Fanta was born inside wartime Germany
The “who” was Nazi Germany: Fanta was developed by Coca-Cola’s German operation while it was trying to keep its business running under the Nazi regime. The story is less a simple case of Coca-Cola secretly routing its usual syrup around an embargo than a wartime scramble to make a drink without it.
The missing ingredient was the concentrate
Coca-Cola’s German bottlers depended on syrup concentrate shipped from the United States. As war disrupted trade and restrictions tightened, those supplies dried up. The German subsidiary, led by manager Max Keith, could no longer make the familiar cola formula, but still had factories, workers, and a market for soft drinks.
So the company improvised with ingredients it could obtain locally. The resulting drink used a changing mixture of available materials, including fruit pulp and whey, the liquid left over from making cheese. It tasted nothing like Coca-Cola. The name “Fanta” came from an appeal to employees to use their imagination when naming the new product.
A product shaped by isolation
Fanta allowed Coca-Cola’s German operation to continue selling a beverage when its signature product could not be made. That meant doing business within a country at war, under a regime that controlled the economy and its trade. After the war, Coca-Cola resumed operations in Germany; the orange Fanta familiar today was introduced later, in 1955, with a different recipe.
The connection is striking because the modern orange soda is not the same wartime drink. Fanta’s origin lies in a supply cutoff—and in a company’s effort to preserve its German business when normal trade with the United States had broken down.
