In 1901, a Georgia grocer named Claude Hatcher argued with a Coca-Cola salesman over the price of syrup. The salesman, Columbus Roberts, refused to lower the price by even a cent. The dispute became a matter of principle. According to the story, Hatcher swore he would never buy another bottle of Coca-Cola and that he would create his own drink to compete with it.
Whether the exact conversation survived more than a century of retellings is difficult to say, but the underlying dispute over the price of Coca-Cola syrup is supported by virtually every version of the story, including the official brand museum in Columbus. Hatcher went down into the basement of the grocery store and began experimenting. He had no laboratory and no serious capital, only his pharmaceutical knowledge and the stubbornness of a man who needed to prove something. The first product was not a cola at all but a ginger ale, Royal Crown Ginger Ale, released in 1905.
Then came strawberry soda and root beer. Only in 1907, after gaining enough confidence, did Hatcher release what the entire story was ultimately supposed to produce: a cherry cola called Chero-Cola, a direct competitor to the drink made by the man who had once refused him a discount. The formula worked so well that the family quickly realized the grocery store was no longer their main source of income. In 1907, the Hatchers founded Union Bottling Works specifically to bottle the new drink.
By 1920, the company already had 700 franchised bottling plants across the country, an extraordinary scale for a business that had started in the basement of a single grocery store just 15 years earlier. Then came the twist that makes the story genuinely interesting. In the early 1920s, Coca-Cola filed a lawsuit against Chero-Cola. The complaint was straightforward: Hatcher’s company was using the word “cola” in its name, while Coca-Cola claimed exclusive rights to the term itself.
A drink created out of rivalry with Coca-Cola was now forced to defend itself in court against Coca-Cola. The legal costs became overwhelming, and then sugar prices suddenly exploded, rising from 5 cents a pound to more than 30 cents a pound within a matter of months. For a company whose main raw material was sugar, it was almost catastrophic. Under pressure from both sides, the company gave in in 1923 and removed the word “cola” from its own name.
The judges were in no hurry to issue an immediate ruling. The dispute over who actually had the right to use the word “cola,” whether it was a generic term for an entire category of beverages or the property of one specific company, dragged on for years and created a precedent that mattered far beyond Georgia. Those early lawsuits brought by Coca-Cola against smaller competitors helped establish the rules of the game for the entire soft drink industry for decades to come. Any new brand with “cola” in its name risked facing the same legal pressure unless it clearly distinguished itself from the original source of the term.
While Chero-Cola’s business was collapsing, Hatcher made a strategic pivot, shifting the company’s focus toward a line of fruit-flavored sodas called Nehi. In 1928, the company officially changed its name to Nehi Corporation. Hatcher even traveled to New Orleans and purchased expensive equipment for processing raw cane sugar, reasoning that obtaining the unrefined product would be easier and cheaper than buying finished refined sugar at inflated wartime prices. He hired a chemist specifically for the project, but he never got to see the reform through.
Hatcher died in 1933 in the middle of the Great Depression, just as the company was struggling on the brink of bankruptcy under the weight of debt and soaring sugar prices. The company’s new leader, H. R. Mott, took on the task of saving the business with cold pragmatism.
He eliminated unprofitable products, cut costs, and brought the company out of debt within a year, a rare example of crisis management that worked quickly without dramatic consequences for the workforce. Then he did what Hatcher could no longer do himself. In 1934, chemist Rufus Cam reformulated the old cola, removing the cherry flavor in favor of a more classic neutral taste. The product returned to the market under a new name, Royal Crown, a tribute to the very first line of beverages Hatcher had ever created.
By 1944, after two decades of legal restrictions, the company finally recognized its right to use the word “cola” in its name again. By the mid-1950s, the company had officially become Royal Crown Cola Company. By 1940, sales had increased tenfold compared with their level less than a decade earlier, and the brand’s products were being sold in nearly every state, regularly appearing in advertisements in publications such as the Saturday Evening Post, one of America’s largest magazines at the time. This is what Royal Crown is actually famous for, not so much for its own flavor but for a list of innovations that the rest of the industry eventually adopted.
In 1954, RC became the first company in history to sell soda nationally in metal cans. Until then, the industry had relied almost entirely on glass bottles, and the idea of drinking cola from a can seemed like a questionable experiment to many competitors. Later, RC became the first company to switch specifically to the aluminum can, the very format used for the vast majority of soft drinks sold around the world today. Around this same period, RC was also the first to introduce a larger 16-ounce bottle, a format the industry would eventually adopt as a standard for retail soft drinks.
In 1958, RC launched Diet Rite, the first truly successful diet cola on the market, years before Diet Pepsi and Diet Coke would even appear. The drink took off so quickly that it almost immediately became the fourth best-selling soft drink in the country, surpassing numerous far more heavily promoted brands. Then, in 1980, the same company introduced RC100, the first caffeine-free cola in history, several years before the major competitors even began seriously considering the idea. Later came Diet Cherry RC, the first diet cherry cola on the market, yet another entry in an already remarkably long list of firsts.
But the most interesting part is the advertising campaign of the 1940s, which almost nobody remembers today. The “Best by Taste Test” campaign was built around blind taste tests, with RC openly comparing itself to competitors using unlabeled bottles, then publishing the results in newspaper and magazine advertisements. It was exactly the same basic mechanic that three decades later turned Pepsi’s Pepsi Challenge into one of the most successful advertising campaigns of the 20th century. RC had pulled off essentially the same trick three decades earlier, simply without the billions in marketing and without a name powerful enough to become part of advertising history.
Decades later, scientists conducting genuinely rigorous double-blind taste tests found that the difference between Pepsi and the much less prominent RC was barely distinguishable, meaning the forgotten competitor was, in terms of taste, perfectly capable of standing alongside a brand backed by a multi-billion dollar marketing machine. By the 1970s, Royal Crown had firmly established itself as the third cola, not as large as Coca-Cola or Pepsi but consistently holding around 10% of the market, a substantial and recognizable share. Then the company came under the leadership of a man named Victor Posner, known on Wall Street as one of the first classic corporate raiders, a specialist in acquiring troubled assets for quick profits rather than long-term development. Posner built his career by acquiring companies through borrowed money, extracting as much cash as possible from them in the short term, and treating long-term investment as an unaffordable luxury.
That approach worked extremely well for him personally but repeatedly left once-strong brands weakened in its wake. While Coca-Cola and Pepsi were spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the 1980s on deals with Michael Jackson and the disastrous New Coke campaign, the company under Posner’s leadership went in exactly the opposite direction. It sharply cut the marketing budget to save money in the short term. The logic made sense if you were looking only at the next quarter’s balance sheet and was devastating from the perspective of any planning horizon longer than a few years.
Within just a few years, RC’s market share collapsed from around 10% to less than three. A brand that had spent decades sitting on store shelves alongside the giants of the industry began to practically disappear from supermarkets. Not because customers had suddenly stopped liking the taste, but because the brand itself was becoming less visible, with less advertising, less presence in store refrigerators, and fewer reasons for shoppers to remember it at the checkout. By the time the strategic mistake was recognized and attempts were made to reverse it, winning back the lost ground had become almost impossible.
Consumer habits had already shifted toward competitors, while other brands had taken RC’s place on the shelves. There is one cultural detail that survived both the corporate upheavals and the collapse in market share: the pairing of RC Cola and MoonPie. In the 1950s, an unofficial working-class lunch tradition took shape across the American South. A bottle of RC Cola and a soft MoonPie with marshmallow filling were cheap, available at almost every roadside store, and together provided enough sugar and calories to get someone through a shift in a cotton field or factory.
Neither company ever officially partnered with the other or signed any joint marketing agreement. The pairing happened organically simply because both products were sold next to each other on the same roadside store shelves and cost roughly the same amount. The combination became so deeply embedded in southern folklore that songs about it are still written in country and bluegrass, while the phrase “RC and MoonPie” became a recognizable cultural expression for simple southern life decades before anyone in either brand’s marketing department thought of it as an advertising opportunity. In some southern towns, festivals dedicated specifically to the pairing are still held today.
After a series of acquisitions, Cadbury Schweppes in 2000, then Dr. Pepper Snapple, and since 2018, Keurig Dr. Pepper, RC Cola ended up under the same corporate roof as its former companion, Dr. Pepper.
Both drinks, born from completely different stories in different states, are now produced by the same corporation and technically compete with each other on the same shelf in the same store. In America itself, the brand has long since ceased to be a major player. Its market share has remained in the low single digits, while its main sales channels have become discount retailers such as Dollar General, where shoppers are often looking less for a prestigious brand than for a familiar taste at a low price. It is precisely in these stores that RC has shown modest but noticeable growth in recent years, not a triumphant comeback but also not the complete disappearance the company seemed destined for after the Posner era.
Outside the United States, however, RC has its own separate and considerably healthier life. In the Philippines, for example, the brand remains one of the country’s best-known soft drinks with a loyal audience that knows little or nothing about the corporate upheavals of the 1980s on the other side of the world. The rights to the international business are now held by a separate entity called RC Global Beverages, formally distinct from America’s Keurig Dr. Pepper.
A company born entirely from the desire to prove to one stubborn salesman that he could do without him eventually went on to invent the aluminum can, diet soda, and the blind taste test, three things that are now impossible to imagine the soft drink industry without. And yet, the company itself could never hold its place alongside the giants it was among the first to challenge and the first to try to outsmart through innovation rather than sheer scale. Coca-Cola, the very brand that started this entire story, still exists as an independent company with its own strategy. Meanwhile, the brand created out of spite toward it more than a century later has become little more than another line in the portfolio of a corporation that also owns its former direct competitor, Dr.
Pepper. The grudge that started everything in 1901 has long since become irrelevant to the people making decisions about the brand today. If the stories of Pepsi, Sprite, Dr. Pepper, and 7 Up show how different brands repeatedly found ways to reinvent themselves and survive, Royal Crown is a rare example of a company that invented the future for an entire industry but failed to invent a future for itself.
Perhaps the reason is that RC’s greatest ideas, the can, diet soda, and the blind taste test, were all created, at least in part, to prove something to its competitors, rather than simply to strengthen its own position. And strategies built on revenge rarely outlive the person who felt wronged in the first place.