Fanta: a drink enjoyed by millions every day
that actually has a very interesting origin. In this video we’re going back to the Second
World War to see how it ended up creating one of the most iconic beverages in the world. This video is brought to you by CuriosityStream. Watch thousands of award-winning documentaries
by signing up for a free trial using the link in the description. The year is 1933, and while Hitler had just
come to power, another force was also rising in Germany. Coca Cola, one of the quintessential American
companies, had entered the German market in 1929 on the back of this guy, Max Keith. He had single handedly built the company’s
entire infrastructure in Germany, starting with a bottling plant in Frankfurt and warehouses
in Cologne. He and an army of salesmen would scour the
streets of every major city, distributing pamphlets and putting up posters until every
German knew about Coca Cola. Through his aggressive marketing Keith did
something truly remarkable: he got a country with centuries of alcoholic traditions to
actually start drinking soda instead. Of course, Keith’s timing was impeccable. He built factories and hired people when everything
was cheap because of the Great Depression. Then, when Germany started recovering in the
early 1930s, Keith’s Coca Cola was the first product many people bought when they finally
had some disposable income. Technology too was helping Keith: refrigerators
had swept across America in the 1930s and were making their way to Germany too, allowing
an unprecedented amount of people to enjoy a cold Coca Cola. Of course, Keith was very careful in his advertising:
he went to great lengths to hide the fact that Coca Cola was actually an American business. He listed the German subsidiary in every single
advert and even tried to obscure the ownership structure by claiming that the American company
wasn’t a shareholder, but only a lender, providing the secret formula and the money. In a way, Keith was right: his phenomenal
success convinced his American supervisors to give him incredible independence, so much
so that by 1935 he was producing 7 out of the 9 secret ingredients to Coca Cola in his
own factories. By that point Germany had already become Coca
Cola’s biggest market outside of America, but Keith was only just getting started. The 1936 Olympics held in Berlin became a
moment of triumph as much for Hitler as for Keith himself. As Germany won 33 gold medals, more than any
other country, Keith’s Coca Cola banners flew throughout the event and he ended up
selling over a million cases of Coca Cola that year. And yet despite this accomplishment, a new
threat loomed above Keith’s cola empire. Under Hitler’s orders, the German economy
was to embark upon a four year plan towards rearmament and self-sufficiency, and that
meant much fewer shipments from America. Keith had no choice but to expand production
even further: in 1938 he had nine factories under construction, with 43 operational. When the Nazis annexed 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 cut
very short, for in September 1939 Hitler’s troops marched into Poland and began the Second
World War. Coca Cola shipments from America were very
limited and were stopped altogether when the US itself entered the war in 1941. As the director of an American-owned company,
Keith was afraid that he might be imprisoned and his business nationalized, which is exactly
what happened to the German subsidiaries of General Motors and IBM. The Nazi bureaucracy was eager to continue
with the nationalizations it had performed throughout the 1930s and Keith was an easy
target. His only solution was to join the bureaucracy
himself, and luckily enough he happened to be friends with the Nazi Minister of Justice,
who appointed Keith to the Office of Enemy Property. From this position Keith was not only safe
from the Nazis, but he could also save the other European Coca Cola companies too. As the German war machine swept across Europe,
Keith would take over the Coca Cola factories of France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Norway. But of course, all the factories in the world
would be useless if they didn’t have anything to produce, and Keith had no more shipments
coming from America. He rationed the two missing Coca Cola ingredients
as best he could, reserving his limited supply for use in Nazi hospitals, but even this rationing
lasted only a few years. Keith had to either find a new product or
go bankrupt, but with the German economy approaching total mobilization, the ingredients available
to him were extremely scarce. Keith got his chemists to create a recipe
from what he called “the leftovers of the leftovers”, which included the apple fiber
left from cider presses and whey, the watery substance that remains after milk has been
curdled to make cheese. Depending on what produce was coming in from
Italy, the recipe would also sometimes include grapes, lemons and oranges, but even then
the resulting cloudy, brownish liquid was far from tasty. In fact, it wasn’t even used as a drink
most of the time, but instead people were watering down their soups with it. Nevertheless, Keith finally had a product
he could readily produce, and starting in 1940, the Coca Cola factories of Europe were
once again running at full capacity. To come up with a brand name for his new product,
Keith instructed his salesmen to use their imagination, or Fantasie in German. That word became the codename of the product
and eventually it was shortened to just Fanta and Keith ran with it. By the time Keith’s supply of Coca Cola
ran out entirely in 1943, he was selling 3 million cases of Fanta per year, but with
the Eastern Front turning against Germany, the war was starting to take its toll. When the army began requisitioning Keith’s
trucks, he had to start bottling carbonated water in order to get his company on the list
of businesses “essential” to the war effort. And yet, from 1943 onward the German Air Force
was steadily obliterated, to the point where the Allies were bombing German cities daily
with impunity. Every single one of Keith’s factories was
bombed at least once during the war, while his headquarters in the industrial city of
Essen were completely leveled. By January 1945, the Nazi government was collapsing
in on itself and it was looking for traitors which it could blame. The Ministry of Justice was no longer safe
for Keith: first it ordered him to change his company’s name to anything other than
Coca Cola, and then it summoned him to Berlin for “questioning” and to begin the process
of nationalizing his company. By that point Keith’s friend was dead and
he had been replaced, but in a streak of incredible luck the very next week the Allies bombed
the Ministry of Justice, killing the new minister and practically saving Keith from certain
death. For the next three months he would continue
bottling Fanta until the Americans found him in a partially destroyed factory in May 1945. His first telegraph to the American headquarters
was to confirm that the German subsidiary was still alive and to ask for help, but the
Americans were way ahead of him. As the Allies liberated Europe, Coca Cola
engineers sent for the US were marching right behind them, rebuilding their factories and
bottling Coca Cola in Germany as early as April. In America, Keith was hailed as hero: not
only had he kept the company alive, he never officially became a member of the Nazi party,
keeping Coca Cola away from the taint of fascism. For his efforts Keith was made president of
Coca Cola Europe and after a few years of careful planning he released a proper version
of Fanta worldwide in 1955. Since then Fanta has become one of Coca Cola’s
best selling beverages, but it all happened thanks to one man’s audacity to make soda
in the face of Nazi Germany. Speaking of Nazi Germany, you can watch two
awesome documentaries on the bombing campaign against the Nazis and the final collapse of
their regime on CuriosityStream, a streaming service built exclusively for documentaries. It was created by the same guy who founded
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the link in the description and use the code ‘businesscasual’ when you sign up. Anyway, thank you for watching. Make sure to like the video if you enjoyed
it and to subscribe if you’re new. We’re gonna be seeing each other again in
two weeks and until then: stay smart.
