Almost everyone must have come across the word ‘Coca-Cola’ atleast once in their life. Did you know that Fanta was invented in Hitler occupied Nazi Germany and that Pepsi called the FBI when people with ‘verified sources’ tried to sell Coca Cola’s secret recipe to them. Scroll down to know more!

1 Coca-Cola started out as a stimulating nerve tonic and used wine as sweetening agent

John Pemberton, the pharmacist founder behind Coca-Cola was a great ‘Coca’ aficionado and sought out to brew an enterprising drink combining a cocktail of medicine and ‘soft’ beverage. The “Pemberton’s French wine coca” was a glorious market hit until Atlanta introduced liquor regulations in 1886. Sugar syrup replaced wine and the product was sold as ‘Coca-Cola: the temperance drink’ after he reworked the recipe. (source)

2 The bottle design was inspired by Victorian era Hobble skirt

Coca-Cola underwent a major product design changeover with the introduction of ‘Hobble skirt’ bottles and to this day, theories exist and one being that the curved bottle shape was inspired by narrow skirt dresses. But that’s not true. It was an error made by T. Clyde Edwards, an auditor working for the company. His research for Coca and Cola at the library landed him on the page of ‘Cocoa’ and decided to use the outline of Cocoa bean pod from the Encyclopedia Britannica as reference. (source)

3 Coca-Cola was considered as an effective contraceptive

It was believed for a long, long time that the carbonic acid in Coke made it the most simple, cost-friendly and hippiest birth control measure. A post-coitus procedure of vaginal douching was thought to decrease sperm mobility. Using Old Coke, New Coke, Diet Coke and the decaffeinated ones in laboratory research gave varied results but major inference was that the soft drink was useless as spermicides. It is notable to mention that the 2008 Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to two sets of team – one for discovering the ‘sperm killing’ ability of Coca-Cola and the other for disproving it by chance. (source)

4 Coca-Cola wanted to replace tap water with soft drinks and bottled water

Highly aggressive advertising campaign for bottled water industry –that’s how Coca-Cola is mentioned in Management Literature as it dissuaded ‘tap water‘ seeking customers to increase profit although the company uses tap water as the source of their bottled water. Coca-Cola spearheaded a hush-hush campaign ‘H₂NO’ through a series of online messages to distributors and restaurants throughout U.S. The Olive Garden ‘say No to H2O ‘campaign was successful and the news broke out. (source)