Fanta: Every day a drink is enjoyed by millions of people which has a very interesting origin. In it, we are going back to the second world war to see how it is one of the world's most iconic beverages.
The year is 1933, and when Hitler came to power, another force was also growing in Germany. Coca Cola, one of the best American companies, entered the German market in 1929 behind this boy, Max Keith. He built the company's entire infrastructure in Germany, starting with the bottling plant in Frankfurt and the Cologne warehouses.
He and an army of salesmen scour the streets of every major city, distribute pamphlets and put up posters until every German knows about Coca-Cola. Through his aggressive marketing, Keith did something truly remarkable; Instead, they found centuries of alcoholic tradition to drink soda. Of course, Keith's timing was impeccable. They built factories and hired people when everything was cheaper due to the Great Depression.
Then, when Germany started recovering in the early 1930s, Keith Coca-Cola was the first product that many bought when they finally had some disposable income.
The technology was also helping Keith: In the 1930s the refrigerator swept across America and was also making its way into Germany, allowing people to enjoy an unprecedented Coca-Cola.
Of course, Keith was very careful in his advertising:
He went to great lengths to hide the fact that Coca-Cola was an American business. He listed the German subsidiary in every single advertisement and even attempted to obscure the ownership structure by claiming that the American company was not a shareholder, but only a lender, providing secret formulas and money. In a way, Keith was right: his unprecedented success persuaded his American observers to grant him incredible freedom, so much so that by 1935 he was producing 7 of Coca-Cola's 9 secret ingredients in his factories.
By that time, Germany had already become the largest market for CocaCola outside the US, but Keith was only getting started.
The 1936 Olympics held in Berlin became as much a victory moment for Hitler as for Keith himself. As Germany won 33 gold medals, more than any other country, Keith Coca-Cola's banners flew throughout the event and they sold more than a million cases of Coca-Cola that year. And yet despite this achievement, a new threat looms over the Keith Cola Empire.
Under Hitler's orders, the German economy was to resume a four-year plan and prepare for self-sufficiency and meant very few shipments from the US.
Keith had no choice but to expand production further: in 1938 he had nine factories under construction, with 43 operations. When the Nazis announced Austria in March of that year, Keith was quick to establish a subsidiary there six months later. And yet this wave of expansion would be greatly reduced, as Hitler's troops marched in Poland in September 1939 and started the Second World War.
Coca-Cola shipments from the US were very limited and were completely halted by the US entering the war in 1941. As a director of an American-owned company, Keith feared that he would be imprisoned and his business nationalized, which happened for the German subsidiaries of General Motors and IBM.
The Nazi bureaucracy was eager to continue the nationalizations it had undertaken in the 1930s and Keith was an easy target. His only solution was to join the bureaucracy, and fortunately, he became friends with the Nazi justice minister, who appointed Keith to the office of enemy property. From this situation, Keith was not only protected from the Nazis, but he could also save other European Coca-Cola companies.
As the German war machine swept across Europe, Keith would occupy the Coca-Cola factories in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Norway. But of course, all the factories in the world would be worthless if they had nothing to produce, and Keith had no more shipments from the US. They best rationed two Coca-Cola missiles, limiting their limited supply for use in Nazi hospitals, but this rationing lasted only a few years.
Keith either had to find a new product or go bankrupt, but with the German economy undergoing total mobilization, the material available to him was extremely scarce.
Keith asked his chemists to make a recipe, which he called "leftovers of leftovers", which consisted of cider press and whey leftover apple fiber, the watery substance that remains after milk to make cheese. Depending on what production was coming from Italy, the recipe would sometimes include grapes, lemons, and oranges, but still, the resulting cloudy, brown liquid was far from delicious.
It was also not used as a drink most of the time, but instead, people were downing their soup with it.
Nevertheless, Keith finally had a product he could easily manufacture and starting in 1940, Europe's Coca-Cola factories were once again running at full capacity. To come up with a brand name for his new product, Keith instructed his salesmen to use his imagination or fantasy in German. The term became the codename of the product and eventually, it was shortened to Fanta and Keith ran away with it.
By the time Keith Kolaran ran out of supplies in 1943, he was selling 3 million cases of Fanta per year, but due to the Eastern Front being against Germany, the war was starting to take a toll.
When the military began requiring Keith to strike, he had to start bottled water to get his company on the list of "essential" occupations for the war effort. And yet, from 1943 the German Air Force steadily reached the point where the Allies were attacking German cities every day. Each of Keith's factories was bombed at least once during the war, while its headquarters in the industrial city of Essen were completely flat.
By January 1945, the Nazi government was collapsing on its own and was looking for traitors who it could blame. The Ministry of Justice was no longer safe for Keith: First, he ordered her to change her company's name to something other than Coco-Cola, and then she asked him to "inquire" and begin the process of nationalizing her company Called for Berlin.
By that time, Keith's friend was dead and was replaced, but the following week in a rhythm of unbelievable fate, the Allies bombed the Ministry of Justice, causing the death of the new minister and practically a definite death to Keith. Was saved from
For the next three months, he would continue beating Punta until the Americans found him in a partially destroyed factory in May 1945. His first telegraph to the US headquarters was to confirm that the German subsidiary was still alive and to ask for help, but the Americans were ahead of him. As the Allies liberated Europe, the Coca Colaengineers sent to America marched behind them, rebuilding their factories and bottling Coca-Cola in Germany in early April.
In the US, Keith was revered as a hero: not only did he keep the company alive, he did not officially become a member of the Nazi Party, keeping Coca-Cola away from the strain of fascism. For his efforts, Keith was made president of Coca-Cola Europe, and after a few years of careful planning, he released an appropriate version of Fanta worldwide in 1955. Fanta has since become one of Coca-Cola's selling beverages, but it all happened thanks to a man's daring to make soda in front of Nazi Germany.
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