Pod Insights Stuff You Should Know Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite? About this episode Fanta has its roots in Germany during WWII, so the Nazi association is something that's tough to deny. Dive in and hear all about how this beloved soda got its start as a non-orange, bad-tasting fizzy drink.
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0:39 Josh Clark? Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And Chuck, I have a question for you.
0:44 Speaker 02 Yes?
0:45 Josh Clark? Don't you want to Fanta?
0:49 Speaker 02 Was that a slogan?
0:50 Josh Clark? Mm-hmm.
0:52 Speaker 02 Oh, don't you wanna? Yeah, yeah, I remember that now.
0:54 Josh Clark? It's very catchy.
0:56 Speaker 02 Don't you Fanta, don't you wanna? Was that it?
0:58 Josh Clark? Don't you want to Fanta?
1:02 Josh Clark? That's how I remember it.
1:04 Speaker 02 Oh, okay. I love Fanta. I mean-
1:06 Josh Clark? Wait, wait, wait. You never answered my question.
1:09 Speaker 02 Well, yeah, of course I do, if I love it.
1:10 Josh Clark? Good.
1:11 Speaker 02 I think I've mentioned plenty of times that I did not grow up drinking much soda because as a family, we didn't have the kind of money to just load up the house with sodas. So sodas were only reserved for my mom to drink tab.
1:26 Josh Clark? Oh, yeah, she was a tab drinker, huh?
1:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, we had money for that. But I didn't drink much soda growing up, so I don't drink soda now, thankfully, because that stuff is so bad for you, generally speaking. But I, I will hammer down six Cokes a year and maybe four or five Fanta oranges.
1:45 Josh Clark? All at once, once a year.
1:47 Speaker 02 I love them. I love that Fanta orange. I just, you know, you can't drink that stuff a lot.
1:51 Josh Clark? Have you had any of the other Fantas? The grape, et cetera?
1:55 Speaker 02 I think I like dabbled in the grape and knee-high grape and stuff when I was a kid, but it's really that, and I like Sunkist, preferred Sunkist as a kid here and there.
2:04 Josh Clark? Sunkist soda, right?
2:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. But Fanta orange is one of my rare, rare guilty pleasures.
2:11 Josh Clark? I got you. I was more of a Faygo man as, as a kid.
2:15 Speaker 02 I, I never drank those. And I also never have- Drink any of the clear or yellows like I've never tasted Mountain Dew.
2:22 Josh Clark? Hmm.
2:22 Speaker 02 Uh, didn't drink Mellow Yellow or Sprite or 7-Up or anything like that.
2:26 Josh Clark? You missed out. You've never tasted Mountain Dew or Mellow Yellow. I just want to make sure I have that correct.
2:32 Speaker 02 I don't think so.
2:33 Josh Clark? Wow.
2:34 Speaker 02 I can't remember ever doing it. I, I mean, I don't even know what it tastes like. It looks lemon limey, but.
2:39 Josh Clark? No, no, it's not. It's its own thing for sure. I don't know that you should ever break the, the streak now that you've reached this, this.
2:47 Speaker 02 Why?
2:47 Josh Clark? Long without trying it, but.
2:49 Speaker 02 Yeah.
2:49 Josh Clark? It's not lemon lime. It's its own thing.
2:52 Speaker 02 Uh, but what we're talking about is whether or not Fanta is a Nazi drink. Uh, and we're going to go into the history of that. And we're going to start out talking a little bit about Coca-Cola, the parent company. Uh, as every, most people know by now, it was invented, um, by Dr. Uh, John Stith Pemberton in 1886. He was a morphine addicted Civil War veteran, looking for a better way to feel better than morphine. And put together some cocoa leaves and cola nuts, um, which had, you know, uh, were stimulants because of cocaine and caffeine. And said, hey, this is like a, a new kind of medicine. Uh, and after he died, it went on to be a very, very popular drink.
3:34 Josh Clark? It sure did. Um, one of the things that Coca-Cola did over time was they expanded around the world. They became an ambassador of American democracy. Um, one of the places they expanded to is Germany, pre-war Germany. Or maybe interwar Germany. I'm not sure when they showed up, but regardless, by the time World War II was starting to ramp up, say the 30s, the late 30s. Coca-Cola was heavily entrenched in Germany and its subsidiary was Coca-Cola GMBH, which stands for. Gelschaft mit Bäschkranter Haftung.
4:09 Josh Clark? Which translates to company with limited liability. And there was a guy named Max Kite who ran the show there. And boy, oh, boy, was he dedicated to Coca-Cola and furthering the cause of Coca-Cola in Germany.
4:23 Speaker 02 Yes, for sure. He, there's a guy named Mark Pendergrass who wrote a book called For God, Country, and Coca-Cola. No colon.
4:32 Josh Clark? Yeah.
4:32 Speaker 02 Way to go, Mark.
4:33 Josh Clark? Yeah.
4:34 Speaker 02 That's incredible. And he said that, you know, this guy loved Coke so much, he really just wanted to weave it into every aspect of German life, including the Nazi party, even though supposedly he never was officially joined the Nazi party. And you think like, well, Coke probably wasn't super stoked about this. They didn't care. Robert Woodruff was running Coke at the time. And he was like, hey, this is all good. We're going to co-sponsor the 1936 Berlin Olympics. We're going to hang up some banners there with our logo right next to the swastika. And it's all, it's all good, everybody.
5:11 Josh Clark? Yeah. Can you imagine? I looked high and low for a photograph of that and I could not find it. I'm sure Coca-Cola has dedicated a significant amount of its operational funding to destroying any evidence of that banner ever.
5:27 Speaker 02 I haven't been to the World of Coke Museum, but I bet, right here in Atlanta, I bet it's not in there.
5:32 Josh Clark? I'll bet they don't have it up, too. There was also, for the 10th anniversary of Coca-Cola GmbH, they decided to commemorate their deepest admiration for the Fuhrer, for Hitler's 50th birthday, with a mass Nazi salute, I guess, of employees who worked there at the time.
5:52 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly.
5:54 Josh Clark? So Coca-Cola was very much entrenched in Nazi Germany even before the war, especially before the war, I should say.
6:01 Speaker 02 Well, yeah, because once the war started, we were like, oh, well, I guess we can't do business with Germany anymore.
6:07 Josh Clark? Right.
6:08 Speaker 02 And Germany was seizing enemy-owned businesses at will. I think General Motors actually got out of Germany, but they did seize IBM. And Coca-Cola said, "Sorry, Kite. We gotta stop sending you our 7X flavoring." And he said, "But that is the secret." And they went, "I know, and I'm really sorry. But even though we're friends, our countries aren't friends right now." And that was a huge hit on Coca-Cola LLC, GMBH, Germany. He couldn't make Coke, so he was like, "I gotta come up with a new plan."
6:43 Josh Clark? Yeah, and also, at the same time, he's walking this, this fine line between not having access to the product that his company makes and trying to keep the German government from officially seizing and taking over his company. And to do that, he needs, he needs a hit. He needs the most delicious, most nutritious thing you could possibly put together that's going to sweep Germany right off, right off the bat. And I feel like we should talk about this product that Max Kite introduced after a break.
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8:21 Josh Clark? Okay Chuck, so Max Kite's like, what am I going to do? I need to come up with something fast to keep my company afloat. I think I'll just create an entirely new drink that no one's ever even thought of making before. And because there's so many wartime rations going on, I'm gonna have to get really creative here, but I'm gonna do it.
8:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, not only was he not getting that sweet, sweet 7X Coke syrup, he didn't have sugar, or at least much, they were rationing sugar at the time. So he said, alright, he ended up saying the recipe was made from the leftovers of the leftovers. The first Fanta, which by the way, is the German word for fantasy or imagination. And supposedly, he said, hey, marketing team, use your fantasy to think of a good name. And they said, how about Fanta? And he went, that's great.
9:14 Josh Clark? How about Love Day?
9:16 Speaker 02 I think it was a guy named Joe Nipp, who officially thought of the name. But he got apple pulp from leftover apple cider making, beet sugar and whey. And by all accounts, it was not orange at all, and it tasted like sweet garbage.
9:33 Josh Clark? Yeah, it took me a couple of reads to be like, well, wait a minute, how does that taste like Fanta? And then I realized with just sudden horror, it didn't taste anything like Fanta. And apparently, it didn't taste very well at all. Historians, no one knows what it tasted like, or at least no one's been able to find somebody who actually drank this stuff. But they're like, just look at the ingredients, there's no way it tasted good. And they think that it was probably mostly sold to be used as like a flavor agent for soups and stews and stuff like that, that people weren't just knocking back bottles of this stuff because they would have vomited until they died, I guess.
10:15 Josh Clark? Instead, they're just using it in other ways. But that's not to say it wasn't a huge hit. It was a big seller. And not only that, it instilled like a kind of national pride among Germans. Like, look at how resourceful we are in the face of, you know, wartime scarcity. But have you tried this stuff?
10:32 Speaker 02 Yeah, it was their own. They're like, we have Fanta and beer. And like, we're going to claim those and love those and drink those until we fall over. So he did, even though, like I said, he officially supposedly never joined the Nazi Party. He did work very closely with the Nazi Party because he needed their help. He needed their help making sure that production continued. And, you know, the cooperation with the Nazis was a key part of that. But that was able to keep the doors open, at least. Officially Coca-Cola in April of 1955, post-war, said, why don't we rejigger Fanta and make it taste good?
11:16 Speaker 02 And we've got the name. We have it copyrighted and it's already sort of got a little bit of cred, at least in Europe. So let's just keep the name and hopefully no one will remember the Nazi ties.
11:27 Josh Clark? Yeah, but also, so this name, just the name, right? They could have come up with anything else, but just the name has Nazi ties. Like you said, it was created in and for Nazi Germany. And it was also made from apple pulp and beet sugar and whey. Why would you use that? I would think you would want to do the exact opposite and bury that name like it was a banner with the Coke logo and a swastika. But instead, they just went with it and they introduced it in Italy first as this, the version we know now, this orange soda version. And Italy was like, yeah, it's pretty good. Let's go with that. And they started to export it, finally made it into the United States in 1958,
12:12 Josh Clark? which was, I think, three years after they reintroduced it in Italy.
12:16 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think what the deal was is it wasn't widely known outside of Germany. So it's not like the word Fanta had some negative connotation all over the world. And the Germans loved it. So it actually had a positive connotation in at least one market. So, yeah, I get it. I mean, maybe it would have been a good PR move to change it because it's a Nazi thing, but I don't think it was like some otherwise tainted name.
12:40 Josh Clark? I see. I see what you mean. And they were like, I'm sure people just forget about it anyway. Within a year or two, anybody who even knows about it, it'll never come out.
12:50 Speaker 02 Yeah, until, you know, people started calling it a Nazi drink and, you know, on the internet.
12:54 Josh Clark? Right.
12:55 Speaker 02 And the idea kind of spread and it was, you know, it was Fanta and not Fanta. But yeah, people largely didn't think much about it and I still don't think much about it. I mean, it's not like if you buy a Fanta or something today, you're supporting Nazis.
13:09 Josh Clark? Right. It goes to support the upkeep of Hitler's tomb or something like that.
13:14 Speaker 02 A small donation.
13:15 Josh Clark? But the author, Pendergrass, was like, it's, this is pretty, it is still pretty significant that people like this drink enough that even knowing its roots or where it came from, you're just like, it's just, it's an orange soda. I like it for what it is. And it's not just orange, as we said, they have a whole line of flavors, including grape. And I think it's much more popular in South America right now, but it's still pretty, pretty big in, in America, in the United States. Man, we keep getting, taken to task for that for calling the US America.
13:49 Speaker 02 Yeah.
13:49 Josh Clark? Sorry, everybody. That's what, that's what they tell us. That's what they teach us here.
13:54 Speaker 02 As far as Kite goes, he stuck around and the Coca-Cola company said, you know what, even though your drink was garbage, you did the yeoman's work way back then and kept that brand alive. And so he was made eventually the head of Coca-Cola Europe. And, you know, seems like had a pretty good career as a soda guy.
14:15 Josh Clark? Oh, one other thing about that, too, is Kite, as the Nazis rolled into country after country, Kite was right behind the tanks going, "Your division of Coca-Cola is now part of Coca-Cola Deutschland. Your division of Coca-Cola is now part of Coca-Cola Deutschland." And so when he was made the head of Coca-Cola Europe, he had consolidated through conquering other businesses. He had consolidated all into one company because of the Nazis conquering these countries. Isn't that nuts?
14:47 Speaker 02 Yeah. I mean, who better to lead the Coca-Cola Europe, you know? I guess he was already in place.
14:52 Josh Clark? Yeah. He kept pounding his fist in his hand whenever he talked at like board meetings and investors meetings.
15:00 Speaker 02 That's right.
15:01 Josh Clark? Okay, well, that's it for Fanta. Do you want a Fanta? I don't know. That's only a question you can answer yourself. And while you think about that, we're done with this. So short stuff is that.
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