Food Theory: Pepsi has a NAVY?!

i'll have a diet coke please we actually don't carry coke is pepsi okay uh i mean not really it's kind of a running joke on these channels you know sir sir please please just just take the soda why why is this so hard what's the big deal drink the soda matthew or we will be forced to open fire okay sure give me diet coke or give me death what [Music] hello internet welcome to food theory the choice of a new generation the choice of a new generation xbox versus playstation pc versus apple left twix versus right twix we've all seen some heated rivalries in the past but none is greater than the battle between pepsi and coke in 1896 the coca-cola company was formed a mere two years later 1898 a little soda by the name of brad's drink was rebranded as pepsi cola and with it the so-called cola wars was born as the companies tried to one-up each other to become the world's go-to drink over the following decades the two companies would continue to introduce new and modern advertising techniques in an effort to prove that they were the superior soda is that all you got [Music] in the rivalry pepsi would always be the one playing catch-up declaring bankruptcy not just once but twice in both 1923 and 1931 as fluctuating sugar prices hit him hard in fact during this period the coca-cola company was offered the opportunity to purchase the pepsi cola company three times three times for as low of a price as 35 000 it's like half a million by today's standards not a lot and coca-cola declined each and every time a crucial mistake because shortly after in 1934 pepsi started selling 12-ounce bottles for a nickel that's twice the amount of beverage that other soft drinks were offering at the time this is the move that single-handedly brought them back from extinction anyway in these cola wars you can tell that pepsi has always had a bit of a chip on their shoulder constantly trying to punch up at their older and more successful rival making a pepsi pepsi i'm on vacation hi i'll take a coke is pepsi okay is pepsi okay pepsi is more than okay it's okay so in 1989 pepsi so determined to get a leg up over coca-cola made a deal with the ussr to become the exclusive soda for the soviets their payment a fleet of warships that at the time would make pepsi the sixth largest naval power in the world pepsi my dude don't you think you're taking this whole cola war thing a bit too literally now i first stumbled across this little factoid during my research for the did coca-cola invent santa episode but this couldn't possibly be true right like why would a soda company need a navy where would they put one and why would they accept it from the usa's biggest cold war enemy the ussr something here didn't add up to me and yet there was headline after headline new york times washington post business insider esquire trusted sources of the news so today matt pat is entering both the coal of wars and the cold war for himself to bust this story wide open i may not be particularly bubbly but when it comes to fact-finding you got the right one baby although the big climax of the story happens in 1989 it actually begins all the way back 30 years prior in 1959. during the height of the cold war the usa and the ussr held exhibitions in each other's countries mainly because the ussr wanted to open trade with the us and so of course the us government saw a chance to take down communism from the inside using our strongest weapon capitalism and so the u.s got to work designing the perfect sales pitch to the ussr with the exhibition showing off our cars our fashion even our houses an exhibition full of american ingenuity provided by american companies all eager to be trade partners the soviet leader nikita khrushchev was less than impressed by this display basically finding fault with everything that he could that was at least until then vice president richard nixon walked the soviet leader over to the pepsi booth and handed him that sweet ice cold beverage on a hot moscow day he actually tried two kinds of pepsi one made with american water another with moscow water and he declared that the one with the eastern bloc's water was better it wasn't a glowing review or anything like that but the photo of the ussr's leader drinking a capitalist beverage was enough to turn pepsi into an overnight soviet sensation jump forward to 1972. nixon is now president the cold war is still going and the man responsible for that pepsi booth donald m kendall is now ceo of the whole company his newest goal capitalizing off that early success with the booth by getting pepsi into the ussr given the company a crucial leg up against coke in the eastern bloc and you know what it works he makes a deal to ship pepsi syrup to russian based bottling plants in exchange for pepsi having exclusive rights within the ussr how's that taste coke except um you know there's there's just one teeny tiny problem with that arrangement hey man you see the soviet's ruble was basically valueless outside of the ussr and it wasn't even allowed to be taken abroad so pepsi needed to come up with a creative solution and they found it in the form of russian vodka they decided to do things the old-fashioned way and used bartering they traded soda for russian-made stellichanaya vodka giving pepsi exclusive sellers rights over here in the u.s and it worked at least for a while pepsi became the first capitalist product sold in the ussr but matpat i thought we were talking about pepsi getting a navy not a bunch of vodka don't worry i'm getting there you see by 1989 pepsi was crushing it over there it was selling 300 million rubles worth of pepsi in the ussr translating to roughly 4 million and remember that's 1980s money making it closer to like 9 million of today's dollars demand for this stuff was way up everything was looking great for pepsi except for the fact that the value of vodka had dropped significantly it just wasn't earning back what pepsi was putting in and so pepsi wanted to keep on earning them dolla dolla bills had to figure out something else that they could possibly get paid with and this is where the navy comes in according to the new york times the soviets offered 17 submarines a cruiser a destroyer and a frigate in order to pay for all that pepsi donald kendall even reportedly joked to president nixon saying we're disarming the soviet union faster than you are how does a bunch of ships pay for soda well the idea was that the ships were obsolete to the soviets so they'd give them to pepsico who could then send them to be scrapped and the sale of said scrap would help pay for the soda syrup and that's it that's the story as outlandish as it seems it's there in black and white clear as crystal in the new york times which gotta say pretty cool trade i'd love to just sign across the dotted line and get myself a huge fleet of ships flying the theorist flag on our way to take on mr beast and his beast burger empire i'm kidding of course he'd then just buy a bigger army and then he'd have a better thumbnail and can you imagine the views on that thing anyway the question still remains would the ships that pepsi supposedly got the 17 submarines the cruiser the destroyer and the frigate make them the sixth largest navy in the world even if it was just for a short time before they got scrapped it's actually a very quick and easy question to answer no there is no possible way that they could ever be considered as such first off it's dumb to measure a navy size by the sheer number of boats that it has it's just not a meaningful metric because it doesn't consider the size of the ships the firepower the manpower anything like that but sure let's assume that we're calculating pepsi's firepower purely off the 20 ships that it was meant to own i had to dig deep to find the numbers for this one because this sort of historical data just isn't compiled neatly anywhere but eventually i stumbled across the worldwars.net nav base the most robust historical library of naval power statistics broken down both by year and by ship category i then did a lot of data entry to make a chart for every active ship for every country that they had on record during the date january 1 1990 right around the time that pepsi would be rising into its supposed naval prominence based purely on the number of ships pepsi would not have been the sixth most powerful navy in the world wouldn't have even made the top ten an accurate headline would have said that pepsi's 17 submarines one cruiser one destroyer and one frigate would have actually put it tied as the 23rd largest navy right alongside the netherlands and right behind norway but because i don't know i'm a tryhard i'm insane i have nothing better to do with my time i don't know i calculated a more accurate measure of naval strength tonnage tonnage refers to a ship's displacement in water or the gross pounds of cargo that it's capable of carrying you'd think that it'd be called this because of the word ton you know like the two thousand pound heavyweight but nope it actually dates back to the word ton t-u-n barrels used for transporting wine with tonnage again spelled with a t-u-n specifying the number of barrels that would fit in the ship's hole anyway this is a measure that more accurately describes the relative size of all the ships within the navy like i could have 700 ships but all of them could be teeny tiny micro machine ships you know a great example of this actually comes from the data i collected based on pure number of ships the ussr back in 1990 would have crushed the us 747 ships versus 461 but lots of those were small ships based on tonnage the us is actually the one that comes out on top by a wide margin 4.7 million versus 3.5 so what happens if we recalculate pepsi's rankings based on 1990 tonnage of various world navies doesn't fare any better falling one rank to 24th largest navy sandwiched between canada and australia with all of that in mind it seems pretty ridiculous to consider 17 submarines plus a few warships as the sixth biggest navy so where did this idea possibly come from is it just something someone said thinking ah no one's gonna check us once you go past fifth no one really cares and from there the myth was more well you know what i find most out about all this every article i looked at would make the same grand statement about pepsi's navy but no one ever bothered to cite a source the most i would ever get was them linking to a youtube video or some other article that made the same claim with just as little evidence i couldn't even find any quotes from pepsi about this whole thing not even from 1989 or 1990. you'd think that if a company was heavily engaged in a cola war and the former ceo was joking with a president that they were doing a better job of disarming a nuclear enemy that they'd make some sort of big statement about this whole thing but as i looked through more and more newspaper articles from the time i realized something that totally shattered my reality it never happened there's a second new york times article released almost a year after that first one and it states that the actual deal was due to be signed in moscow today today being april 9 1990 so the deal got delayed doesn't necessarily disprove anything at least it doesn't if that's all you read of it right at the top of the article there's a paragraph that explains in detail what pepsico was getting out of this thing and things have changed quite a bit quote under the new deal the soviet union will trade at least 10 tankers and freighters ranging in size from 28 600 tons to 65 000 tons with a total value of more than 300 million dollars but uh wait what happened to all the submarines the destroyer the frigate this particular quote from the deal is also backed up by an article from the washington post that was released the next day quote again the soviet union will build at least 10 ships mostly oil tankers in the 25 000 to 65 000 metric ton range to help finance the estimated one billion dollars that pepsico plans to invest in the project the ships would then be sold or leased by pepsico working together with a norwegian partner on the international market this tells us that somewhere within the negotiations the deal changed the new york times and that original article wasn't working off of facts but rather hearsay of a deal in progress there was a point where the idea of buying old naval vessels and selling them for scrap was probably in the cards by the time the deal was actually finalized they'd moved on to something else building the ships from scratch all these new tankers would then be leased out to other countries to transport oil all over the world which gotta be honest probably the smarter business move or at least it would have been if you know the soviet union hadn't collapsed and that my friends is probably the biggest twist of the story not only did pepsi not have the sixth biggest navy in the world not only did they never get a hold of a single submarine they never even got a single ship for all of their troubles as you might imagine it takes a long time to build a big ship and those of you who are paying attention in history class might remember that the ussr fell apart in december of 1991 just over a year after the oil tanker deal was signed all of a sudden the soviet union shattered into a series of smaller independent territories with redrawn borders throwing pepsi's investment into the region in chaos instead of dealing with a singular state pepsi now had to piece together deals from across 15 separate countries with things like their bottles coming from belarus and their partially built ships stuck in the newly independent ukraine a ukraine that all of a sudden wanted a cut of sales donald kendall who had since retired as ceo of pepsi went on the record by saying that the soviet union had essentially gone out of business fast forward to modern times in 2020 russia is still pepsi's third biggest market behind mexico in the us with a reported revenue of three billion dollars a year so you know their investment over there wasn't all for nothing and in 2004 former pepsi ceo donald kendall received the order of friendship for his contributions to russian commerce from russian president vladimir putin ironically though surveys report that coca-cola is actually russia's favorite soda possibly because pepsi felt old at the time a marker of the cold war a previous life in the country compared to the new rebel that entered the market post cold war coke or you know maybe just coke tastes better oh yeah and one final final thing to mention about all this is just as the soviet communists gave pepsi a monopoly during the cold war communist china did the exact same thing for coca-cola in 1978 so what then is the moral of today's story friends do your research don't trust clickbaity headlines that sound too unbelievable to be true from the newspapers be careful when trying to solve communism using soda all are valid conclusions but perhaps the biggest takeaway of them all the next time you do a deal worth 300 million dollars make sure that you get paid with your warships up front but hey that's just a theory a food theory bottoms up [Music] you

Channel: The Food Theorists

Views: 2,018,394

Keywords: pepsi, pepsi navy, navy pepsi, soda, soda pop, pepsi history, coke vs pepsi, pepsi halftime show, pepsi halftime show 2022, pepsi superbowl, superbowl pepsi, pepsi commercial, pepsi man, pepsi myth, navy myth, pepsi has a navy, pepsi navy myth, food myth, lore, pepsi lore, myth, eat the menu, babish, keith eats everything, food theory, food theorists, matpat, film theory, game theory, coca cola, pepsico, diet pepsi

Id: bhjyHbcrfQQ

Length: 15min 18sec (918 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 26 2022

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Matpat has officially gone mad (excluding FNAF lore)