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Mistakes That Helped Shape U.S. into What it Is Today

Khalid Elhassan October 16, 2019 34 min

39. Pepsi Emerges As Coke’s Main Rival

A 1940s Pepsi ad targeting African Americans, a niche market ignored by Coca-Cola and other white-owned businesses at the time. Dawn

Charles Guth turned Pepsi around within two years of buying it, and made it a profitable enterprise. By 1936, Pepsi was selling half a billion bottles a year – the second largest soda company, behind only Coca-Cola. It was right around then that Loft Inc. sued Guth, accusing him of breach of fiduciary duty, and took Pepsi from him in 1939.

Loft then concentrated on Pepsi, and spun off its non-soda businesses in 1941. The brand kept growing, and eventually merged with Frito Lay in 1965, to become PepsiCo. That new company went on to finally eclipse Coke in sales in the 1980s, and in 2005, PepsiCo surpassed the Coca-Cola Company in market value.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.