This educational history documentary examines how Fanta was created inside Nazi Germany in 1940, when Coca-Cola’s German subsidiary lost access to Coke syrup and its director, Max Keith, built a substitute from whey and apple pomace. We trace the documented record rather than the legends: Coca-Cola’s rise in 1930s Germany, the Afri-Cola bottle-cap propaganda campaign, the ads in Der Stürmer, the 1938 sales convention, the 3.5 percent sugar allowance that made Fanta a wartime cooking sweetener, the 3 million cases sold in 1943, the post-war investigation that cleared Keith, the 1955 relaunch in Naples that turned a wartime stopgap into a brand sold in 180 countries, and the 2015 “good old times” ad that Coca-Cola had to pull.
Sources include Mark Pendergrast’s For God, Country and Coca-Cola, Jeff Schutts’s archival research on Coca-Cola in the Third Reich, Frederick Allen’s Secret Formula, and The Coca-Cola Company’s own corporate history pages.
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The true history of Fanta reveals how the soda was created in Nazi Germany. Learn the strange story behind this iconic drink.
Most people know Fanta as a fruit-flavored soda, but its origins are rooted in the supply chain crises of World War II. When Coca-Cola could no longer import its syrup to German bottling plants, local managers faced a major dilemma. Max Keith, the manager of the German operation, had to innovate to keep the business running during the war.
He developed a new beverage using whatever ingredients were available, including cheese waste and fruit leftovers. This rationing-era experiment became a massive success, selling 3 million cases within the Third Reich by 1943. While the brand is now famous globally, the Fanta origin story remains a fascinating piece of corporate history that highlights how companies adapted to extreme global conflict.
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0:00 The Secret Origins of a Wartime Soda
1:06 Establishing the Coca-Cola Family in Germany
5:03 The Controversy of the Kosher Cap
9:48 Max Keith and the Blockade Dilemma
15:00 Bottling for the Allied Front Lines
19:12 Whitewashing the Corporate Past
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