Was Fanta Made From Wastewater in WWII? The Dark History of Fanta

Hi everyone, welcome to Cold-Knowledge Blind Box. In this episode, I want to talk about the story behind Fanta. Yes, that's the fruit-flavored drink you see everywhere in convenience stores, in orange, purple and green, each one a different flavor.

The Fanta brand was actually born in Nazi Germany during World War II.

Opening: December 11, 1941

At 2:30 p.m. Berlin time on December 11, 1941, Max Keith, head of Coca-Cola's German subsidiary, stood by the window of his office at the Essen headquarters, clutching an urgent telegram he had just received. Outside, air-raid sirens were tearing through the skies over the Third Reich.

A few minutes earlier, Adolf Hitler had delivered a fiery speech at the Reichstag, formally declaring war on the United States of America.

For Max Keith, this was effectively a death sentence. He was not just a German. He was the highest representative in Germany of Coca-Cola, a classic American corporate giant.

The Supply Crisis

By now, the transatlantic shipping routes had been completely severed by submarine warfare and blockades, and a huge, precise commercial machine was letting out the wail of something about to grind to a halt.

Over the previous decade, Keith had built a business miracle. But now that the United States and Germany were officially at war, the US government immediately invoked the Trading with the Enemy Act. That meant the Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta was strictly forbidden from exporting any materials to Nazi Germany.

Even worse, the mysterious concentrate formula known as "7X," the very soul of Coca-Cola, was cut off completely.

Inside the Essen plant, the huge canning lines now looked painfully bright. This had once been one of the most efficient liquid-canning centers in Europe, and now it had to face the cruel reality of its conveyor belts slowing down. The concentrate stock in the warehouse was running out at a visible rate. Every bottle sent to the front meant an irreversible depletion of supply.

Trouble Inside and Out

Keith knew very well who his enemy was. It wasn't the Allied bombers. It was the SS and the bureaucrats of the Reich Ministry of Economics.

Under Nazi Germany's regulations on enemy property, any asset belonging to an enemy country had to be placed under trusteeship. In practice, that was outright confiscation: a loyal Nazi Party member would be installed to take over the factory, and the machines would be dismantled to make shell casings, or the trucks would be requisitioned for the Eastern Front to haul ammunition.

Keith had 43 bottling plants and more than 2,000 German employees. If the factories stopped, those workers would not only lose their jobs. They would be immediately drafted and sent to the meat grinder of Stalingrad. As for Keith himself, a senior executive who had long worked for an American company and whom the Gestapo suspected of pro-American sympathies, his fate could very well be a concentration camp, charged with treason.

Looking for a Way Out

To save these factories, Keith had to prove to the authorities in Berlin that they did not belong only to Americans. They were an indispensable part of Germany's wartime economy. He needed to keep the production lines running, and keep this enormous commercial machine operating.

But without the 7X concentrate from America, what could he possibly still produce?

Germany's material shortages had reached an outrageous level. Sugar was the most strictly controlled strategic resource. Anything that produced calories went first to the Wehrmacht, and civilians' ration cards allowed a pitiful amount. As for the chemicals needed to make a soft drink, such as citric acid, food coloring and flavorings, they were either diverted to the war industry or depended entirely on imports that had dried up completely.

The technical director even suggested bottling plain water to keep the machines running. Keith rejected this foolish proposal on the spot. In wartime, no one would pay for a bottle of tap water, and the Nazi economics ministry would never allow such a waste of energy and glass bottles.

He needed a new drink. One that didn't require an American formula, didn't consume precious military resources, and could be mass-produced entirely from raw materials already available in Germany.

Inspiration From Garbage

It sounded like a fantasy. In the winter of 1941, Germany didn't even have enough fat to make soap. Where would there be spare raw materials to make a capitalist luxury?

Keith gathered his most trusted technical team. In that conference room, full of despair and tobacco smoke, a crazy idea began to sprout: if all the good raw materials were going to the army, then all that was left was garbage.

The "garbage" here is not a figure of speech. It was literally industrial waste.

At the time, Germany's dairy industry was running at full capacity to supply the army with butter and cheese. Cheese production creates a yellow-green, cloudy liquid by-product called whey. It was usually poured straight into drainage ditches, or used as the lowest-grade pig feed. It had a sour, fermented smell, and although it contained a little lactose and protein, it tasted terrible.

That was the first key ingredient Keith found.

Then they turned their eyes to another forgotten corner: the jam and cider factories. After squeezing every drop of juice out of apples and other fruit, what was left were heaps of brown, sticky fibrous residue. This apple pomace was also usually treated as waste.

Mixing pig-feed-grade whey with pomace that looked like dirt sounds more like a poison from a medieval witch's cauldron than a bestselling drink. But in 1941 Germany, it was the only card Keith had left to play.

Alchemy in the Lab

He gave the technical department strict orders: no matter the method, this mixture had to become drinkable. It was a race against time. Every day, Gestapo officials lingered at the factory gate, and Keith had to fight not only the shortages, but also the greedy eyes inside the Nazi Party that were eyeing this fat piece of meat.

In that frigid winter, in the lab at the Essen factory, chemists began fiddling with these foul-smelling wastes like alchemists. They tried centrifuges to separate the stink from the whey, and tried saccharin to hide the bitterness of the apple pomace. It was really a survival game. If they failed, the factory would be taken over, the machines melted down, and the people sent to the front.

Just as American soldiers in training camps were gulping down the real thing, Coca-Cola, Max Keith, a lone commercial wolf inside Nazi Germany, was preparing to put an unprecedented oddball product on the market in this land scorched by war.

1942: The Birth of a Formula

The winter of 1942 was bitterly cold. The lab at the Essen factory reeked of a nauseating smell, and it didn't come from chemical reagents. It came from rotting fruit and fermented dairy.

Standing in front of chief chemist Dr. Schettlich were two piles that industry considered worthless garbage. On the left were barrels of yellow-green whey, the wastewater from the cheese plants, giving off a strong sour stench. On the right were heaps of brown apple pomace, the fibrous lumps left after the jam factories had squeezed out the juice, which looked more like mud than food.

The first problem was the whey. Though rich in protein, that stubborn cheesy off-smell was fatal to a carbonated drink. The technicians had to design a complicated filtration system, repeatedly boiling the liquid and skimming off the foam, trying to strip away the smell and keep only a faintly sweet base.

But that was just the first step. To add texture and flavor, they had to deal with the apple pomace. The dried, clumped fibers were crushed again and mixed with the treated whey. In the process, they were surprised to discover a remarkable chemical reaction between the two. The whey's protein gave the drink a richness it had never had before, while the pectin in the pomace gave the liquid a cloudy look, similar to murky fruit juice.

Sweetness Crisis

As mentioned last time, after World War II broke out, Coca-Cola's subsidiary in Nazi Germany was soon cut off from its concentrate, which meant it could no longer produce Coca-Cola in Germany. The German subsidiary's manager, Max Keith, had to come up with his own substitute for Coca-Cola so he could keep selling in Nazi Germany, saving his factories from being torn down into scrap and his workers from being sent to the front as cannon fodder. In 1942, they found a new formula that mixed apple pomace and whey to imitate the taste of the drink.

Coca-Cola conquered the world thanks to the perfect balance of sugar and caffeine. But in 1942 Nazi Germany, sugar was a strategic reserve more precious than gold, and the source of caffeine had long been cut off. Without sugar, the liquid of whey and apple pomace tasted like sour soup gone bad.

Keith used every connection he had and finally found the only alternative: saccharin. This was a chemical product refined from coal tar. It was 300 times sweeter than cane sugar, but it had a distinct metallic aftertaste. Although the Nazi authorities strictly regulated food additives, under the pressure of extreme scarcity, it was the only choice.

And so the first samples were mixed. They had a cloudy, dark brown color, with tiny fibrous particles floating on the surface. Compared with the clear, sparkling Coca-Cola in the hands of American GIs, it was practically a counterfeit from hell. But this was not about pursuing quality. It was about surviving in a collapsing empire.

The Chameleon Drink

This drink had one more strange trait: it was a chameleon.

Because wartime supplies were extremely unstable, the formula had to be adjusted constantly. If apple pomace ran out one month, the factory would use pear pulp, or even grape skins. If saccharin ran out, they would try beet extract instead. This meant that the color and taste of every batch leaving the factory was essentially random. Sometimes it was yellow, sometimes brown, and sometimes it even had a purplish tint.

Consumers never knew what they would taste when they opened the next bottle. It was like a mystery blind box.

Naming "Fanta"

Once the samples were finally drinkable, Keith faced one last challenge: giving this oddball a name.

On the day of the decision, the senior executives of the sales team were summoned to a conference room. The atmosphere was heavy and oppressive. Everyone knew that if this new product failed, their next assignment would be a draft notice to the Eastern Front.

Standing at the conference table, Keith loudly urged his dispirited subordinates on. He demanded that everyone use their utmost creativity and come up with a name that sounded loud and clear, and that would be easy to remember by word of mouth. He shouted in German, "Use your imagination!" (In German, the word for "imagination" is pronounced "Fantasie.")

At the very moment this order rang out, Joe Knipp, a veteran salesman sitting in the corner, seemed to be struck by lightning. Whether it was a flash of inspiration in desperation or an instinctive reaction from the subconscious, he blurted out: "Fanta!"

The whole room fell silent at once.

"Fanta" was short, punchy and easy to pronounce, and it had a direct kinship with "Fantasy." It sounded like a magic spell, and also like a cheerful exclamation of delight. Most importantly, it completely stripped away the associations with "trash" and "waste" in the original ingredients, giving the drink a fresh, dreamlike identity.

Keith made the call on the spot: "That's the one!"

Production and Marketing

With the name settled, the machines at the Essen factory roared to life again. This time, though, the conveyor belts were no longer carrying the familiar contour bottles with red logos. Workers pasted new labels onto recycled bottles. They bore a simple two-color design and the brand-new name.

To make the new product stand firm in the market, Keith devised a deceptive marketing strategy. He did not advertise the drink's ingredients. Instead, he emphasized that it was a supplement that provided energy and lifted spirits in wartime. Amplified by the Nazi propaganda machine, this liquid made of whey and pomace transformed into a "symbol of German technological innovation."

In the spring of 1942, when the first truck loaded with Fanta rolled out of the factory gate, Max Keith let out a long sigh of relief. He had succeeded. Through alchemy-like means, he had turned industrial waste into a money-printing machine.

But he could never have imagined that this "illegitimate child" born to answer a wartime crisis, this "oddball" barely surviving under the shadow of Nazi insignia, would one day become the second best-selling beverage brand in the world.

Meanwhile, at the Atlanta headquarters across the ocean, no one knew what was happening here. They only knew that the German subsidiary's books were still miraculously balanced. But they could never have imagined what kind of bizarre liquid that balance was built on.

1943: The Sales Myth

As the production lines ran at full speed, Fanta began to spread like a virus through every corner of the Third Reich. It was not just a drink for quenching thirst. In the years that followed, it would take on even more unexpected roles, becoming an indispensable lifeline on German family dinner tables.

It was 1943. Nazi Germany's war machine was suffering heavy blows in the icy snows of Stalingrad, while on the home front, Max Keith was creating an incredible sales myth.

According to preserved company archives, Fanta's sales in 1943 alone exceeded 3 million cases. That is an astronomical figure. While most German companies were collapsing because their raw materials had run dry, the performance of Coca-Cola's German subsidiary not only failed to shrink, but showed a strange, explosive growth.

Fanta's distinctive ribbed glass bottle almost became the most common consumer product among the ruins of the Third Reich. Its popularity even surpassed the propaganda pamphlets handed out by the Nazi Party.

"Liquid Bread"

But behind this crazy sales volume lay an absurd truth: most German people who bought Fanta at the time did not buy it to drink. They bought it to eat.

As Allied bombing intensified and the sea blockade tightened, Germany's food rationing system was on the verge of collapse. For ordinary housewives, the scarcest commodity was still sugar. Without sugar, you couldn't make jam, you couldn't bake cakes, and you couldn't even get the children to swallow the coarse rye bread.

At this moment, Fanta unexpectedly took on the role of a lifeline. Because the drink contained a high concentration of beet sugar and saccharin, it effectively became a liquid sugar jar.

In kitchens in Berlin, Hamburg and Munich, thrifty German housewives invented a series of astonishing "Fanta recipes." They poured Fanta into stockpots to simmer root vegetables that tasted like wood chips, adding calories and flavor. They even used Fanta to knead dough and make sweet pastries.

For this reason, Fanta earned an ironic nickname at the time: "the liquid bread of the Third Reich."

The Charcoal Trucks

To keep this astonishing supply running, Keith had to face even harsher logistical challenges. By now Germany's gasoline reserves had run completely dry. All fuel had to go first to the armored divisions and fighter planes at the front, and civilian trucks couldn't get a single drop.

To keep the trucks carrying Fanta on the road, Keith showed his cold, technocratic wisdom. He ordered that several hundred of the company's Opel Blitz trucks be converted, fitted with bulky wood-gas generators. This was a primitive and inefficient technology: wood was burned in a boiler at the back of the truck to produce combustible gas that drove the engine.

Although these converted trucks had very weak power, and drivers sometimes had to get out and push them up hills, they miraculously kept Fanta's logistics network running across all of Germany. When the German army's supply lines were stuck in the mud of the Eastern Front, the charcoal-powered trucks, emblazoned with the Coca-Cola logo, still ran on schedule along German roads pockmarked by bombs.

The Dark Human Cost

Yet this commercial miracle was supported not only by charcoal and waste, but also by a much darker human cost.

As the war worsened, nearly all eligible German men were conscripted. The skilled German factory workers at Essen were either captured in the North African deserts or had died on the Russian tundra. The production lines faced an unprecedented labor shortage.

To fill these gaps, Max Keith made a decision that was highly controversial after the war: he began applying to the Nazi authorities for the allocation of forced laborers.

From the second half of 1943, the faces in the Fanta factory changed dramatically. The German workers who had once worn neat uniforms disappeared, replaced by a group of foreign laborers with gaunt faces and terrified eyes. Most of them were French prisoners of war, Polish civilians and Soviet citizens known as "Eastern workers" from occupied territories. Under the strict surveillance of the Gestapo, these people, stripped of their freedom, were forced to work on the production lines day and night.

Every bottle of Fanta sent to German trenches, and every crate of "liquid bread" that German families treasured, was soaked in the sweat and blood of these forced laborers.