The World of Caffeine (35 page)

It is strange to say, but the twentieth century, the time of unmatched enlightenment in education and medical science, has witnessed the first widespread acceptance of the general and unmonitored use of a psychoactive stimulant drug by the juvenile population. In fact, except for khat, widely used by adolescent Yemenis, we know of no other mood-altering drug whose use anywhere by the young is or has been not only legal, but approved and fostered by adults.

Sundblom Santa advertisement for Coca-Cola. This is one of many Sundblom paintings that created the American icon of Santa Claus. The fat, red-nosed, red-cloaked, jolly Coca-Cola-drinking version of Santa Clause became a defining image of American cultural life.

Coca-Cola, the forerunner of all commercially caffeinated soft drinks, was, during its first years, an elixir sold in pharmacies. After the turn of the century, the CocaCola Company had to make a choice as to whether to continue promoting the drink as a tonic, which might suggest it was a strong stimulant with a limited application, or to advertise it as a simple beverage, suitable for everyone, including children. Some Coca-Cola leaders had reservations about the latter strategy, partly because they were concerned over the potential danger to children. However, the simple beverage theory won, even though it meant sacrificing any claim, in the words of executive correspondence, for “excellency or special merit,” and Coca-Cola faced the future as one of many soft drinks.

With this strategy in place, it remained for the company leaders to ensure their product a distinctive place in the arcana of common soda fountain options. One of their central problems remained how to inveigle children into becoming lifelong Coca-Cola drinkers while observing their pledge never to show a child under the age of twelve in an advertisement. While the advertising of Coca-Cola is an epic tale, no single feature stands out as clearly or has had such a broad impact on popular culture as Coca-Cola’s most brilliant response to this apparent dilemma: the invention of the modern Santa Claus.

Santa Claus, as we all know, is a portly, white-haired gentleman with a snowy beard, broad smile, rosy cheeks, red nose, wearing a costume somewhat resembling bright red flannel underwear with a broad belt and big black boots, happily busy with the delivery of toys on snowy Christmas Eves. What many may not realize is that this image of Santa is an American, twentieth-century invention, created by Haddon Sundblom, a Swedish artist in the employ of Coca-Cola, and promoted relentlessly into the apotheosis of a folk hero. Before Sundblom’s work, Santa Claus was represented in a variety of ways. In Europe he had traditionally been a serious, even severe, tall, thin man wearing any of the primary colors. In the popular recitation piece “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” written by Clement Moore, a Columbia University professor, in the 1920s, Santa became a jolly elf only a few inches high.

In their book
Dream of Santa,
Charles and Taylor relate how in 1931, posing his friend Lou Prentice, a retired salesman, as his first model, Sundblom painted the first depiction of the Santa Claus we know in America today. After Prentice’s death, Sundblom used himself as a model, refining his creation further. The Coca-Cola Company built a small advertising industry around Sundblom’s Coke-guzzling saint, who was invariably aided in completing his eleemosynary labors by the lift provided by sugar and caffeine—an advertising effort aimed, obviously, primarily at young children who would, in the course of things, grow into succeeding generations of CocaCola consumers. New Sundblom productions were used on billboards and in magazine advertisements year after year, until his last two paintings were completed in 1964.

In February 1996, Beverage Marketing Corporation, which offers consulting and information services to the global beverage industries, reported that Coca-Cola Classic was the best-selling soft drink in America, followed by Pepsi-Cola, Diet Coke, Dr Pepper, Mountain Dew, Diet Pepsi, Sprite, 7-UP, Caffeine Free Diet Coke, and Caffeine Free Diet Pepsi.
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Insiders in the soft drink industry and outsiders trying to get in have noticed that the top six brands have one thing in common: They all contain caffeine. Following the maxim “If a little is good, then a lot is better,” a number of companies have offered or are preparing to offer some soft drinks containing more caffeine and others in which the presence of caffeine is a more emphatic component of their market identity.

The first of these high-caffeine soft drinks was Jolt Cola. In a brief company history posted on the Internet, called “Where did Jolt Come From?,” Jolt represents its founder, C.J.Rapp, as a pioneer. In 1985, when Jolt Cola was introduced, their story runs, most beverage companies were pushing a “less is more” approach to new products: fewer calories, less sugar, and less caffeine. Rapp had the vision to buck this trend and put the slogan “Twice the Caffeine” on every bottle and can. What they don’t mention in this article is that Jolt originally boasted “Twice the Sugar” as well. But even though more caffeine might seem to call for more sugar to counteract the increased bitterness, Jolt today has trimmed its sugar to standard levels, but kept the caffeine content as high as ever, which gives the drink a disrinctive “bite” that some people find pleasant.

Rapp says that his product was inspired by college students who were “concocting elixirs to help them study for exams,” perhaps a veiled reference to the use of methamphetamine, dexamphetamine, and caffeine pills. He sees a tie-in between Jolt’s success and the renaissance in coffeehouse culture: “Just as coffee bars began showing up in every city from Boston to Seattle, Jolt, the espresso of colas, took the soft drink market by storm.”

In the 1990s many new high-caffeine soft drinks are flooding the market worldwide. The triumph of Jolt is perhaps more apparent in Rapp’s mind than in the marketplace, as evidenced by the fact that most comments about the product consist of people asking each other if it is still being made and if so where it can be found. Recently we found a grocer in Philadelphia who stocked it. But on returning several weeks later, it was gone, and the owner explained that the distributor was not expected for an indeterminate period.

Another way of looking at it, however, is that, difficult to find as Jolt may have become, people still remember it and seek it out. There can be no doubt that highcaffeine soft drinks can have a distinctive flavor. Jolt itself is a superior product and easily the best-tasting cola on the market. The extra caffeine gives it “point,” a word used to designate piquant bitterness, such as that which is vital to fine coffee’s appeal. Significantly, Jolt, unlike Coca-Cola or Pepsi, is still sweetened with cane sugar, and the clarity of cane sugar, which is far less cloying than cheap corn syrup substitutes, combines with the additional caffeine to create a bittersweet flavor that is hard to beat.

The cola nut is not the source of either the flavoring for or the caffeine content of cola soft drinks. However, other carbonated caffeinated beverages, such as some made from the guarana berry, actually depend for their flavor and stimulant power on the high caffeine content of the fruit or nut itself.

Brazilians consume more than six billion quarts of soft drinks a year, making Brazil the third-largest soft drink market in the world, after Mexico and the United States, and guarana-based drinks make up 25 percent of this market. Antarctica, a local company, and Coca-Cola currently sell the brands that dominate guarana beverage sales, but PepsiCo has announced plans to take them on with a new line of drinks flavored with plain guarana and guarana mixed with peach, passion fruit, and acerola, a citrus-flavored Brazilian berry. Pepsi is also test marketing a guarana drink in the United States called “Josta,” for which guarana is the primary flavor and source of caffeine.

In the late 1990s a new soft drink was created by Steve Gariepy to advance his ambition to market guarana, which he describes as a natural energy source. He hits every questionable note, from vulgarity, pandering to children’s interest in drugs, false historical puffing, and scientific misinformation:

Note that if GUTS has twice the correctly stated 3.2 mg per ounce caffeine content of Pepsi, it would have only about a third the caffeine per ounce of average coffee. The drink may be “New Age,” but the snake oil sales tactics are as ancient as the imaginary Andiraze Indians are supposed to have been by the author of this release.
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An interesting phenomenon is the Austrian dominance in the production and consumption of European high-caffeine “energy drinks,” including Red Bull, Blue Sow, Dark Dog, and Flying Horse, to name a few. Austrians, often stereotyped as slow moving and hypochondriacal, consume more than one-third of such beverages produced in Europe. Red Bull, for example, sold 150 million cans in 1996, more than a third in Austria alone.

The use of colas, especially trendy high-caffeine soft drinks such as Kick, Nitro Cola, Semtex, GUTS, Afri-Cola, and the old, original Jolt Cola, are enjoying a kind of cult upsurge among computer programmers. The reason was explained in a recent article by David Ramsey in
MacWEEK
responding to a reader’s query, “Why do programmers drink so much cola?”
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Some of the answers to this question are discussed in
chapter 16
, “Thinking Over Caffeine.”

President and Mrs. Clinton gulping Coca-Cola straight from the bottle during a visit to the Moscow Coca-Cola plant, May 1995. (Reuters/ Jim Bourg/Archive Photos)

The biggest news in the area of highly caffeinated soft drinks is the entry of the giant Coca-Cola Company into the $4-billion-a-year “heavy citrus” soft drink market, 80 percent of which currently belongs to Mountain Dew, with the brand Surge. The specter of Wiley’s concerns about the propriety of selling caffeinated soft drinks to young consumers arises in connection with this highly spiked drink, because the company intends to market this high-caffeine, high-calorie beverage to twelve- to thirtyfour-year-olds, especially boys and men. The first television advertisement for Surge was aired during the 1997 Super Bowl. The marketing of Surge marks the first time caffeine itself has been brought to center stage by the manufacturer of a comestible product with a large international market. To a certain extent, what constitutes a highcaffeine soft drink is in the mind of the regulator. Consider that while Mountain Dew is an ordinary soft drink in the United States, it is too supercharged with caffeine to be legally sold on the British market.

As the purveyors of caffeine indefatigably repeat, caffeine is the only alertness aid approved for sale by the FDA. This means that companies like SmithKline Beecham, the makers of Vivarin, the largest-selling caffeine pill, and Bristol-Myers Squibb, the makers of NoDoz, and their competitors are in the enviable yet problematic position of being the legal producers and sellers of one of the only over-thecounter psychoactive stimulant drugs outside the matrix of a food or beverage.