Sprite began life in West Germany as a clear lemon Fanta
The Sprite name first belonged to a Houston bottler's line of strawberry and orange drinks. The lemon-lime recipe came from somewhere else entirely: West Germany, where Coca-Cola sold it in 1959 as Fanta Klare Zitrone, clear lemon Fanta. Two years later the two ideas were joined to take on 7 Up in America.
T. C. Bud Evans, a Texas bottler who also handled Coca-Cola products, coined the name around 1955. Coca-Cola bought the rights in 1960 and gave it to the German lemon drink when it launched in the United States in 1961. Its sole purpose was to compete with 7 Up. Even the bottle has a gimmick: the concave dimples on its sides are meant to mimic carbonation bubbles.
By the 1980s teenagers had adopted the drink, and from 1987 the advertising chased them directly. The bigger shift came in the 1990s with the slogan Obey Your Thirst, whose jingles leaned into hip-hop. Commercials featured rising and underground rappers including LL Cool J, A Tribe Called Quest, Missy Elliott, Common and Nas, and basketball star Grant Hill starred in a long, tongue-in-cheek campaign exaggerating how much his skills owed to Sprite. Later ads carried on the pairing with LeBron James and Lil Yachty.
The brand also coined its own word. Lymon, a mashup of lemon and lime, appeared on older logos, was revived for a Sublymonal campaign tied to an alternate reality game, and returned in 2026 as a nostalgia push. A cartoonish 2017 holiday advertisement in which LeBron James asks relatives whether they want a Sprite Cranberry became a seasonal internet meme, re-aired so often that Coca-Cola edited it for the flavour's replacement.
Two practical changes stand out. In France in 2012 the recipe dropped 30% of its sugar in favour of stevia, the first of many regional rewrites as countries introduced sugar taxes; the Netherlands went fully sugar-free in 2017. And in August 2022 the famous green bottles gave way to clear ones, because the green plastic cannot be recycled into new bottles.
Source: Sprite (drink)
