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Coca-Cola® Day celebrates the world’s best-known soft drink and one of the most recognized brands in the world.
It all began on this day in 1886 when the curiosity of an Atlanta pharmacist, Dr. John S. Pemberton, led him to create a distinctive-tasting soft drink for soda fountains. He made a flavored syrup, including extract of coca leaves and kola nuts, added for medicinal purposes, of course (it was a pharmacy).
Pemberton took this syrup to his neighborhood pharmacy, where he mixed it with carbonated water and was deemed “excellent” by those who sampled it. Dr. Pemberton’s partner and bookkeeper, Frank M. Robinson, is credited with naming “Coca‑Cola” and designing the trademarked, distinct script still used today.
Before he died in 1888, just two years after creating what was to become the world’s best-selling sparkling beverage, Dr. Pemberton sold portions of his business to various parties, with the majority of the interest sold to Atlanta businessman Asa G. Candler.
Under Mr. Candler’s leadership, the distribution of Coca‑Cola expanded to soda fountains beyond Atlanta. In 1894, impressed by the growing demand for Coca‑Cola and the desire to make the beverage portable, Joseph Biedenharn installed bottling machinery in the rear of his Mississippi soda fountain, becoming the first to put Coca‑Cola in bottles. Large-scale bottling became possible just five years later when in 1899, three enterprising businessmen in Chattanooga, Tennessee, secured exclusive rights to bottle and sell Coca‑Cola.
The three entrepreneurs purchased the bottling rights from Asa Candler for just $1. Benjamin Thomas, Joseph Whitehead, and John Lupton developed the Coca‑Cola worldwide bottling system.
Though the original recipe for Coca-Cola included cocaine (the amount of which has never been disclosed), and this ingredient was instrumental to naming the product, as of 1929, Coca-Cola has been completely narcotics-free.