At the beginning of 1940, Max Keith, the head of Coca-Cola’s German subsidiary, faced a brutal choice. For more than a decade, his branch had sold the American drink successfully across Germany, building factories and a distribution network that covered nearly the entire country. But with the outbreak of World War II and the international trade blockade, shipments of the essential syrup concentrate from Atlanta came to an almost complete halt. The subsidiary was cut off from its parent company and from the only legitimate source of the proprietary formula.
Without it, producing the familiar dark drink was impossible. Keith could shut down production entirely, leaving hundreds of employees without work during an already difficult wartime period, or he could create something entirely new from whatever ingredients remained physically available under severe food shortages and government rationing. He chose the second, riskier path. Working with a small team of local food technologists, he experimented with byproducts from other food industries that were still accessible: whey left over from cheese production at local dairies, and apple pomace from cider and apple juice pressing.
The resulting drink had almost nothing in common with Coca-Cola. It was noticeably sweeter, with a pronounced fruity flavor and a completely different color. The name came almost accidentally during an internal team meeting. According to a story Keith later told journalists with enthusiasm, he challenged the employees to come up with a suitable name within just a few minutes, urging them to use their “fantasy,” the German word for imagination.
One employee reportedly shortened that word into the short, memorable name Fanta. And so, in 1940, at the height of the war, a brand was born that today, more than eighty years later, is sold in more than 180 countries. After the war ended, Coca-Cola’s leadership in Atlanta faced an unusual legal and corporate question. What should be done with a product developed entirely independently by the company’s German subsidiary during a period when direct communication with the parent company had been impossible, and when Germany itself had been officially at war with the United States?
Formally, Fanta had been created without prior approval from Coca-Cola’s central American management. Yet it had been developed by an official foreign subsidiary, not by an independent outside organization. This created a strange legal situation regarding ownership of a trademark that had emerged under such extraordinary circumstances. Coca-Cola’s leadership made a bold strategic decision.
Instead of abandoning the wartime invention or trying to distance the company from a product created in an enemy country, they officially integrated the Fanta brand into their expanding international portfolio. By the end of the war, the drink had already gained a stable popularity on the German domestic market and had a fully functioning, time-tested recipe and established production process. The company saw a ready-made, virtually cost-free opportunity to expand its product range rather than a reason for lengthy legal disputes with its own former wartime subsidiary. After the war, the formula was revised repeatedly and adapted to take advantage of widely available ingredients, gradually evolving toward the familiar orange soda flavor consumers know today.
The brand expanded steadily beyond Germany, becoming a full international range of fruit-flavored soft drinks with numerous regional flavor variations. Remarkably, Max Keith, the man directly responsible for creating the drink under wartime shortages, was not only spared formal sanctions from the American parent company for developing a new product without approval, but went on to continue a successful corporate career within Coca-Cola in senior European management positions for several more decades. It remains a rare case in corporate history where a forced and improvised wartime decision proved so commercially successful that it outweighed all bureaucratic questions surrounding its unauthorized creation. Alongside this wartime story lies another widespread legend that requires more careful examination.
Many people believe Coca-Cola was the first company to portray Santa Claus wearing red and white clothing. This is not entirely consistent with the historical record. Images of Santa dressed in red had existed in American popular culture and book illustrations for decades before Coca-Cola’s advertising appeared, including well-known illustrations from the nineteenth century. However, Coca-Cola’s advertising campaign, launched in 1931 and created by illustrator Haddon Sundblom, played a decisive role in firmly establishing the warm, cheerful, plump elderly man with rosy cheeks and kind eyes now regarded as the canonical image of Santa throughout much of the Western world.
For more than three decades, Sundblom created new versions of Santa each year for Coca-Cola’s Christmas campaigns, consistently dressing him in the brand’s signature red and white colors. The long-term repetition of this specific visual image in national advertising distributed across the country for decades did more to standardize this version of Santa Claus than any other illustration or book of the period. The company never officially claimed to have invented the character, but it spent years willingly allowing the popular legend to continue circulating, since the association with one of the most beloved figures in Western culture proved exceptionally valuable. In 1993, Coca-Cola’s marketing department launched one of the most unusual product experiments in company history: a carbonated drink called OK Soda, created specifically for Generation X, a generation known for its skeptical, ironic attitude toward traditional advertising.
Instead of enthusiastic promises, marketers deliberately chose performative indifference and self-irony. Phrases such as “It’s an okay soda. Will it be great? That’s hard to say.
” appeared on the cans. For packaging and advertising, Coca-Cola worked with well-known artists from the world of independent and alternative underground comics, including Daniel Clowes and Charles Burns, whose darkly ironic visual styles were meant to resonate with the skeptical youth audience. Despite the conceptual boldness, the product was a commercial failure. OK Soda was discontinued in 1995, just a couple of years after launch, having failed to gain any significant market share against more traditional competitors.
But the failure has had an unexpected continuation. Three decades later, original OK Soda cans and promotional materials have become genuinely sought-after collectibles among fans of branding history and 1990s underground comics. Some well-preserved examples now sell at specialized collectors’ auctions for amounts far exceeding the original retail price. In 1920, a nationwide ban on the production, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages came into effect in the United States.
This period, known as Prohibition, lasted until 1933. For traditional drinking establishments, it was a genuine economic catastrophe. Bar owners were forced either to close entirely or to risk the underground market for illegal alcohol. For Coca-Cola, however, the same difficult period unexpectedly became a genuine commercial opportunity.
Many former drinking establishments, determined to preserve some source of legal income, converted into soda fountains specializing in non-alcoholic soft drinks, ice cream, and light snacks. Coca-Cola, which had established a solid reputation as a respectable, family-friendly, completely legal drink long before Prohibition, found itself in an exceptionally favorable position at the moment when millions of Americans were looking for a socially acceptable alternative to the traditional bar. The company actively promoted its drink as a respectable, modern, legal alternative to alcohol. Throughout the Prohibition years, sales volumes showed steady year-over-year growth, a development particularly paradoxical against the broader backdrop of economic crisis.
For many decades, Coca-Cola has also engaged in an unusual legal struggle, not against direct competitors, but to preserve the legal status of its registered trademark in everyday speech. In certain parts of the United States, particularly the South, the word Coke has historically become a general colloquial term for virtually any carbonated soft drink, regardless of brand. Such a linguistic situation presents a serious legal threat. If a trademark officially becomes a generic term, completely losing its association with one specific manufacturer, the company risks permanently losing its exclusive right to the name.
This fate has befallen other once-protected trademarks, including aspirin, which became a generic term for ordinary medicine. To avoid this, Coca-Cola has spent decades systematically sending legal letters to restaurants, diners, and retail establishments across the country, demanding they stop using the word Coke as a generic term for competing drinks on menus or in conversation with customers. Despite these costly efforts, the habit of calling virtually any carbonated soft drink Coke persists in some Southern regions to this day, and servers there may still have to ask customers which specific brand they actually mean. What ultimately emerges from these separate episodes is a picture of a company shaped by forced improvisation, unexpected historical disruptions, and long legal battles.
Its most recognizable fruit-flavored drink was born from a German subsidiary cut off from its parent by war, left to survive under severe shortages. Its Christmas advertising helped firmly establish a beloved cultural character while never officially claiming to have invented him. And it benefited from historical upheaval like Prohibition while simultaneously spending decades in a costly fight to keep its own name from becoming a generic word. Even a deliberately unimpressive product experiment, designed from the start not to impress anyone at first glance, commercially failed yet unexpectedly became a sought-after cultural artifact for collectors.
Over more than a century of history surrounding a single drink, the most interesting stories have often been the less visible side stories: a forced wartime improvisation, a long legal battle over everyday language, and a product designed so that almost no one would particularly like it.