Pepsi was not always Pepsi. When it first entered the market, the drink was called “Brad’s Drink” \u2014 a name that surprises a lot of fans who have only ever known the blue, red and white label.<\/p>\n
The drink was created in 1898 by Caleb “Doc” Bradham, a pharmacist in New Bern, North Carolina. The original name was simply taken from Bradham’s own name, and he marketed his creation as a digestive aid, positioning it against Coca-Cola’s medicinal tonic branding of the time.<\/p>\n
The name did not stay that way for long. In 1902 Bradham applied for a trademark and formed the Pepsi-Cola company, having bought the name “Pep Kola” from a local competitor. “Pepsi” itself refers to pepsin, a digestive enzyme \u2014 Bradham believed his drink aided digestion the way pepsin does, although pepsin was never actually an ingredient.<\/p>\n
So the rebranding was a deliberate move: from a pharmacist’s own-name drink to a product pitched as a digestive remedy. More than a century later, the “Brad’s Drink” origin is the part of the story most Pepsi lovers say they never knew.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pepsi was not always Pepsi. When it first entered the market, the drink was called “Brad’s Drink” \u2014 a name that surprises a lot of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18682,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-viral-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/viralscontent.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/viralscontent.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/viralscontent.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/viralscontent.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/viralscontent.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18678"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/viralscontent.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18684,"href":"https:\/\/viralscontent.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18678\/revisions\/18684"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/viralscontent.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/viralscontent.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/viralscontent.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/viralscontent.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}