembered it was good, but I didn’t remember how good it was. I do always like to let people know I chose Riverside. It’s a good platform. If there’s a little bit of delay or drag, it actually is uploading things from your side into the cloud. So it actually comes out very clear. So that’s one of the good things about that. And then,

Tristan Donovan (01:38.766)

You

Tristan Donovan (01:45.475)

Yeah.

Tristan Donovan (01:52.258)

Yeah. Yeah.

No, I mean, we use it ourselves. I mean, these days I actually do run a podcast production company. So we actually use Riverside ourselves because it’s it’s worked out the best of the ones we’ve tried. So yeah, but we’ve had ones where it drops and it’s like, it’s lifesaver that loads up locally as well.

Andrew Roy (02:05.191)

really? Cool.

Andrew Roy (02:11.254)

Yeah, does really well.

Andrew Roy (02:17.329)

Yeah. Well, cool. I mean, I guess all the other things about leaving your browser open, I don’t need to tell you about them. Yeah.

Tristan Donovan (02:24.43)

Yeah, I mean, the mic position, I had no idea if it’s too near too far. It looks like it’s yellow from what I can see. Just tell me what to do.

Andrew Roy (02:31.099)

Shit.

Andrew Roy (02:35.099)

Yeah. No, no, you sound great on there. I hope I sound fine. And then if you say something that you realize that you misspoke or didn’t mean to, just let me know. Because I can always edit that out. But yeah, only one person’s taken me up on that so far. They were talking about their boss and then afterwards they’re like, I probably shouldn’t have said those things. It’s like, fair enough, fair enough. I’ll clip that out.

Tristan Donovan (02:40.728)

Yeah.

Tristan Donovan (02:53.527)

Right.

Tristan Donovan (02:59.598)

Yeah, I know I am aware my accent is sometimes a little bit difficult for some Americans. So if you feel like, you know, could you say that again more clearly? might take the offense.

Andrew Roy (03:11.826)

there.

Andrew Roy (03:18.365)

Sure, yeah. No, like I think I told you in the email, my best friend actually lives in the UK, that I grew up in high school, so. And like navigating that time change, was like, yeah, I got this. I already know the times I can call him, Yeah. Well, if you’re down with it, I was just gonna start. I’ve got a couple questions and we can talk about it, Well, Tristan, thank you for coming and talking to me today about…

Tristan Donovan (03:25.39)

Yeah.

Tristan Donovan (03:33.551)

Excellent.

Tristan Donovan (03:38.474)

Yeah.

Yeah, brilliant.

Andrew Roy (03:47.109)

One of your older books, so we’ll have to refresh your memory. Yeah, for Fizz. So a book all about sodas. So, surprisingly dense work for such a kind of light topic. So I wanted to start off with what I thought was one of the best quotes in the book. And it made me laugh out loud when I was rereading it for today’s talk. So it’s right in the middle. The bar is dead, it is king.

Tristan Donovan (03:50.574)

No.

Tristan Donovan (03:56.878)

Thanks for having me.

Andrew Roy (04:15.741)

you’re writing about prohibition. And it’s just one sentence, strangely, the need for medicinal alcohol grew rapidly after prohibition. And I think that sentence really captures a lot of kind of your whimsy and fun when you’re talking about different subjects that a lot of people might think are a little on the boring side or just kind of ordinary. So when did you get into writing and how did you kind of develop your style?

Tristan Donovan (04:15.982)

You

Tristan Donovan (04:24.686)

You

Tristan Donovan (04:40.45)

you

Well, my background is in journalism. I actually went to university planning to be an ecologist and found out during my course that mainly meant being in England, that mainly meant being in a muddy field, being rained on. And there was like a sort of slight crisis. I’m not sure this is the life I want. And so basically I ended up getting an opportunity to write for a magazine called

big issue here in the UK, which is sold by homeless people on the streets, but it’s written by writers. And it was just like a article that to be honest, I gave the idea to the editorial team expecting their go away and some journalists would write it and then said they asked me to do it. So that was kind of my entry point. So it was a little bit of a random sort of path into journalism. And I really kind of learned from the job. So my

first job was a weekly newspaper and I think for the first six months I had to write news and briefs. So we don’t really have them anymore, but it’s like you have 30 words to tell an entire news story and it can’t be 31 words and it can’t be 29 words. And so I basically spent six months doing that and that was my training. And so you sort of, I guess you kind of pick it up on the way. because I wasn’t

having gone through some postgraduate course, guess in a way that probably helps you develop your own style a bit because you’re kind of winging it a little bit. And with experience on top, you kind of eventually sort of go, well, this is how I sound. And I guess I always like to think of it as if I was talking to people rather than sort of delivering a speech. It was like, well, and then this happened, then this thing. And you know what? And the strange thing they said was this.

Andrew Roy (06:11.89)

yeah.

Andrew Roy (06:32.209)

Yeah, no, I’ve got so many questions already. So like, why 30 words? Is there something magical about 30 words? That’s what usually would fit or?

Tristan Donovan (06:42.504)

Well, yeah, I mean, this is the age of print journalism, right? And your page is fixed. It’s paper. It’s like you, you only have so much space. And I think it was like there was space for five of these if you had 30 words. And so basically it’s like, well, we can fit in five stories here. So that’s what you need to fit in each week. And so it was kind of basically very tight. think the headlines are like, has to be less than five.

five words or something like that. mean, obviously it depends how long your words are, basically write small words and you can fit more in.

Andrew Roy (07:16.797)

Yeah.

Sure. Okay. And so you’re learning on the job. I’m guessing you’re doing journalism. You don’t often get to choose what you’re writing about. You’re kind of assigned the assignments and make it interesting is your task.

Tristan Donovan (07:37.258)

Yeah. So I think probably in a way, think the best trainer had I worked on them long redundant and now dead magazine called IT training, which was a business magazine for people who worked in IT training. And it really was as dull as it sounds. these are the people who would large corporates go, I’m going to teach people how to use word.

It was kind of not the most exciting magazine. And so you have this material that’s like, you’d phone up interviewees and they’re like, I don’t know why you want to find out my job is so boring. Yeah. So you have to kind of really work to go, how can I make this, I wouldn’t say any of it is super exciting for a general audience, but it’s like, okay, how do I

Andrew Roy (08:11.005)

Tell me more about font sizes, please. Yeah. Okay.

Tristan Donovan (08:26.304)

stop people falling asleep while reading this. And so that’s kind of, I think that’s really useful because you do stuff that is inherently dull and you have to kind of really work quite hard to make it interesting. So when you do stuff that’s interesting, it feels quite easy.

Andrew Roy (08:29.415)

Mm-hmm.

Andrew Roy (08:44.689)

Well, I mean, I almost want to re investigate that idea and maybe rework that idea into we take so much of the world for granted that when you truly look at something in depth, like the way you’ve looked at soda, there is a lot of fascinating depth there. You know, like we take for granted a Coca-Cola exists, but that whole story, like which we’re going to talk about, like that’s insane. It starts with the priestly like carbonated air over

Tristan Donovan (09:11.116)

Yeah.

Andrew Roy (09:14.599)

fermenting vats of beer and it ends with war and ends with Nixon and like it’s like there is a lot there, you

Tristan Donovan (09:21.993)

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that that’s where the book came from. So the idea came, I’d done my first book on history of video games and I distinctly remember being in a car. I was in the passenger seat. I was trying to think at that time, I trying to what would be the next book? And I had a can of Coke in the cup holder and I was like, you know what? It’s kind of funny because that’s like everywhere and you never think about it. And

actually it tastes kind of odd. Why do we even drink this? It was all that kind of thinking of like, this is a bit random. Why is this so big? And so I ended up sort of starting to look into it and the more I looked, the crazier it got. It was like, okay, this is a very strange world. And I think as soon as I started finding out things about Coke and Pepsi trying to go to space and teaming up with different presidential candidates and

Andrew Roy (09:55.601)

Yeah.

Tristan Donovan (10:19.03)

fighting over whose vending machine was going to be in the White House. It was kind of like, this is just crazy. And I don’t know why anyone’s not told it because this is the weirdest, most useless consumer product ever in a way. And so ubiquitous and just fun, crazy business stories.

Andrew Roy (10:37.083)

Yeah. I mean, just Coca-Cola alone. mean, I’m sure you can find it throughout the internet. everyone knows that at some point Coca-Cola had some cocaine in it. It’s the Coke part of the name, but I thought it’d be fun to investigate just if as much as you remember about the beginning, just how deeply involved all these pseudoscience

like fraudsters or like, yeah, I’m trying to think of a better word for it, yeah, like fake drugs, like, yeah, like.

Tristan Donovan (11:08.152)

Yeah.

Tristan Donovan (11:12.71)

it was totally tied up in that it is all out of, you know, the sort of snake oil salesman, you know, who would kind of rolled into, yeah, you know, the people with the wagons and potions who would roll into the old west towns and go, Hey, this cure is all ailments. It really emerged out of that, know, Coca Cola was supposed to cure things and reduce your, I think it was a headache cure.

Andrew Roy (11:19.837)

That’s the word I was trying to think of, yeah.

Tristan Donovan (11:39.35)

market it as another drink that was big at time Moxie. I mean the list of what it supposedly cured is huge. It’s like everything from brain injuries to feeling a bit nervous. I mean it’s like it should probably list what it wouldn’t apparently cure and so all of these things kind of came out of that. They were mainly created by pharmacists who had the ingredients and they would play around with it and go well we’re putting

some winter green, because we believe it has some magical properties. I mean, it’s all kind of very made up. There’s no evidence behind it. But, you know, that was the style at the time. And, you know, the way of that kind of quack kind of medicine world of like, hey, we’ve got this. It will cure everything. mean, John Pemberton was a homeopath, the guy who invented Coca Cola. So, you know, he came from that world. He was tutored in that world.

Andrew Roy (12:22.493)

Mmm.

Tristan Donovan (12:36.13)

They rule, kind of habit.

Andrew Roy (12:38.129)

Yeah, no, and it just strikes me, because these days we don’t talk really about the coal in that, but rereading that history of how for a while this was the health craze of the day. Maybe the way that we think of like, like the new tonic movements or like brain enhancers that we have these days. You know, as I’m reading this, I’m thinking it’s something that has struck me a lot about

There’s an element of current life that seems inevitable just because it exists that when you go back and see its progression, very much like there is an alternate history where Moxie won and Coca-Cola just isn’t the thing it is. Moxie committed to getting Moxie into everyone’s hand during World War II. You know, like you can see an alternate history where we are talking about how it’s a Moxie is American.

Nothing is inevitable, but it just came out of happenstance and just chaos almost.

Tristan Donovan (13:35.479)

Yeah.

Tristan Donovan (13:42.712)

Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, it is, you know, it was just a decision by Coca Cola that we’re going to franchise bottling to local areas that make Coca Cola as big as it was. Moxie was like, we’re to build one factory and then we’re going to build another factory and slowly with, we’ll get everywhere and kind of Coca Cola seemed ahead. But I mean, for good.

30 years or so Moxie was the drink. That was the number one soda. mean now it’d be hard push to find it in New England. They’ll learn anywhere else.

Andrew Roy (14:15.753)

I’ve like luckily found some because there was a point where they had some, it was like a reproduction or maybe it was actually the Moxie’s in Hastings stores in America. So like I’ve tried like one back in the day. So I was like, yeah, I forgot about that. Yeah.

Tristan Donovan (14:27.63)

You

Tristan Donovan (14:34.08)

Yeah, it’s sort of a weird, I’ve only tried it once as well, it’s like a weird licorice kind of flavour from memory. I’m not sure I’d choose it over Coke.

Andrew Roy (14:40.049)

Mm-hmm.

Andrew Roy (14:45.189)

Yeah, no, no, it’s probably good that Coca-Cola loved that one. Yeah, so I did want to explore a little, if you remember, because I thought one of the more fascinating things about Coca-Cola doing the bottling thing was not just that that helped them grow, but also some of the struggles and challenges they had with bottling and kind of, you know, throwing into light something I’ve taken for granted in the modern era.

how clean and regulated our drink and food stuff is. I know for a large part of it, there’s, you know, tales of the fear of shards of glass being in the bottles, which like as I’m reading that horrify my modern sensibilities, but I guess it was just a heart and parcel back in the day. I believe, I don’t know if it was Coca-Cola, but I remember there’s a story of a snail being found and that entered case law.

the liability of companies paying attention to their products. And yeah, just…

Tristan Donovan (15:45.09)

Yeah.

Yes. Yeah, so mean, bustling was, I mean, very early on before they perfected the bottle cap, a really kind of grimy business. I mean, everyone went to the soda fountains for a reason because in the bustling plants, you

ash getting in there, there’d be beetles getting in there. And, you know, this is part of the reason that lots of these drinks are dark coloured, because you can’t see what’s inside. You know, it’s a deliberate kind of tactic. So I mean, that was always the problem with bottling very early on, that it was very unhygienic and very, and it was dangerous work. I mean, you get the pressure wrong, the glass bottles explode. But,

The story of the snail. So this is in Scotland, 1920s, I can’t remember the exact year, but this was a woman called Mae Donoghue and she went to a cafe to meet her friend. She ordered a ginger beer and apparently there was a snail, a decomposing snail inside her ginger beer and she took this to court. Now the court never managed to find out if the snail actually existed or

So no one actually knows if there was a She claims there was, the shop claims there wasn’t. But the argument was she was like, well, the shop has a duty of care to me and therefore I’m owed compensation. And the shop’s like, well, there’s no contract. Why do we owe you anything? We didn’t put the snail in there. And so this went all the way to the Supreme Court in Canada because of the bizarre way the British Empire.

Andrew Roy (17:20.145)

That’s

Tristan Donovan (17:28.942)

worked. The case in Scotland gets here in Canada. That’s the way. But basically, kind of introduced this duty of care that a restaurant or a cafe had to, you know, take care of it. We can just give customers rubbish and go, oh, it’s not our fault. It was came like that from the manufacturer. So that because the British Empire just became law everywhere. it’s like everywhere from

Andrew Roy (17:30.235)

Yes.

Yeah.

Tristan Donovan (17:57.87)

Jamaica to India to the UK to Canada at that time, that instantly became law. And that, I believe, sort of then spread into US law and everywhere else and sort of came to basis of that kind of law. So that sort of compensation thing sort of really started with drink a ginger beer.

Andrew Roy (18:17.703)

drink of ginger beer and a snail. man, yeah. And then, yeah, you know, I hadn’t thought of this parallel until you were talking about this. I’d kind of forgotten, but when Coca-Cola first tried to penetrate the French market, they contracted out with some bottlers that knew, I think you put it like knew less than nothing about hygiene. And so they used tap water and

Tristan Donovan (18:20.15)

Yeah.

Andrew Roy (18:46.299)

they bottled it like room temperature. of course sugar plus tap water, unfiltered room temperature is going to equal bacteria. it got a lot of the diners sick and it actually impeded the progress of Coca-Cola into France in the beginning, which.

Tristan Donovan (18:53.262)

Yeah. Yeah.

Tristan Donovan (19:04.086)

Yeah, I mean, there was one French Coca Cola salesman who went into one of the restaurants where customers got affected and got chased out by some angry restaurant owner with a butcher’s knife afterwards. You know, it can be really serious if the postuling isn’t done right. You people can get seriously ill with bacteria. It does need to be hygienic. But back in the early 1900s, people were a bit more lax about that stuff.

Andrew Roy (19:14.875)

Yeah.

Andrew Roy (19:29.637)

Yeah, yeah. It kind of reminds me, my wife’s Russian, so a lot of like traditions they have with time and temperature control that are, would be looked at surprisingly over here. It’s given me a stronger stomach, but you just kind of get used to these things. But you do take for granted a lot of the protections that we have these days for better or worse.

I was wondering, what are the things I thought about when I was reading the book? Have you ever drawn the parallels? Anyone ever asked you if you thought about parallels between soda and sparkling wine production? Because I feel like there is a large crossover between the two.

Tristan Donovan (20:15.406)

I don’t know much about sparkling wine. I thought the carbonation there was natural, but I mean, maybe it isn’t. I’m thinking about it more, I think.

Andrew Roy (20:25.553)

Well, yeah, I mean, it’s kind of the way, like at the beginning of the book, when they’re trying to figure out, you know, how to duplicate and then capture that carbonation in some sort of stable product. Wine at least had the benefit of it, you know, the yeast or continuing the fermentation so that bubble comes naturally. But they they were plagued with the same problems of the glass being lower quality. So they had the explosions. That’s when I first started thinking about it.

The only reason that I think it was a little more natural for them is the alcohol kills a lot of the bacteria. So they had less of the hygienic problems just because they had that natural antibacterial element. But they also, they didn’t know what was going on, kind of like with the sparkling water until we had priestly and then a little more advanced. So they were just kind of guessing too.

Tristan Donovan (21:02.702)

Mm.

Tristan Donovan (21:20.514)

Yeah.

Yeah, and I think this was a problem when they started to go to moving into cans because I think, you know…

I think beer had gone into cans before soda had. obviously with the alcohol, there’s not kind of more fermentation, more kind of carbonation happening. But with the sugar of soda in there, you know, that is a potential risk. So you do have to kind of make sure it’s like, well, this is sealed tight and is not going to start exploding everywhere. you know, there’s a lot of pressure inside those cans.

Andrew Roy (21:45.181)

I’m

Andrew Roy (21:58.993)

Yeah, well, I think you you mentioned this which I found really interesting that Soda because it was a higher acidity I believe had a problem where it would kind of eat away with the lining and then it would affect the taste Which is not something you think about it being higher acid, but there’s just so much sugar in there, I guess

Tristan Donovan (22:11.598)

Yeah.

Tristan Donovan (22:19.168)

Yeah, and the rules said that you usually have a sphoric acid or something like that, which is like the sort of tart kind of flavor you get with most sodas. And so that’s why the acid there is sort of a preservative, but it also kind of improves the taste and gives it that sort of bite. Yeah, but you know, that kind of interacts with whatever vessel it’s in. you know, one of the reasons people feel like glasses

glass bottles are often better is because glass is less affected than say plastic bottles or aluminium cans. you know, how you, what it travels in and the size of those vessels does have an effect on the taste and it’s usually quite minor. I mean, it’s one of those things I think everyone says they can tell the difference. I think if you did a blind taste test, probably less people can tell the difference, but

Andrew Roy (23:12.151)

Mm-hmm.

Tristan Donovan (23:16.846)

Certainly, if you can see like, well, if I’m drinking Coca Cola out of a plastic bottle as opposed to a glass bottle, you probably have an opinion already about each container and you probably fail. You know, in my case, I would go, oh, it tastes better out of the glass. That might not even be true, but that’s the way I feel about it.

Andrew Roy (23:16.849)

Yeah.

Andrew Roy (23:26.246)

Hmm.

Andrew Roy (23:32.53)

No.

I mean, you know, I, because I’m more steeped in the wine world than anything, but there’s a reason that they have these like five pound glass bottles for expensive Napa cabs. They’re doing nothing except for setting expectations, but they set expectations very well. And a lot of what we taste is what we think we taste. And yeah.

Tristan Donovan (23:39.671)

Yeah.

Tristan Donovan (23:45.966)

Yeah.

Tristan Donovan (23:55.874)

Yeah, you know, the color of the branding will have some effect on us as well. I mean, we know kind of Coca Cola and Pepsi, you know, probably too much for just pure color to have effect, but maybe sort of lower tier sodas, you know, the color of their packaging may affect how we view the taste of them.

Andrew Roy (24:16.189)

Yeah. You know, since you mentioned blind tasting, we’ve got to talk a little bit about Pepsi and Coke. And I think the Pepsi challenge was probably a good way to get in there because it kind of leads into New Coke and that big debacle. yeah. So I guess if someone walked up to you in the street and they say they knew nothing about Pepsi and Coca-Cola, how would you,

You kind of run down what you give them. I know.

Tristan Donovan (24:47.566)

It is so bizarre. mean, even now I look back and go, know, the cola wall seemed like such a big thing when I was a kid in the 80s. And now it seems like that was so bizarre. But essentially it’s two products that are almost identical in taste. they but.

Andrew Roy (24:57.981)

Mm-hmm.

Tristan Donovan (25:11.564)

there’s huge demand for it and they are battling over a couple of percent of market share because that’s worth like each percent is worth like a billion dollars. It’s like the numbers are enormous. And so it becomes a marketing war because that’s all you can do. You can’t go, Pepsi tastes so much different and you’re gonna not gonna want to drink Coke again. You know, the margin of difference isn’t that much. But if you can just persuade enough people

to go, let’s do a blind taste test and see if you can really tell that Pepsi is worse than Coke. And of course you encourage people to do it and they go, well, you can’t actually tell that much difference, so I might actually buy a Pepsi. And so that was the clever thing of the Pepsi challenge. it’s really kind of two mega brands fighting over shelf space. the extremes they went to because of the money involved was

Andrew Roy (25:52.497)

Thank

Andrew Roy (26:01.725)

you

Tristan Donovan (26:06.702)

Incredible. But I think it was also in their best interests, right? This is not a war where they both lose. There’s not a winner and a loser. This is war that expands the market and makes, everyone’s very excited about cola. We better go buy some more cola. And so both their sales were growing even as the percentage of the market was changing.

Andrew Roy (26:13.605)

Hmm.

Andrew Roy (26:28.893)

I mean, between the two of them, there’s not a loser. The way you said it expands the market made me think there may have been a long-term loser, us and our expanding waistlines, So yes, there may have been someone who didn’t win out of that fight. it is, yeah, if you trap me on a desert island and said you could only have Dr. Pepper forever or Coke or Pepsi, it’d be kind of like, okay, you know.

Tristan Donovan (26:33.806)

Yeah.

Tristan Donovan (26:41.501)

Yes!

Tristan Donovan (26:48.078)

Yeah.

Andrew Roy (26:57.501)

It’s a soda. They are all kind of exchangeable in a certain sense.

Tristan Donovan (26:59.648)

Hahaha

Tristan Donovan (27:05.336)

Yeah, and I think it’s, yeah, I mean, it’s not been great for our waistlines. mean, soda consumption during the Dakota wars just went out of control. mean, was huge in just 30 years. We went from drinking very little soda to huge amounts. And that obviously kind of had an effect along with many other things on how heavy we all became. But, you know, it’s…

Andrew Roy (27:28.347)

hehe

Tristan Donovan (27:32.172)

Business-wise, it was a kind of win-win for both of them. mean, I know now that they’ve kind of given up on that fight since the 90s, it’s kind of faded. And now in the US, Dr Pepper is bigger than Pepsi. So I mean, the world’s kind of changed, which was unthinkable kind of back in the height the Kona was.

Andrew Roy (27:50.269)

Yeah. Speaking of Dr. too, that hits on something that I did want to ask you about. I think one of my favorite themes that feel like goes throughout the book, and I think Dr. Pepper really illustrated this, the FDA ruled that it wasn’t a cola, but it was a pepper. And then that one little arbitrary ruling that kind of

just turns on semantics, allowed them to be brewed by Coca-Cola brewers, because they’re not violating their non-compete clause. And just like, how much of the soda world all hinged on these tiny little litigations of like, is Coca-Cola enough cola and Coke to be, like have a trademark? then like, is L people squibbling over a couple words in a lot of key moments almost?

Tristan Donovan (28:25.656)

Yeah.

Tristan Donovan (28:44.406)

Yeah, there was a lot of that with the bottlers. I mean, each, talking about the US here, it’s like each little area would have your Coca Cola bottler, then your second tier one, which would be your Pepsi bottler, and then maybe a third one that did the independence. And all the contracts be, well, if you’re bottling Coca Cola, you can’t bottle another cola. and by the way, we’ve bought out lemonade now, so you can’t.

make someone else’s lemonade. And so this became a thing that you’ll see all these launches and like, Pepsi’s bought out a new kind of drink or 7-Up’s getting big. I know we’ll make Sprite because we don’t want our bottle of making 7-Up. And so you kind of get into this thing of they’re just trying to stop these bottles signing up any kind of little local brands. And it shuts the market down, right? It’s hard for

Andrew Roy (29:29.34)

Yeah.

Tristan Donovan (29:41.806)

smaller companies to go, oh, I’m going to start up a soda company, because they can’t get anyone to bottle it once those slots are gone. It’s like, well, you could do it if you open a bottle in your palm. Well, that’s incredibly expensive. Yeah, exactly. You know, they’re not cheap things to run. So, you know, that kind of limits what else can enter the market quite a bit. And I think there were things like Jolt Cola, which

Andrew Roy (29:53.117)

If you get a couple spare millions around, yeah. Yeah.

Tristan Donovan (30:11.382)

you know, piece together kind of bottling plants from beer companies and built its own kind of separate network back in the day. And so these things can sometimes break through, but it’s really hard if you’re not one of part of PepsiCo or you’re not part of Coca Cola, because then it’s like, okay, well, where are you going to get bottled? Well, you better go knock on the Dr. Pepp bottle.

Andrew Roy (30:34.961)

No.

Tristan Donovan (30:35.18)

door and it turns out that they’ve got a bunch of drinks too. So you’re not going to be able to do your root beer through them because they’ve already got fewer beers.

Andrew Roy (30:43.121)

Yeah, so you either get big enough to break in on your own bottling lines throughout the US or you piece it together through brewers, micro-breweries around the country sort of thing.

Tristan Donovan (30:55.769)

Yeah, or you make something so distinctive that no one else, none of the other people have it. So the bossalers can go, well, Cocoa Company can’t have a problem with Donovan’s new soda because they wouldn’t have anything like that. And I guess, you know, whatever that would be, I don’t think if I made a soda, it’d be disgusting.

Andrew Roy (31:18.205)

Something that’s so weird that no one wants to buy. Yeah. Now, you know, I did want to ask you, I’m sure that you tasted a lot of sodas in researching this book. Were there any that you were like, this is the weirdest thing I’ve ever tried?

Tristan Donovan (31:21.612)

Yes.

Tristan Donovan (31:34.846)

there are a few.

Tristan Donovan (31:40.44)

think Moxie was up there. Moxie was like, wow, this isn’t sweet. This is very weird. There were always the kind of odd ones like kind of buffalo wings, soda, things like that, which are kind of like novelties. And it’s like, they are as horrible as they sound. And it’s like, what what do you expect? I think big surprise was celery soda. Because I got that thinking.

Andrew Roy (31:42.215)

Okay.

Andrew Roy (32:02.205)

Yeah.

Andrew Roy (32:06.894)

Mmm, okay.

Tristan Donovan (32:09.922)

This sounds so, this sounds so not right. And it’s really nice. I actually really like celery soda. It’s not very common, but it’s really nice.

Andrew Roy (32:15.377)

Yeah.

Andrew Roy (32:19.485)

celery bitters. enjoy them. Vee brothers does a great one. I was gonna say, I’m sure someone somewhere does a pickle soda.

Tristan Donovan (32:29.029)

that could work. Yeah.

Andrew Roy (32:29.787)

I’m sure, yeah. I’m like, Lithuanian pickle beer is a thing. But yeah, people like that flavor.

Tristan Donovan (32:34.03)

Yeah, Inca Kola was an interesting one. It’s a big Peruvian drink. It’s kind of one of those like iron brew to extent Dr Pepper where it’s kind of fruity, tastes very artificial, and you don’t really know what it is. It’s like, I can taste this. I can definitely taste there’s something synthetic here.

don’t know what that flavor is, it is just Inca Cola flavor, in the same way. Yes, vaguely, you know, sort of synthetic fruit flavor, chewing gum fruit.

Andrew Roy (33:06.461)

It is fruit. Yeah.

Andrew Roy (33:14.596)

Yeah, and then okay so remind me because my memory is bad here if I remember correctly is Inca soda I forget the names, but I know there’s India and Scotland I believe so like the three places and the only three places where Coca-Cola is not the number one soda in the world what a strange like grouping of countries but

Tristan Donovan (33:35.276)

Yeah.

Tristan Donovan (33:38.688)

Yeah.

Andrew Roy (33:39.473)

Yeah, each for its own weird historical kind of accident or development, but it’s.

Tristan Donovan (33:45.044)

Yeah, so India had a period where it wanted every company to basically be Indian. So it shut Coca Cola out the market and a brand called Thumbs Up, which was basically a Coca Cola ripoff, took the market and became the big, the big brand. Inca Cola was made basically and pushed on nationalist kind of thing. It’s like this is the Peruvian drink, you know, don’t.

don’t drink those foreign drinks. So it kind of took over that way. I guess, iron brew was kind of interesting. So this is really big in Scotland. It’s kind of, yeah, it’s kind of orangey kind of taste. It was sold on basically it’s made out of girders, like steel girders, because it does have a little bit of iron in it. So it’s a really odd drink. wasn’t

Andrew Roy (34:25.422)

The red one, right? Yeah.

Tristan Donovan (34:42.046)

huge, but it basically played on its Scottishness. so Scottish nationalism grew, it grew as well. And it really tapped into a we’re a Scottish drink, we’re part of Scottish culture. And it really just boomed off there to the point where, you know, McDonald’s would have iron brew. It became, you know, it is something really associated with Scotland. So it’s a really unique case. But I think all of them really comes down to a little bit of nationalism and

Andrew Roy (34:59.933)

So weird.

Tristan Donovan (35:11.2)

all three cases, it’s, you know, slightly different paths towards it, but it’s all about game, we’re not going to be taken over by the two American brands that everyone else in the world is drinking.

Andrew Roy (35:15.517)

Thank

Andrew Roy (35:21.925)

Yeah, the only way to keep out Coca-Cola is nationalized. Yeah, if I remember correctly, I think the Indian one didn’t Coca-Cola just buy it. it’s like, you can’t win as Coca-Cola, just buy the competition and then you just won by default kind of. Yeah.

Tristan Donovan (35:33.319)

Yes.

Tristan Donovan (35:37.838)

Yeah, they did that with Inca Kola as well. They haven’t bought Ironbrew yet, so Ironbrew is the last one standing.

Andrew Roy (35:44.123)

No. Well, I stand up. Well, I guess, yeah, nationalism and communism is how you keep out Coca-Cola. So yeah, if you’re communist or Nixon, oddly the two political parties that did not like Coca-Cola. Wow, it so weird. It’s such a funny, it’s so funny how all these different things just conspired to.

Tristan Donovan (35:54.068)

Yeah.

Hahaha

Tristan Donovan (36:03.36)

Yeah.

Andrew Roy (36:12.709)

Now we don’t even think about it, just, you know, little turns here and there could have changed things so greatly.

Tristan Donovan (36:16.291)

Yeah.

Tristan Donovan (36:19.634)

Yeah, and I think a big part of it in Coca Cola’s case, especially what was World War Two, basically, it had this plan to get round sugar rationing by supplying the army and all the American troops. So, you know, Coca Cola is spreading all over the world, following the troops wherever they go. And

Andrew Roy (36:25.372)

Good.

Tristan Donovan (36:40.11)

Certainly in the aftermath of the war, basically have all these American GIs and they have Coca-Cola and they have Hershey’s chocolate and all the rest, but particularly Coca-Cola because there was just so much being sent to them.

the places like Europe where, you know, the whole cities were devastated and there were no food and same with Japan, you kind of go, wow, this is like, these are the people who’ve come to deliver freedom, and they’ve got Coca Cola. Coca Cola means freedom. And that’s kind of what it meant in that post-war world, is kind of odd now, but kind of makes sense at the time. So it became something like I’m buying

Andrew Roy (37:14.087)

Yeah.

Tristan Donovan (37:21.354)

certain vision of the world by buying this fizzy pop. It takes on a greater meaning, which is bizarre because it is just fizzy pop really.

Andrew Roy (37:29.082)

Yeah, well no, and if I remember correctly, the director of CEO committed to getting every troop a Coca-Cola for five cents as long as it weren’t, it’s something crazy like that. Probably an insanely expensive bill if you add it up today, but honestly if you think about it, probably the cheapest marketing campaign ever. Every person that saw a Coca-Cola was five cents, but.

Tristan Donovan (37:43.084)

Yeah.

Andrew Roy (37:56.571)

like in the middle of the war, was probably gold, you know?

Tristan Donovan (37:58.862)

Yeah, you can imagine there was like some accountant in Coca-Cola going, you’ve just promised to sell Coca-Cola for five cents anywhere in the world and we’ve got to deliver on that because you’ve made this promise in public. This is insane, we’re going to lose so much money.

Andrew Roy (38:08.796)

Okay.

Tristan Donovan (38:14.83)

And it is probably one of the, I just don’t really talk about it, it’s probably one of the greatest marketing moves of all time because that really did establish it worldwide as a huge brand, even before it really opened up and gone on sale in places. And, you know, it’s something that on the face of it seemed kind of charitable, it was very canny for long-term.

Andrew Roy (38:39.153)

Yeah, I mean, we’ve gone so long since we’ve had such a big war, so no one in our lifetime’s really, except maybe the oldest people remember rationing that sort of thing. But yeah, like if you are not supplying the troops, like of course you’re not going to get the supplies like the sugar to make it. Yeah, kept them going. I think Pepsi, if I remember correctly, didn’t. So they essentially were nearly bankrupt or bankrupt by something around those lines.

Tristan Donovan (38:50.413)

Yeah.

Tristan Donovan (38:59.598)

Yeah.

Tristan Donovan (39:07.79)

Yeah, so Pepsi basically got told Coca Cola is the one we’re sending to the troops. So you can supply the home front. By the way, we’re cutting your sugar allocation by 80 % or something. So Pepsi was basically did a bit of a fiddle. Basically, it started taking sugar to Mexico that turned it into this molasses type stuff.

Andrew Roy (39:35.901)

Yeah, I forgot. Yes, yes, yes.

Tristan Donovan (39:36.096)

And then it wasn’t sugar anymore. And so they bring it over the border because it’s not sugar. It was allowed to be imported and used. they were, they kind of went and suddenly the American government was like, that’s not really the spirit of the law. And Pepsi’s like, but it is legal. You know, so it was kind of one of those where it’s like, yeah, you’re not really doing what you should be doing, but you kind of got through the loophole.

Andrew Roy (39:50.885)

Yeah.

Andrew Roy (40:03.261)

No, yeah. And again, you know, thinking about how today it seems natural, but had that not happened, I’m sure Pepsi would be dead and we’d have had the Coca-Cola Dr. Pepper Wars. You know, it would have been a completely different alternative history line there. Yeah, weird.

Tristan Donovan (40:12.142)

Mm.

Hahaha!

Tristan Donovan (40:19.723)

Yeah, I can’t see Dr. Pepper going for the Dr. Pepper challenge. I think it’s kind of definitely everyone. Most people prefer coke.

Andrew Roy (40:26.653)

Yeah.

Andrew Roy (40:31.163)

Yeah, for sure. I’m a Texan though. I’ve got to love me some Dr. Pepper.

Tristan Donovan (40:35.91)

I love Dr. Pepper, but I mean, it’s like, I know people who are just like, how can you drink that? You know, it’s quite a taste.

Andrew Roy (40:42.077)

The thing that kind of surprised me towards the end, it came in out of nowhere and I understand that we needed to address it when talking about sodas, energy drinks. They just kind of burst into the scene out of nowhere, kind of, in my mind, at least. How do you feel about the emergence of energy drinks? Was that a weird section to write?

Tristan Donovan (40:58.638)

Yeah

Tristan Donovan (41:07.918)

You feel… I think they came out of a different place. It wasn’t like an evolution of a soda company. But at the same time, they were carbonated and…

earlier sodas did kind of market themselves on giving you energy. Like a lot of the mid 20th century Dr. Pepperines about, this is going to give you energy. This will keep you going past four o’clock on your work day thing. So in a way it is an echo of what soda used to sell itself on. So I think, you know, because it Red Bull came at it at such a random angle, it probably does feel a bit like

how has this kind of invaded the soda world? it, and it’s seen as a different category, but I think it is closely related to soda in a way that say sports drinks aren’t, right? Gatorade and Powerade, you know, they’re soft drinks, are made by Pepsi and Coke, but they are definitely not sodas, whereas Monster and Red Bull retain that kind of…

I don’t know, kind of functional idea of what a seira could be and maybe unconsciously kind of resurrected kind of what it was in the 19th century.

Andrew Roy (42:26.331)

Okay, I think when you put it that way, can, I have a lot more peace with it. Maybe it’s just that I don’t really like energy drinks too. It’s almost like humanity is very cyclical in nature and we just kind of reverted back to the pseudoscience phase of our drinking, but we had science has progressed enough that we like, like just up the caffeine and this is, it doesn’t just make you feel good. It actually does wake you up.

Tristan Donovan (42:32.142)

Yes!

Andrew Roy (42:55.683)

sort of thing yeah instead of just like let’s add some bitter green and see what happens yeah

Tristan Donovan (42:56.064)

Yeah, yeah, we got better at the science.

Yeah, we got a bit better at the science behind it, I guess. But I think, yeah, but I mean, it is interesting because neither of those red bull and monster don’t really sell themselves on taste. It is purely a function kind of thing, whereas soda is always kind of gone, it tastes great as well. Whereas red bulls like.

You’re drinking it for the energy. You’re wanting wings. You’re not wanting a nice treat.

Andrew Roy (43:28.381)

I do remember, I think it was Rory Sutherland, the big marketing guy that said like, let’s have a small can of this weird tasting liquid from out of the US and let’s introduce it. I think it’ll be great. like, of course it did because it was so different. And yeah, I think that they did take what was naturally occurring in the soda world that

Tristan Donovan (43:50.359)

Yeah.

Andrew Roy (43:58.171)

like propensity to advertise above all else and pushed it to a kind of natural extreme. know, Red Bull with the jump out of the like, what was it, like the space dive. I forget how they put it, but yeah, just, so much marketing over everything else, you know? Yeah.

Tristan Donovan (44:11.057)

yeah.

Tristan Donovan (44:20.366)

Yeah, absolutely. And on the taste level, think it’s almost that medicine thing of like, well, if it tastes bad, then it definitely is good for you. Kind of a thing.

Andrew Roy (44:31.377)

It must be waking me up otherwise, Kind of like the espresso effect. It’s like it’s so bitter it has to be poached, you know? I always like to ask, anytime I ask someone who wrote a book, especially a book like this, are there any stories that you wish you could have included and they just didn’t fit in or you found anecdotes but couldn’t substantiate them or anything like that?

Tristan Donovan (44:37.718)

Yeah.

Hehehehe

Tristan Donovan (44:56.842)

There was, this was actually after the book came out, I met a guy who helped set up Coca Cola in Russia after the Cold War. And so got to chat with him and I wish I’d known some of those stories. So he’s going there and he, it is just a very chaotic time in Russia, right?

USSR had just collapsed and inflation is something insane, like 3000%. So it’s all a bit wild west and they wanted to open the Coca Cola booths to help introduce and put them on the street corners. And basically they ended up buying missiles.

and using the shell of missiles and basically cutting a window in them and putting these kind of old Soviet missiles on street corners to be basically like little places you could go and buy your Coca Cola at. And so basically they bought a warehouse full of old decommissioned Soviet missiles to help get there. And there’s loads of stories like that. So I so wish I knew that at the time.

Andrew Roy (46:00.454)

Yeah.

back. And you know, was listening to one of your old interviews. And I think it was I don’t think it made it in the fizz. At least if it did, I skipped it or didn’t remember it. But you talking about clear sodas. And I think there’s like a Russian person who wanted to drink Coca Cola, but didn’t want anyone to see them drinking it. So like, like brood them a special clear one. So no one would know or Yeah, that’s wild.

Tristan Donovan (46:31.406)

Yeah. Yeah. And it gets into like, what was it? Crystal Pepsi, which yeah, where it’s like, we’ll take out the caramel coloring and it looks like fizzy water now.

Andrew Roy (46:37.393)

Yeah, sis. Perhaps I use this.

Andrew Roy (46:45.223)

Yeah, that’s wild. Well, Tristan, thank you for taking a little bit of time to come and talk to us today. yeah. Anyone listening, it’s Fizz, How Sotus Shook Up the World by Tristan Donovan. He also has done a great book about games, which I’ve just started, so I can’t talk unauthoritatively.

Tristan Donovan (46:54.978)

That’s been great. Thanks for inviting me.

Tristan Donovan (47:10.968)

Yeah.

Andrew Roy (47:11.833)

really exciting. And then one about pets in the urban environments. And I don’t know how we got through an hour almost without talking about the fact that I have a great day and you have a couple of dogs. Like, yeah, it’s really a shame, but,

Tristan Donovan (47:16.952)

Yeah.

Tristan Donovan (47:22.478)

Yeah, we’ve got two dash hans, they’re much smaller than the great hans.

Andrew Roy (47:30.971)

Yeah. for those listening to us today, is there anywhere you’d like our listeners to come follow you or anything exciting you’re working on?

Tristan Donovan (47:40.558)

Well, these days I’m mainly doing podcasts. So my company does work with a company called Wondry and we work on a show called Business Wars and a show called Spy Who, which are kind of like a sort of, so very far away from Soda, but Spy Who is kind of like a audio spy movie, I guess, but all kind of true stories.

Andrew Roy (48:03.195)

You did a Coca Cola versus Pepsi on Business Wars. it counts. Yeah.

Tristan Donovan (48:08.204)

Yeah, yeah, so it’s been a while since we did that, but yeah, we say it crosses over. And it’s one of the great business stories. Co-comparison, just the perfect business story, really.

Andrew Roy (48:12.125)

Yeah.

Andrew Roy (48:22.493)

Awesome. Well, I’ll link to those podcasts in the show notes, along with a link to all the books. Thank you. have fun on your call. I know we had a timeline, so thanks for taking the time Tristan.

Tristan Donovan (48:32.27)

Okay.

Tristan Donovan (48:36.46)

Yeah, that’s it. Brilliant. Thanks. All right. Bye.