Illustration by Britt Spencer
Did Dr. Pepper, the oldest major soft drink in the U.S., get its start at the World's Fair? We asked the St. Louis Sage.
I would hardly have been shocked. After all, the fair was the stage upon which the world got its first glance at gobs of newfangled wizardry: X-rays, electric typewriters, coffeemakers, ice cream cones… But if St. Louisans preferred a float instead of a cone, they could have ordered one with Dr Pepper long before the fair.
In fact, pharmacist Charles Alderton concocted the good Doc P in 1885 for Morrison’s Old Corner Drug Store in Waco, Texas. Whereas other soft drinks at the time made medicinal claims and used questionable ingredients (you know—real coke), Alderton created a secret blend of 23 harmless flavors meant purely to tantalize taste buds.
By the time of the 1904 World’s Fair, Dr Pepper was doing so for a vast number of patrons. “It was already a popular drink,” says Mary Beth Farrell, a spokeswoman for the Dr Pepper Museum, in Waco. “The company was growing, having just signed its first franchising contract.”
In preparation for the fair, Dr Pepper built a St. Louis bottling plant and began advertising here in 1901. The Doc was banking big on the Exposition, with a permit to sell Peppers at soda fountains and concession stands throughout Forest Park. It hoped to shake up its brand and spray it all over the U.S.—and that’s precisely what happened.
“The fair was a significant kick on the timeline,” says Farrell. Within two years, Dr Pepper began construction on a sprawling bottling plant and headquarters in Waco. It became the hub for the burgeoning Pepper-Upper Empire.
Meanwhile, in 1920, St. Louis ad man C.L. Grigg invented another type of beverage—what he called a “Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda”—that eventually lost the mood-enhancing lithium and clunky moniker and became the country’s third-best-selling soda: 7Up. There is still some mystery surrounding the name’s origin. Some have said that the 7 represented the drink’s seven flavors and perhaps the “Up” had to do with the pick-me-up from the lithium.
Coincidentally, in the late 1980s, 7Up was sold and merged with the Dr Pepper Company, though the soda continued to be made and bottled in St. Louis for years. There’s still a branch of Dr Pepper Snapple Group—the company’s current iteration—located in Overland. In fact, former 7Up CEO and chairman William E. Winter, who helped pen and push 7Up’s wildly popular “uncola” ad campaign and served as mayor of Creve Coeur in the ’90s, died this past March.
