A cola company in Columbus, Georgia, placed soda in aluminum cans on store shelves nationwide for the first time in American history in 1964. No taste test, no slogan, just the first aluminum can of soda sold coast to coast. Three years later, Coca-Cola adopted the exact same can, and Pepsi followed within months. By the end of the decade, most Americans assumed the aluminum can had always been theirs.
The company that actually invented it was already fading from the conversation. That company was Royal Crown Cola, and it happened again and again. The story begins in Columbus, Georgia, in 1905. Claude Hatcher grew up in a merchant family, the son of a grocery operator.
He trained as a pharmacist, which in that era meant he mixed syrups, tested flavor combinations, and often ran the soda fountain himself. At the time, Coca-Cola already dominated soda fountains throughout Georgia, having been invented less than 200 miles away in Atlanta. Hatcher was not trying to outmarket Coca-Cola. He was trying to solve a narrower problem.
The family grocery store needed a house-brand soft drink it could sell at its own counter without paying another company’s price. He began mixing syrups in the back of the family store on West 10th Street, testing flavors the way a pharmacist tests a formula. What he landed on first was a ginger ale, sold in 1905 under the Hatcher name. By 1907, he added a cherry-flavored cola called Chero-Cola, and that drink turned a grocery store soda counter into a bottling business.
The business grew quickly. By 1920, the company controlled roughly 700 franchise bottling plants across the South. Through the 1910s and 1920s, the company expanded its lineup and changed names more than once. In 1925, it became Nehi Incorporated.
In 1933, Claude Hatcher died. A chemist named Rufus Kamm reformulated the cola recipe in 1934, and the company relaunched it under a new name meant to signal ambition: Royal Crown. RC was born as the deliberate flagship of a company that already had the infrastructure of a national player. According to the account, before Hatcher ever bottled his own soda, he was a Coca-Cola customer.
As a grocery wholesaler, he bought Coca-Cola syrup in bulk and asked for a volume discount from a local company salesman named Columbus Roberts. Roberts refused. The dispute escalated into a personal conflict, and Hatcher told Roberts he would never buy another drop of Coca-Cola syrup again. He went to the back room of the family store and began mixing his own.
Royal Crown’s positioning came down to several pillars. The formula was sharper and less syrupy, heavier on carbonation bite, lighter on lingering sweetness, built to taste like an alternative, not an imitation. In packaging, Royal Crown became the first company to distribute soda nationally in steel cans in 1954, then became the first beverage company to package soda in aluminum cans. In 1958, it introduced the 16-ounce bottle, double the 8-ounce standard that had defined the industry.
In pricing, the company offered more product for a comparable price. The 16-ounce bottle sold close to what competitors charged for their standard 8-ounce bottle. In go-to-market strategy, Royal Crown’s franchise bottlers pushed hard into small-town grocery stores, general stores, and drugstore coolers across the South. Then Royal Crown turned its product into the argument itself.
In the 1930s, and with growing intensity through the 1940s and 1950s, RC became the first company in the industry to use blind taste tests as the centerpiece of a national advertising campaign. The tagline was “Best by taste test. ” Ordinary Americans, blindfolded, sampled RC against Coca-Cola and Pepsi, with results printed in newspaper ads and broadcast on radio. By 1940, the company’s products sat on shelves in 47 of the 48 states.
Sales that year ran roughly 10 times what they had been less than a decade earlier. The advertising campaign was relentless. Beginning in the early 1940s, full-page ads in the Saturday Evening Post and Good Housekeeping showed a movie star holding three unmarked paper cups labeled X, Y, and Z, picking the one that turned out to be Royal Crown. Bing Crosby and Bob Hope endorsed it.
In a March 1947 issue of Life magazine, Joan Crawford told readers she took the famous taste test and picked Royal Crown Cola as the best tasting of them all. Lucille Ball, Claudette Colbert, Shirley Temple, Loretta Young, and future President Ronald Reagan all put their names to the same claim across the decade. In 1966, Royal Crown hired a young puppeteer named Jim Henson, years before Sesame Street made him a household name, to create characters for a national ad campaign. A year later, singer Nancy Sinatra featured Royal Crown in her television special “Moving with Nancy,” dancing to a jingle written for the brand.
New York Mets pitcher Tom Seaver and his wife performed the same jingle in a regional commercial, dancing on top of the Shea Stadium dugout. In the mid-1970s, the company shifted tone with the “Me and My RC” campaign, whose jingle was sung by Lou Rawls. Culturally, Royal Crown’s identity was captured by its pairing with a Southern snack cake. Across the working-class South of the 1950s, factory and mill workers took their midday break with the same combination, sold together at the same country stores and gas station counters: an ice-cold RC Cola and a moon pie.
It became common enough that it produced its own piece of folk culture, a country song titled simply “RC Cola and a Moonpie. ”
Wartime touched the company the way it touched every American beverage maker of the era. Sugar became tightly rationed as the country mobilized. When the war ended, the company moved into what internal accounts called one of the greatest expansion pushes in company history, with 1947 standing out as one of the best years the business had ever had.
The first major warning sign arrived not as a sales report but as a chemistry ruling. Diet Rite, the diet cola that by the late 1960s accounted for roughly a quarter of Royal Crown’s total sales and nearly a third of its earnings, was sweetened with cyclamate, an artificial sweetener approved by the FDA in 1958, the same year Diet Rite launched. For a decade, cyclamate was the engine underneath one of the most successful product lines in company history. In 1969, the FDA banned cyclamate outright, citing new research linking it to cancer in laboratory animals.
Diet Rite was pulled and reformulated almost overnight. The customer response was immediate and unforgiving. One company representative from the Diet Rite era recalled grocery managers in Greenville, South Carolina, literally chasing down RC delivery trucks begging for more stock because demand outran supply. That enthusiasm did not survive the mandatory reformulation.
The new Diet Rite tasted different, loyal drinkers noticed, and many did not come back. Decades later, in the mid-1990s, the company tried again with Royal Crown Draft Cola, a premium cola sweetened with pure cane sugar. Reviewers liked it. It failed anyway, not because customers rejected it but because the company’s bottling network, weakened over decades, could not get the product onto single-bottle store shelves at the scale a national launch required.
It was quickly discontinued in the United States, surviving only in a handful of international markets. The final years unfolded not as a single dramatic bankruptcy but as a long, quiet sequence of ownership changes. By the early 1990s, Royal Crown Cola Company had been absorbed into Triarc Companies, a diversified holding conglomerate. In 2000, Triarc sold its beverage division, including both Royal Crown and Snapple, to Cadbury Schweppes.
A year later, Cadbury Schweppes sold off all of Royal Crown’s international business to a Canadian company, Cott Beverages, splitting the brand permanently in two. In 2008, Cadbury Schweppes spun off its American beverage business as an independent public company, Dr Pepper Snapple Group, and Royal Crown became one brand among dozens. Ten years later, in 2018, Dr Pepper Snapple Group merged with Keurig Green Mountain to form Keurig Dr Pepper, a conglomerate built primarily around single-serve coffee pods. Royal Crown Cola, the company that invented the aluminum can, the diet cola, and the caffeine-free cola, became a legacy brand inside a company whose growth story is about coffee machines.
The international side followed its own quiet drift. Cott Beverages ran Royal Crown Cola International for two decades before selling it in 2021 to Refresco, a Dutch bottling conglomerate, for $50 million. In January 2023, RC Global Beverages was sold again, to Mael Holdings, a Philippine conglomerate, for approximately $47 million. Today, Royal Crown Cola is not one company.
It is two, split apart in 2001 and never rejoined. In the United States, Keurig Dr Pepper distributes RC Cola as one line among dozens. Outside the United States, RC Global Beverages runs the brand independently, licensing it to local bottlers across more than 60 countries. In certain corners of the world, RC Cola is not a fading memory at all.
In the Philippines, RC Cola is the top-selling cola brand, distributed by a local licensee that built its own bottling plant in Antipolo City after acquiring the rights in the early 2000s. In Israel, it ranks as the second largest cola brand, trailing only Coca-Cola and outselling Pepsi. Back home, the brand survives through a smaller, quieter kind of loyalty. Vintage RC Cola bottles, particularly the distinctive 1936 design embossed with a pyramid on the shoulder, are actively sought after in the collector market.
The story of Royal Crown, the account concludes, is not about better products losing to worse ones. The company was by nearly every documented measure the more inventive one for most of the 20th century, first to the can, first to the diet cola, first to caffeine-free, first to challenge the giants publicly with its own product in a paper cup. What it lacked was never imagination. What it lacked was the capital, and later the corporate attention, to turn each invention into permanent market share before a larger competitor copied it and did it bigger.
It is a story about what happens to a company that keeps discovering the future slightly before it is profitable to own the future.