In 1928, an American beverage company did something almost unprecedented in corporate history: it erased its own name from the letterhead and replaced it with the name of a product. That product was a fruit soda called Nihi. Just five years earlier, the same company had lost a court battle it could not win, when Coca-Cola sued over a single word—”cola”—and won. The smaller company was ordered to drop that word from its flagship product’s name.
By the late 1950s, Nihi was gone from the corporate letterhead again. In its place stood a different drink, one that Nihi’s own profits had helped bring back to life. That drink went on to become one of America’s major colas. Nihi did not.
The story began in Columbus, Georgia, in 1905. Claude Hatcher was 29 years old, standing in the basement of his family’s grocery store. He was not a businessman by training but a pharmacist, a man who understood chemistry before he understood commerce. While the family store moved staples like flour and tobacco, Hatcher saw opportunity in soda fountains, which were pulling in customers with flavored drinks and offering better margins than almost anything else on the shelf.
Working with what the store already had, he began bottling ginger ale and root beer in that basement under the name Union Bottling Works. It was not a factory—just a folding table, a handful of bottles, and a young man betting that Columbus was ready for something new. The bet paid off faster than expected. Within two years, demand outgrew the basement, and in 1907 the operation moved to a permanent address on 10th Avenue, a location the company would occupy and expand for decades.
Hatcher developed a full line of flavored drinks under the Royal Crown name, a name he chose for his family, not knowing it would resurface decades later under very different circumstances. In that same period, he built the product that would define the company’s first act: a cola called Chero-Cola. It caught on immediately. By 1912, the growth was significant enough that the company reorganized as the Chero-Cola Company, with Hatcher as president.
Rather than build company-owned bottling plants in every market, Hatcher franchised the formula and brand to independent bottlers across the country. It was fast, cheap, and effective. By 1920, the company had roughly 700 franchise bottling plants operating under its name—an expansion that should have made Chero-Cola a household name rivaling anything coming out of Atlanta. But Atlanta was exactly the problem.
Coca-Cola had spent years defending the word “cola,” targeting any regional drink that used it in its name. Chero-Cola was next. The lawsuit centered on the claim that Coca-Cola held exclusive commercial rights to the word itself. As legal bills piled up, a second crisis emerged: the cost of sugar, the core ingredient in every bottle, was climbing sharply.
In 1923, Hatcher settled the only way left to him. He dropped “cola” from the company’s flagship name. The product that had built 700 bottling plants could no longer legally call itself what it had always been called. For most regional bottlers of that era, a forced rebrand like this was the beginning of the end.
He did not retreat into a smaller version of the same drink. He built something the lawsuit couldn’t touch: a fruit soda that had nothing to do with cola at all. It arrived in 1924, in grape, orange, and peach flavors, and in a bottle that broke every convention on the shelf. Where most fruit sodas of the era leaned on cheap artificial flavoring, Hatcher’s team built the new lines around real fruit extract, blended to hold its flavor through carbonation and through weeks on a warm shelf.
The heavier, fuller mouthfeel became the drink’s signature. It made people finish one bottle and reach for a second. But the bottle did more than the formula. Standard soda bottles in 1924 ran about six inches tall, so similar that one looked nearly identical to the next on a crowded shelf.
Hatcher’s team designed a bottle twelve inches tall—double the industry norm—tall enough to be visible over every other bottle in the case. The name followed the bottle: Nihi, a direct play on “knee-high,” the height the bottle appeared to reach when set beside a customer standing at the counter. The advertising leaned into the same joke. Print ads used women’s legs as a visual anchor, a knee-high hemline standing in for the bottle itself.
By the standards of 1924 it was bold. By modern standards, some of that early imagery reads as dated. But at the time, it worked exactly as designed. No customer who saw one of those ads forgot the name.
Nihi launched at the same price point as standard six-inch sodas: a nickel a bottle, the going industry rate. For that nickel, customers got twice the bottle and, by most accounts, a flavor with more depth than anything else at that price. There was no barrier left between the product and the sale. The distribution network was already in place.
The same 700 franchise bottling plants that had carried Chero-Cola across the country were still under contract, ready to bottle a new formula the moment it arrived. Within its first year, Nihi was moving through the same soda fountains, drugstores, and general stores that had carried Chero-Cola for over a decade. In 1924, the company sold roughly 10,000 cases of Nihi. By 1928, that number had climbed past 600,000 cases a year—growth of roughly 6,000% in less than half a decade.
The company that had been forced to erase its own name was about to do something almost no company in American beverage history had done before: erase that name again, this time on its own terms, and replace it with the name of the drink that saved it. In 1928, the board voted to change the company’s name to the Nihi Corporation. That same year, it listed publicly on the New York Curb Exchange, the forerunner of the American Stock Exchange. A drink invented as a lawsuit workaround now had its name on stock certificates traded in New York.
Through the following decade, the company leaned into a jingle simple enough to lodge in a customer’s head after one hearing: “Splash something great. Splash a little Nihi. ” By the 1940s, Hollywood noticed. Print advertisements featured some of the biggest names in American film, including Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and Joan Crawford.
Hedy Lamarr, one of the most photographed actresses of the decade, appeared in large-format Nihi advertising that turned drugstore counters into something closer to a movie promotion than a soda display. By the mid-1950s, the lineup had expanded to 14 distinct flavors, anchored by grape, orange, and peach, and joined by additions like Dr. Nihi and Nihi Blue Cream. Three flavors born out of a 1924 lawsuit settlement had grown into an entire shelf of their own.
The company’s growth ran directly through the years of Prohibition, which banned the sale of alcoholic beverages nationwide from 1920 until 1933. Records from the period are not detailed enough to isolate exactly how much of Nihi’s explosive early growth came from drinkers switching to soda rather than beer or spirits, but the timing is difficult to ignore. The years Nihi grew from 10,000 cases to over 600,000 were the same years the alcohol market sat almost entirely dormant. Then came a crisis that threatened every bottler in the country: sugar.
The core sweetening ingredient spiked in price, climbing from under five cents a pound to more than thirty cents a pound during a stretch of severe market volatility. For a company selling a nickel bottle, a six-fold jump in its most essential raw ingredient was close to an existential threat. Hatcher’s response was not to raise prices or thin out the recipe. He traveled to New Orleans, purchased sugar refining equipment outright, and brought it back to Columbus, betting that owning the refining process would let the company control its own cost going forward.
But the crisis that nearly ended the Nihi Corporation did not come from sugar. It came from the broader collapse of the American economy. When the stock market crashed in 1929, the Nihi Corporation was a public company less than a year removed from its listing, with annual sales of roughly $12 million, the high-water mark of everything Hatcher had built since that basement in 1905. The Great Depression did not spare the company.
By 1930, annual sales had slipped to roughly $11 million, and they kept falling through 1931 and into 1932, the only year in the company’s history that it posted an outright financial loss. By 1933, the numbers had begun to stabilize, but on December 30, 1933, Claude A. Hatcher died suddenly at age 57. He was buried in Riverdale Cemetery in Muscogee County, Georgia, a few miles from the 10th Avenue address where Union Bottling Works had first set up permanent operations 26 years earlier.
The man who had turned a pharmacist’s basement experiment into a publicly traded corporation was gone. The company he left behind carried his name on nothing. It carried the name of the product that had saved it once already. In the weeks after Hatcher’s death, HR Mott, the company’s vice president, took control.
His mandate was survival. He audited the full product line, cut every flavor and formula that wasn’t earning its shelf space, and tightened operations across the bottling network. Within a single year, he had brought the company back to debt-free footing. But the centerpiece of Mott’s recovery plan was not Nihi.
It was a decision to revive the original cola formula Hatcher had built the company around decades earlier—the one stripped of the word “cola” back in 1923. Mott’s team reformulated it and in 1934 launched it under a new name: Royal Crown, borrowed from the ginger ale and root beer line Hatcher had first bottled in his family’s basement in 1905. It carried no reference to the drink that had rescued the company nine years earlier. Royal Crown succeeded immediately.
Within its first year, it was generating more than a million dollars in annual sales—close to a lifeline for a company still recovering from its only loss year on record. The customer response was immediate. Sales climbed steadily through the mid-1930s, and by the early 1940s, Royal Crown Cola had become one of the fastest-growing colas in the country, trailing only Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola in national volume. In 1940, the company brought in C.
C. Colbear to replace Mott as president. A legal decision in 1944 changed the calculus further: a court ruling determined the company could once again use the word “cola” in its branding. The restriction that had forced Hatcher to invent Nihi in the first place was now gone, and the word went straight into Royal Crown’s branding, not Nihi’s.
Through the 1940s and into the 1950s, the marketing budget, advertising campaigns, and corporate identity all shifted steadily toward Royal Crown. Nihi kept selling, but it was no longer the product the company was building its future around. It had become the reliable secondary line—profitable, familiar, and increasingly overshadowed by the cola carrying the company’s original founding name. The final structural shift arrived in the late 1950s.
The board voted to rename the Nihi Corporation one more time, becoming the Royal Crown Cola Company. The name built entirely around a fruit soda’s runaway success was erased from the corporate letterhead after roughly three decades. In its place stood the name of a product that Nihi’s own profits had helped bring back from a lawsuit-forced grave nine years after Nihi itself was born. What followed was not a single collapse but a long series of ownership changes.
In 1993, Triarc Companies purchased the Royal Crown Cola Company outright. Nihi was no longer a founding product with its name on the building; it was one line item inside a beverage portfolio owned by a holding company with no direct connection to Columbus, Georgia. The ownership chain kept moving. Royal Crown Brands eventually passed to Cadbury Schweppes.
In 2008, Cadbury Schweppes’ American Beverage Operations merged into the newly formed Dr Pepper Snapple Group, and Nihi became a single brand among dozens in a portfolio built around Dr Pepper, 7Up, and Snapple. A decade later, Dr Pepper Snapple merged with Keurig Green Mountain, forming Keurig Dr Pepper, one of the largest beverage and coffee companies in North America. Nihi’s ownership had passed through five distinct corporate identities in less than a century. Distribution followed the same slow contraction.
The 700 franchise bottling plants did not survive as a network. Independent regional bottlers were consolidated, bought out, or shut down over decades of industry-wide restructuring. What remained of Nihi’s shelf presence narrowed to its strongest historical territory, the American South, where regional loyalty had always run deepest. The final years arrived as attrition.
Mainstream grocery chains consolidating their beverage sections around national brands gradually stopped stocking flavors like Nihi Blue Cream and Dr. Nihi. Cooler space and shelf space shrank flavor by flavor, region by region, decade by decade. No single decision ended it.
No single executive made the call. It simply stopped being anyone’s priority. Under Keurig Dr Pepper, the classic flavors—grape, orange, and peach—are still bottled and sold today in glass containers that echo the original silhouette, if not the full 12-inch height. It is a smaller operation than the one that once ran 700 franchise plants, but it is the same company, five ownership changes removed, still filling bottles with the same three fruit flavors a Columbus pharmacist mixed up in 1924.
Finding it today takes more effort than it once did. It survives in pockets where regional loyalty runs deepest: small grocery stores and specialty shops across the American South, and online retailers shipping six-packs of classic glass bottles to buyers who have never set foot in Columbus. Around that surviving product, a quieter secondary economy has grown. Vintage bottle collectors trade unopened cases in pre-1960s glass, hunting for bottles that still carry embossed markings from long-defunct franchise plants.
Online groups trade photographs of old crate stamps and cap liners the way other collectors trade baseball cards. None of it moves the needle on Keurig Dr Pepper’s balance sheet. All of it keeps a 90-year-old brand alive in a way corporate marketing budgets no longer bother to. For the drinkers who still seek it out, the reason is rarely nostalgia alone.
It is the flavor itself—a fruit soda built on real extract rather than the thinner, more uniform artificial flavoring that dominates most of the category today. Nothing else on a modern shelf tastes quite the same way, because nothing else was built the same way. The physical trail of the company’s origins is easier to walk than most. Columbus, Georgia, still holds the history at its center, preserved today through local historical institutions dedicated to the Hatcher family and the beverage empire they built.
The city remembers Hatcher as the man who put it on the beverage map of the American South. The surprise in this story is not a hidden scandal. It is what Hatcher did with the fortune Nihi built. When he died in 1933, his will did not simply pass the company down.
It created an educational fund, the Pickett and Hatcher Educational Fund, built specifically to help young people from the region afford college. A pharmacist who started with a folding table and a basement of ginger ale bottles spent the back half of his life quietly reinvesting in the community that had bought his product one nickel bottle at a time. Nihi was never destroyed by a scandal, a formula disaster, or a single bad decision. It was slowly, methodically outgrown by its own success.
A fruit soda invented to dodge a lawsuit ended up funding the revival of the very cola it was created to replace. The company Hatcher built did not fail. It simply stopped needing the product that saved it as badly as it once did, and that shift—small, reasonable, defensible at every individual step—added up over 90 years to a founder’s name erased from the company twice, and a soda that once renamed a public corporation, now sitting quietly in the regional aisle of a southern grocery store.