Coca-Cola Company
The Coca-Cola Company is the world's largest soft-drink company and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Besides the well known Coca-Cola and Coke brands, it also has Fanta, Sprite, Barq's, Minute Maid orange juice, POWERade, and Dasani water. In North America, it sells Groupe Danone's Evian and Coca-Cola sells Crush, Dr Pepper, and Schweppes outside Australia, Europe, and North America. The firm makes or licenses more than 400 drink products in more than 200 nations (Coca-Cola Company, n.d.).
Coke as it is popularly known was invented in Columbus, Georgia, by John Stith Pemberton, originally as a coca wine called Pemberton's French Wine Coca in 1885. When Atlanta and Fulton County passed Prohibition legislation, Pemberton responded by developing Coca-Cola, essentially a carbonated, non-alcoholic version of French Wine Cola. The first sales were at Jacob's Pharmacy in Atlanta, Georgia, on May 8, 1886. It was initially sold as a patent medicine for five cents a glass at soda fountains, which were popular in the United States at the time due to the belief that carbonated water was good for the health. Asa Griggs Candler acquired a stake in Pemberton's company in 1887 and incorporated it as the Coca Cola Company in 1888. In 1892, Candler incorporated a second company, The Coca-Cola Company (the current corporation). Coca-Cola was sold in bottles for the first time on March 12, 1894. Cans of Coke first appeared in 1955. The first bottling of Coca-Cola occurred in Vicksburg, Mississippi, at the Biedenharn Candy Company in 1891.
The beverage was named Coca-Cola because, originally, the stimulant mixed in the beverage was coca leaves from South America, which the drug cocaine is derived fr ...