40 Fun Facts About Snapple

In 2005 Snapple chased a world record with a 25-foot version of which frozen treat, which melted into the street?

The ice pop, 17.5 tons of frozen juice, melted faster than planned, and spectators fled to higher ground while firefighters hosed the sticky flood away.

Which cereal company paid $1.7 billion for Snapple in 1994, then sold it three years later for just $300 million?

Quaker Oats dropped the popular Snapple Lady from the adverts after the purchase, and sales fell sharply before the fire sale to Triarc.

A debunked Snapple cap claims the average person swallows eight of which creatures a year while asleep?

Spiders sense a sleeper's breathing and heartbeat as warning vibrations, so a slumbering human is something they keep well away from.

Which pre-gunpowder object does a Snapple cap call the first human-made thing to break the sound barrier?

A whip cracks because a ripple racing down the lash speeds up until the tip outruns sound, so the snap is a miniature sonic boom.

Which mythical creature, a supporter of the British royal arms, is Scotland's national animal, as a Snapple cap notes?

The unicorn was believed to be the natural enemy of the lion, the beast England's kings had already adopted, which made it a pointed choice.

Which sport, according to a Snapple cap, was the first played on the Moon, by Apollo 14 commander Alan Shepard?

Golf reached the Moon because Shepard had fixed a six-iron head to the handle of a sampling tool; he hit two balls one-handed in his stiff suit.

According to a Snapple cap, Hawaiian pizza was created in 1962 by a Greek-born cook in which country?

Canada is where Sam Panopoulos first put pineapple on a pizza, at his Ontario restaurant; the name came from the brand of canned fruit he used.

Which historical event was pictured on an early Snapple label, a harbor scene that false rumors recast as slave ships?

The Boston Tea Party suited a bottle of iced tea, but rumors cast the vessels as slavers, so Snapple first added a caption naming the scene and later dropped the ship.

A Snapple cap says the world's biggest pyramid is not in Egypt; the one at Cholula stands in which country?

Mexico's Great Pyramid of Cholula is bulkier than Giza's, yet it looks like a natural hill, with a church the Spanish built on its summit in 1594.

Which radio host, the self-proclaimed King of All Media, read live Snapple commercials on air during the brand's rise?

Howard Stern shared the job with Rush Limbaugh: Snapple spent its $15-million-a-year advertising budget on live reads by controversial radio hosts.

Which Snapple office worker became the Snapple Lady of 1990s TV ads after answering fan mail in her spare time?

Wendy Kaufman was sold to the founders with photos of Oprah and Roseanne Barr, and her letter-answering commercials sent sales soaring.

The Snapple name comes from an early fizzy apple juice whose bottle caps flew off after a batch did what?

Fermented in the bottle, the juice blew its caps off, and the drink's name, a blend of snappy and apple, later became the company's.

Before Snapple, co-founders Leonard Marsh and Hyman Golden ran which kind of business together in Brooklyn?

Window washing stayed their day job even after the first bottles shipped, because neither man was sure a drinks company would last.

In 2018 the soda company that owned Snapple merged with which maker of single-serve coffee brewers?

Keurig Green Mountain's $18.7 billion deal put coffee pods, Dr Pepper and bottled iced tea under one roof, and the merged company took the name Keurig Dr Pepper.

Snapple branched out from juice in the late 1980s with its first bottled iced tea, in which flavor?

Lemon tea sold so well that demand carried on after the summer heat had gone, and the iced tea line it started drove the sales boom that followed.

Snapple signed a 2003 deal to become the official beverage of which city, stocking its school vending machines?

New York wanted sodas out of its schools, so Snapple made a special line of fruit drinks, yet a bottle held more sugar than a can of Coca-Cola.

Snapple was the official beverage sponsor of which NBC competition show for three seasons, starting with its seventh?

America's Got Talent kept Snapple through season 9, then handed the sponsorship to Dunkin', the doughnut chain, for season 10.

Which London-based group paid $1.45 billion for Snapple in 2000, then spun off its American drinks arm in 2008?

Cadbury Schweppes was a chocolate maker with a soda business, and its spin-off bundled Snapple with 7 Up and Dr Pepper in one American company.

Snapple co-founder Arnold Greenberg turned his father's pickle and herring shop into which kind of business?

A health food store suited a neighbourhood that was turning into a hippie enclave, and such shops were the first market the partners' juices were made for.

False 1990s rumors linked the small K on Snapple labels to the Ku Klux Klan; what does the letter really indicate?

Kosher approval is all the K signals. Snapple finally answered the rumors in 1993 with full-page newspaper adverts denying any tie to the Klan.

A Snapple cap recalls which team contest as an Olympic event until 1920, when London police officers won the last gold?

Tug of war went when the Olympic programme was trimmed after 1920. Countries could enter several club teams, so in 1908 three British teams filled the whole podium.

A Snapple cap notes that a day lasts longer than a year on which planet, which also spins backwards?

Venus needs 243 Earth days to turn once but only about 225 to circle the Sun, so its year is over before its day.

A Snapple cap gives the oldest known animal as a 152-year-old tortoise; what kind of creature was 507-year-old Ming?

The quahog clam was dredged up off Iceland in 2006 and died when researchers, unaware of its age, froze it; its shell bands were counted afterwards.

A Snapple cap says J is the only letter missing from the periodic table; which other letter has been absent since 2012?

Q vanished when element 114, long known by the placeholder name ununquadium, was officially renamed flerovium after a Russian laboratory.

The 1787 Fugio cent, whose blunt motto a Snapple cap misquotes, is credited by some accounts to which Founding Father?

Benjamin Franklin is said to have designed the copper coin, which shows a sundial beneath the Sun and the Latin word Fugio, meaning that time flies.

A much-repeated Snapple cap claims dueling is legal in which country if both parties are registered blood donors?

Paraguay has no such law, and its consulate in the United States has said outright that dueling is illegal there.

According to a debunked Snapple cap, which bird's call produces no echo, a claim MythBusters put to the test?

A duck's quack does bounce back, the testers found; the returning sound is just hard to tell apart from the fading quack itself.

Which sport, as a Snapple cap points out, has been the official state sport of Maryland since 1962?

Jousting in Maryland means ring tournaments, held there since colonial times, in which riders aim their lances at small hanging rings, not at each other.

Which toy began as an attempt at an instant cast for broken bones, as a Snapple cap recalls?

Silly String's inventors were testing nozzles for an aerosol cast when one shot a strand about 30 feet across the room, and they took it to Wham-O.

In a 1960s CIA project recalled on a Snapple cap, which animal was wired with a microphone to spy on Soviet embassies?

A cat had a microphone put in its ear canal and a transmitter at the base of its skull, but the animals proved too hard to train.

The Snapple Lady of 1990s TV ads later competed in the first two seasons of which VH1 reality series?

Celebrity Fit Club weighed its contestants on air, and she was the only one from the first season to come back for the second.

Triarc, the company that bought Snapple in 1997 and brought back the Snapple Lady, also owned which fast-food chain?

Arby's had arrived with Royal Crown Cola in a 1984 hostile takeover, so Snapple's new owner was already selling both sandwiches and soda.

Which American teenager, the tennis gold medalist at the Barcelona Olympics, signed to endorse Snapple in 1992?

Jennifer Capriati beat Steffi Graf in the Barcelona final at 16, in the same summer that Snapple reached every major city in the United States.

Under which company name did Snapple's three founders start selling fruit juices in 1972?

Unadulterated Food Products began as a part-time venture, and co-founder Leonard Marsh later admitted he had known next to nothing about juice.

Which leveraged-buyout pioneer bought Snapple in 1992, took it public eight months later and sold it in 1994?

Thomas H. Lee and his investors were estimated to have made $900 million on Snapple, a deal that revived the buyout business after several dormant years.

Which dog breed from central Africa, as a Snapple cap notes, makes a yodel-like sound instead of barking?

The Basenji owes its yodel to an unusually shaped larynx, a quirk that earned the breed its nickname of the barkless dog.

Green and black tea, a Snapple cap notes, both come from one evergreen shrub, a species of which genus?

Camellia sinensis yields every true tea, and the differences come from processing: black tea is the most oxidized, white the least.

The cereal maker that bought Snapple in 1994 already owned which sports drink, acquired with Stokely-Van Camp in 1983?

Gatorade proved the better buy: PepsiCo took over the cereal maker in 2001, chiefly to get hold of the sports drink.

A Snapple cap notes that puppies of which dog breed are born plain white, their markings appearing days later?

Dalmatian puppies show their first spots within about ten days, though the pattern can already be seen on the skin at birth.

Which texting abbreviation first appeared, a Snapple cap notes, in a 1917 letter from an admiral to Winston Churchill?

OMG is credited by the Oxford English Dictionary to Lord Fisher, the admiral behind the battleship Dreadnought, decades before text messages existed.