How did cola become the default soda? Soda can be made in any flavor your can imagine, any popular flavor or mankind...

How did cola become the default soda? Soda can be made in any flavor your can imagine, any popular flavor or mankind, and yet this seemingly random caramel flavored black sludge became the number one face of soda and most relevant flavor of all time, with only lemon lime being closely behind it?

Great question , it makes no sense

I can't stand cola, or really any dark brown drink whatsoever. That includes cola, root beer, Dr. Pepper/Pibb, coffee, and sweet tea. I wish I liked them, because I fall asleep on the job constantly.

Georgia or something.

Maybe marketing plays a factor:
Due to the nature of the Industry, Coca-Cola has made a yearly commitment to large ad spends, spending a total $3.499 billion in 2014, $3.266 billion in 2013 and $3.342 billion in 2012.

I would guess the massive distribution and marketing power of Coca-Cola and Pepsico.

The local brand of the New Haven area, Foxon Park, was always most famous for their white birch or gassossa (lemon-lime) sodas.

Kola nut actually has a really good flavor to it and if you buy a soda that's actually made from it rather than artificially flavored stuff you'll understand. My only complaint is that nothing comes quite close to being as fizzy as Coca-Cola.

because the one who popularized it used to put in a fucking addictive substance in it. combine that with sweetness and you have a soda that was extremely addictive and by the time we weened ourselves off of the coke the brand was already here for good.

>For me

Are you attempting to summon him?

This is the correct answer, just like if you asked someone for the first thing that came to mind about fast food they would probably say big mac

This. Cola was so popular because of all the fucking Cocaine.

But the Big Mac is a burger, a popular food. I'm not really thinking like "when you think of soda, when does coke come to mind?"

More along the lines of why the particular flavor of cola came to dominance when soda could be made any flavor you could imagine, when there are already tons of popular flavors in the world like strawberry and chocolate, cola seems so weird

He is with you. Always.

We are omnipresent.

Miracle of marketing.

The original creator of coca-cola nearly went bankrupt. Some fucks purchased the recipe and brand, gave it some refresher and a heavy marketing campaign, and turned it into THE soda.

The story with Pepsi is even worse. The original Pepsi-cola was quite unpopular and unprofitable, the recipe somewhat awful. It managed to survive a trademark lawsuit by Coca-Cola though, A firm producing Coca-cola knock-off purchased the Pepsi-cola firm, and gutted the brand - officially "modified the recipe" while in reality replacing the original recipe with their Coca-cola knock-off. And again, through intense marketing, grew up into a megacorp.

Am I the only one that prefers off-brand cola over Pepsi or Coke. Every brand is different but the big two lack the sweetness I crave. Pic related I get at walmart, made by Cott I believe.

Not alone.
There was that shop at the railway station where I'd go day by day to work, and they had such a selection of off-brand colas. I'd buy a different one every day, and "review it", writing stuff about it in a notebook. Taste, how much chemistry, how easy to open the bottle, does it spill over once I open the bottle, price, manufacturer, personal impression and so on. Got good 20+ entries. I planned to finish the run with genuine Coca-Cola and Pepsi, expecting them to rank somewhere mid-file, but lost the notebook before that happened.

Coca-cola flavor has nothing to do with kola nut. It was originally a "health" drink that contained real coca leaves.

pretty much the redbull story

That's the problem, it markets itself as a cola but it doesn't actually meet the definition of a cola.

>Cola is a sweetened, carbonated soft drink, derived from drinks that contain caffeine from the kola nut

The reason you think cola is just caramel black sludge is because you're not drinking cola

Same picture yet the one with the larger file size is pasty/pale looking.
Why?

Lighting ya dum cunt

>Soda can be made in any flavor your can imagine, any popular flavor or mankind

Most of them suck, though. There's only a handful of flavors that are popular enough to warrant regular continued production for standard 2L bottles, 12oz cans, and food chain soda fountains.

Personally I find the popularity of the Mountain Dew flavor astounding.

Marketing and branding and all that good stuff. Coca Cola protected its brand and product from imitations, delivery guys themselves put it on the shelf back in the day, there was what seemed an unlimited supply of knockoffs of Coca Cola sold. They protected their brand and made sure the product was consistent among the different bottlers throughout the US from early on, the rest is history. So their success was branding in the bottle, consistency throughout multiple bottling plants of the bottle and formula to discern from knockoff imitations, and protecting the supply by having delivery men stock it on store shelves, plus the early formula had some COCAINE in it.

>Among the biggest challenges for early bottlers, were imitations of the beverage by competitors coupled with a lack of packaging consistency among the 1,000 bottling plants at the time. The bottlers agreed that a distinctive beverage needed a standard and distinctive bottle, and in 1916, the bottlers approved the unique contour bottle. The new Coca‑Cola bottle was so distinctive it could be recognized in the dark and it effectively set the brand apart from competition.

Went to Cuba on vacation one time and they have their own brand of cola as opposed to Coca-cola, remember always drinking it instead cuz I thought it was interesting but I cant really remember how it tasted

Economics. Cola is a very neutral flavor. No one can possibly hate it.

Also cola used to have coca leaves WITH the cocaine in it. Nowadays it is taken out, I'm sure there are still ever so small traces of cocaine in it to make people keep buying it.

Why do large companies advertise in places where their products are already well known?

How did they get well known in the first place?

Through advertising, i know.

I'm asking why do franchises like Coca-Cola have commercials and other advertising, when a large number of people buy their soda almost compulsively.

Brand recognition is only one of the first steps. You want to trigger a purchase.

I think they buy them compulsively for that very reason. They are in our face non-stop, everywhere, on all platforms.
These guys doing advertising are very clever. They also work on our subliminal level.

Cream soda is best soda. Fuck colas.

Marketing is part of the answer for the popularity of sodas in general but doesn't explain why Coke, in particular, is liked by so many adults.

I think much of that has to do with the flavor profile of colas. They are sweet but not too sugary. Colas have a complexity to their flavor which appeals to adults and keeps them consuming it in the long-term. Kids like sodas that taste sweeter and most preteens, especially, don't enjoy the taste of colas.

Colas contain extracts from coca, cinnamon, nutmeg, lemon, vanilla, coriander, and bitter orange. The combination of those flavors stimulates a variety of taste receptors and dampens the response of one's sweet receptors. Coke, like wine, works well as a palette cleanser. It gets a lot of the fat contained in fast food off one's tongue, stimulates a different set of receptors than the food does, and makes that next bite taste good again. Hence why colas are often consumed alongside a meal.

There's a demand for it. Factor in it has caffeine and sugar, people crave that stuff, and yea you make a good point on the pallet cleansing and the acid and whatever helping digest fatty oily junk food too. There's multiple things at play, but they were first to market a consistent brand and protected that advantage early on, plus their business model of franchising out and keeping it consistent throughout different bottlers helped them. It's like they did everything right from the start and now can't be knocked off their throne easily, as people demand different variations such as diet coca cola and what not and they meet them with new products here and there.

Caffeine I get from coffee, sugar from some cookies or sweets. Can't remember when I last had some Coke. When thirsty I drink water, juice or milk. In restarant beer or wine.
As you guessed, I'm not a child anymore.

Fuck yeah Foxon Park! Too bad you can only really get it if you live there.

oh man i could go for a nice foxon park and louis lunch burger. with potato salad

You don't see all them fat peoples eating at burger king or mcdonalds washing it down with a crisp delicious coke?

Has anyone tried Virgin cola? Is that any more or less sweet.

Yeah I used to love mtn dew, and then I became Veeky Forums and it tastes fucking terrible now. Amazing

Meme Magic