7UP
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7 Up (or Seven Up) is a brand of a lemon-lime flavored non-caffeinated soft drink. The rights to the brand are held by Cadbury Schweppes Americas Beverages in the United States, and by PepsiCo in the rest of the world (sublicensed to Britvic in the United Kingdom and C&C in Ireland).
Charles Leiper Grigg was born in 1868 in Price's Branch, Missouri. As an adult, Grigg moved to St. Louis and started working in advertising and sales, where he was introduced to the carbonated beverage business.
By 1919, Charles Leiper Grigg was working for a manufacturing company owned by Vess Jones. It was there that Grigg invented and marketed his first soft drink called "Whistle".
After a dispute with management, Charles Leiper Grigg quit his job (giving away "Whistle") and started working for the Warner Jenkinson Company, developing flavoring agents for soft drinks. Grigg invented then his second soft drink called called "Howdy". When he eventually moved on from Warner Jenkinson Co., he took his soft drink "Howdy" with him.
Together with financier Edmund G. Ridgway, Grigg went on to form the Howdy Company. So far, Grigg had invented two orange-flavored soft drinks. But his soft drinks struggled against the king of all orange pop drinks, "Orange Crush". "Orange Crush" grew to dominate the market for orange sodas.
Charles Leiper Grigg decided to focus on lemon-lime flavors and and by in October of 1929 he had invented a new drink called, "Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Sodas".
The name was quickly changed to " 7 Up Lithiated Lemon-Lime" and then again quickly changed to just plain 7up. 7up merged with "Dr Pepper" in 1986.
Formula
7 Up has been reformulated several times since its launch in 1929; in 2006, the U.S. version underwent another reformulation, becoming "100% Natural" with five ingredients: "filtered carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup, natural citric acid, natural flavors, natural potassium citrate". However, classifying this product as "100% Natural" is problematic as high fructose corn syrup is manufactured by using enzymes that convert corn starch into sugar. (Starch is made up of multiple sugar molecules that have been linked together.) It should also be noted that this is not the case in other countries, such as the United Kingdom, where high fructose corn syrup is not generally used in foods, including 7UP. In 2007, after the CSPI threatened to sue 7 Up, it was announced that 7 Up would stop being marketed as "100% Natural". It is now marketed instead as having "100% Natural Flavors".
7 Up is also available in Cherry 7 Up flavor, with these ingredients listed: Carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup, and 2% or less of each of the following: citric acid, natural and artificial flavors, potassium benzoate (preservative), red 40.
Diet Cherry 7 Up has recently been re-introduced due to popular demand after having been missing due to the existence of 7 Up Plus Cherry flavor. Ingredients are as follows: Filtered carbonated water and contains 2% or less of each of the following: citric acid, natural and artificial flavors, potassium benzoate (protects flavor), aspartame, potassium citrate, acesulfame potassium, red 40. Phenylketonurics: Contains phenylalanine
Diet 7 Up has also been reformulated recently where it was packaged and advertised as now made with Splenda sweetener (sucralose) but now the formula has been re-tooled and they are using the following Ingredients: Filtered carbonated water and contains 2% or less of each of the following: natural flavors, citric acid, potassium citrate, potassium benzoate (protects flavor), aspartame, acesulfame potassium, calcium disodium EDTA (protects flavor). Phenylketonurics: contains phenylalanine . They also do still list the ingredients for Diet 7 Up with Splenda as the following Ingredients: Filtered carbonated water and contains 2% or less of each of the following: natural flavors, citric acid, potassium citrate, potassium benzoate (protects flavor), calcium disodium EDTA (protects flavor), acesulfame potassium, sucralose. . The 7 Up company claims they switched back to aspartame because they conducted a nation-wide study showing that people preferred the 'aspartame taste' over the taste of Splenda-brand Sweetener. 7 Up Plus is still sweetened with Splenda, and they announce no intention of switching it to aspartame.
Name origin
The origin of the 7 Up name is unclear. One popular story is that its creator named the soft drink after seeing a cattle brand with the number 7 and the letter u. Other theories suggest that the name reflects the seven syllables in the drink's original name (Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime) or that the drink was formulated with seven flavors plus the carbonation (the bubbles go "up"). Other ideas include that the original bottle contained seven ounces, or that its creator came up with the name while playing dice, or that even it was the 7th large commercial lemonade brand that tasted the same. There is also the rumor that the name was created because the company had previously failed six times, hence the name "7-up". Before the formula change in 2006, looking on a can of 7up included 7 ingredients. The "Up" in the drink's name might refer to the original inclusion of Lithium, a mood stabiliser.
Some people mistakenly believe that the name 7 Up comes from the fact that its pH is 7.0 and therefore neutral. This is not the case: the pH of 7 Up is comparable to many other soft drinks. At a pH of 3.67, Diet 7 Up is less acidic than lemon juice (pH 2.3), vinegar (pH 2.9) or wine (pH 3.5)
However, the best possibility is that the drink is named after "Seven up", a card game.
A can of 7-Up
History
Charles Grigg launched his St. Louis-based company 'The Howdy Corporation' in 1920. Grigg came up with the formula for a lemon-lime soft drink in 1929. The product, originally named "Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda", was launched two weeks before the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The product's name was soon changed to 7 Up.
7 Up, as its first name suggests, originally contained lithium citrate, a mood-stabilizing drug. It was one of a number of patent medicine products popular in the late-19th and early-20th centuries; they made claims similar to today's health foods.
The Great Depression was just the beginning of the business challenges the product would face. In its early years, there were around 600 lemon-lime beverage brands being sold in the US. 7 Up was able to survive and become the market leader in the category by being one of the first to be nationally distributed as well as being marketed as more healthy than other soft drinks.
The success of 7 Up led Grigg to rename his company to The Seven Up Company in 1936.
Lithium citrate was removed from 7 Up's formula in 1950.
After establishing the category as more than a niche, major competitors set their sights on it such as The Coca-Cola Company with its Sprite brand introduced in 1961. Sprite would not challenge 7 Up's position seriously until the 1980s when Coke forced its major bottlers then distributing 7 Up to drop the beverage in deference to Sprite. 7 Up challenged Coke's actions in court as anti-competitive, a challenge they eventually lost.
Philip Morris acquired The Seven Up Company in June 1978. Philip Morris sold the brand's U.S. operations in 1986 to a private investment group, which merged with Dr Pepper Company and established Dallas, Texas as the headquarters of the combined company.
7 Up became dependent on Pepsi's bottlers for distribution during the 1990s, until PepsiCo launched its own serious entrant in the category with Sierra Mist in 2000. PepsiCo then adopted the previous Coca-Cola tactic and forced its bottlers to give up 7 Up for Sierra Mist, which most did by 2003.
The result is that in the United States, DPSU does not have a network of bottlers and distributors, so some of their products are frequently bottled under contract by independent Coca-Cola or Pepsi bottlers, though in some areas independent distributors exist, either by Cadbury-Schweppes, or by individual independent bottling plants such as Vineland Syrup of Vineland, New Jersey and Polar Beverages of Worcester, Massachusetts. These bottlers often do not distribute their products much beyond major supermarket chains, so 7 Up can be difficult to find in smaller stores and vending machines.
In an effort to align their brands and build a better "route to market", in 2006 Cadbury Schweppes Americas Beverage acquired most of the independent 7 Up bottlers in the U.S and created the Cadbury Schweppes Bottling Group.
In 1998, in the first formula change since lithium's removal, 7 Up was flavor-enhanced, without changing the sugar content or carbonation level.
In 2006, the product was re-formulated so that it could be marketed as being "100% Natural" in the United States. This was achieved by eliminating the preservative calcium disodium EDTA, and replacing sodium citrate with potassium citrate to reduce the beverage's sodium content. This re-formulation contains no fruit juice and is still sweetened with high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). The manufacturing process used to produce HFCS has led some public health and special interest groups to challenge the ad campaign's "natural" claims. In Ireland however, it remains the only carbonated soft drink that is 100% natural (there is no HFCS used in the manufacturing process). This has led it to becoming one of the top five grocery brands across all grocery categories. see http://www.checkout.ie/Top100.asp
Variations
7 Up Plus is a family of fruit-flavored soft drinks, part of the 7 Up family of beverages, and produced by Cadbury-Schweppes. Touted as a healthy alternative, it contains no caffeine and has only 2 carbs per serving, as well as 5% apple juice, which is uncommon among American market carbonated beverages. It is sweetened with Splenda, and the original flavor, Mixed Berry, was released in summer 2004. Two additional flavors have been added to the line, Cherry and Island Fruit. In Ireland, 2007 7up launched a range of flavoured water.
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Natural (claimed) 7-Up design
Cultural references
Trivia
Ownership
7 Up (or Seven Up) is a brand of a lemon-lime flavored soft drink. The franchise for the brand is held by Dr Pepper/Seven Up in the United States, by Britvic in Great Britain, by C&C in Ireland and by PepsiCo in the rest of the world.
The product has been reformulated several times since its launch in 1929; in 2006, it underwent another reformulation, becoming "100% Natural" with five ingredients: "filtered carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup, natural citric acid, natural flavors, natural potassium citrate".
The origin of the 7 Up name is not clear. The most popular story is that its creator named the soft drink after seeing a cattle brand with the number 7 and the letter u. Other rumors suggest that the name reflects the drink's seven flavors and carbonation, that the bottle contained seven ounces, that its creator came up with the name while playing dice, or that even it was the 7th large commercial lemonade brand that taste the same.
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