7 Up began life as a lemon soda that claimed to contain lithium
For its first years, the soft drink now called 7 Up was sold as a lithiated lemon soda, advertising lithium citrate, a mood-stabilising drug, among its contents. It launched in 1928, a year before the Wall Street crash, and only dropped the medical-sounding name after federal regulators stepped in.
Charles Leiper Grigg ran a St. Louis firm called the Howdy Corporation when he came up with a lemon-lime formula in 1928. The trademark Seven-Up was granted that year, and by 1930 and 1931 the labels read 7up Lithiated Lemon Soda. Like many patent medicines of that era, it leaned on health claims. In 1936 the federal government forced the maker to strip several of them, and since lithium was not actually an ingredient, the name was cut down to plain 7 Up in 1937. A popular tale says the drink was first called Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda, yet investigators have found little sign such a product ever existed; a bib label was simply a paper tag hung around a bottle's neck.
Nobody is sure where the number came from. Britvic, which distributes the drink in Britain, credits seven main ingredients, and also points to its seven-ounce bottles at a time when rivals used six. Others link it to lithium, whose atomic mass is roughly 7.
Ownership has passed through many hands. The founding families sold to Philip Morris in 1978, which split the brand in 1986, handing the international business to PepsiCo and the American side to investors led by Hicks & Haas. The US arm merged with Dr Pepper in 1988 and has since passed through Cadbury Schweppes and into Keurig Dr Pepper.
The drink itself kept changing. A 2006 American reformulation removed the preservative EDTA and swapped sodium citrate for potassium citrate so it could be sold as 100 percent natural, but because it was sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, a consumer group threatened to sue, and the slogan became 100 percent natural flavours. Its advertising left memorable traces too, from a Disney-made rooster named Fresh-Up Freddie in the 1950s to Geoffrey Holder holding up Uncola nuts.
Source: 7 Up
