Pepsi To Appeal To Different Set Of Millennials With New “1893” Cola

By Chris Morran November 5, 2015

(ken fager)

Mention any cool brand to a bona fide hipster and you’ll inevitably get an earful about how that product sucks now and was so much better blah blah blah. But even the oldest hipster still hanging on to the refurbished sugar warehouse “space” his parents bought him 18 two decades ago isn’t old enough to remember the original Pepsi formula.

And perhaps that’s what the beverage biggie is betting on with its vague plans to release something called “1893” cola.

More precisely, according to the trademark, the new drink will be called “1893 From the Makers of Pepsi-Cola,” because the kids today are all about really long, legally worded brand names.

What the heck is 1893? No one is saying yet, though the company did confirm the beverage’s eventual existence to AdAge.

In terms of cola history, 1893 is the year that Caleb Bradham began selling “Brad’s Drink” — a concoction of sugar, water, caramel, lemon oil, nutmeg, and other stuff — out of his North Carolina drugstore. That name lasted for five years until being rechristened Pepsi in 1898.

What remains to be seen is how different 1893 might be from Pepsi’s recently introduced Caleb’s Kola, which also trades on the company’s little-known history.

The company did say in June that it was working on something called Stubborn Sodas, a more upscale line of soft drinks to counter the drop in sales of both sugary and diet sodas.

Not everything has been so retro for Pepsi lately. The company tried to cash in on the first arrival of Marty McFly in 2015 by releasing a “Pepsi Perfect” on Oct. 21. However, that promotion didn’t exactly go as swimmingly as hoped.