60 free Soda trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
57 free soda trivia questions with answers. Soft drinks have a stranger history than the vending machine lets on. These 60 questions cover the whole fizzy family, not just Coca-Cola: the pharmacist's tonic that became Pepsi, the Waco drugstore where Dr Pepper was first poured, the mood stabilizer once advertised in 7 Up, the wartime German improvisation that produced Fanta, and the 79 days in 1985 when New Coke replaced the original. You will also meet the regional and international favorites: Moxie's gentian bite, Vernors and the Boston cooler, Big Red, Irn-Bru's forced name change, Inca Kola, Jarritos, ramune and its marble, plus the science of Joseph Priestley's first carbonated water, the pull-tab can, caffeine counts and the great pop-versus-soda-versus-coke divide. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and company history pages before publication, so the dates, names and figures hold up. Play it at a trivia night, share it with a friend who still says pop, or use it to settle an argument about what Mountain Dew originally meant.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Under what name was the cola created by a New Bern, North Carolina pharmacist in 1893 first sold?
Brad's Drink
Caleb Bradham's drink was renamed Pepsi-Cola in 1898 and the company was incorporated on Christmas Eve 1902.
Q 02Pepsi-Cola got its name in 1898 because its formula was said to include an essence of what?
The digestive enzyme pepsin
Early ads called it 'The Pepsin Drink' and claimed it relieved indigestion, headaches and drowsiness.
Q 03What size nickel bottle did Depression-era Pepsi sell, twice what Coca-Cola offered?
12 ounces
The 'Nickel, Nickel' radio jingle looped endlessly on 'twelve full ounces, that's a lot', and profits doubled between 1936 and 1938.
Q 04PepsiCo won the right to sell Pepsi in the USSR in a 1972 barter deal for Western rights to which product?
Stolichnaya vodka
The deal made Pepsi the first foreign product sanctioned for sale in the USSR, and 'Pepsi-stroika' later became a pun on Gorbachev's reforms.
Q 05In which country did the 1992 'Pepsi Number Fever' promotion's 800,000 winning caps spark deadly riots?
The Philippines
The grand prize was one million pesos, and the botched draw led to riots and five deaths.
Q 06Which Hollywood star sat on Pepsi's board from 1959 to 1973 after her husband, its president, died?
Joan Crawford
She had married Pepsi president Alfred Steele and made sure the drink turned up prominently in several of her later films.
Q 07Pharmacist Charles Alderton first mixed Dr Pepper at Morrison's drug store in which Texas city?
Waco
Customers at the soda fountain originally ordered the drink by asking for a 'Waco'.
Q 08The Dr Pepper name was first used commercially in 1885 — how long before Coca-Cola was introduced?
One year
It went national at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, and the period after 'Dr' was dropped for good in 1950.
Q 09A rumor since the 1930s claims Dr Pepper contains which ingredient, something the company flatly denies?
Prune juice
One theory blames a rival's deliveryman for starting the story, playing on the fruit's laxative reputation.
Q 10According to a classic promotion, 'Dr Pepper Time' came at which three times of day?
10, 2 and 4
A wartime radio show called The 10-2-4 Ranch, featuring the Sons of the Pioneers, spread the slogan across the South.
Q 11After Dr Pepper sued in 1972, Coca-Cola renamed its imitation drink 'Peppo' to what?
Mr. Pibb
Both drinks fall into the 'pepper soda' category, which the FDA has ruled is distinct from cola.
Q 12Before it was a soft drink, 'Mountain Dew' was Southern and Scots-Irish slang for what?
Moonshine
The 1882 Irish folk song 'The Rare Old Mountain Dew' used the term, and early labels showed a barefoot hillbilly with a jug.
Q 13The Hartman brothers first developed Mountain Dew as a whiskey mixer in which state?
Tennessee
The Hartmans wanted a lemon-lime mixer for their bourbon and could not find their favorite brand in Knoxville.
Q 21The orange Fanta that became the brand's standard flavour was first produced in 1955 in which city?
Naples
A local bottler used locally grown oranges, and the classic ringed bottle dates from those years.
Q 22Charles Hires wanted to call his drink 'root tea', but chose 'root beer' to appeal to which group?
Pennsylvania coal miners
Hires was a teetotaler who debuted the drink at the 1876 Centennial Exposition and later fought a boycott by the Woman's Christian Temperance Union.
Q 23The FDA banned the oil safrole in 1960, ending root beer's traditional reliance on which plant?
Sassafras
Q 14In what year did the Pepsi-Cola company acquire the Mountain Dew brand?
1964
Pepsi bought the Tip Corporation of Marion, Virginia, which had relaunched the drink in 1961, and took it across the US and Canada.
Q 15A 12-ounce can of Mountain Dew contains roughly how much caffeine?
54 mg
That is well above the 38 mg in a can of Pepsi, though still short of the 80 mg starting point for energy drinks like Red Bull.
Q 16Until 1936, 7 Up's recipe was advertised as containing which mood-stabilizing compound?
Lithium citrate
For a time it was sold as '7up Lithiated Lemon Soda', and one theory ties the '7' to lithium's atomic mass.
Q 17What was the name of 7 Up's rooster mascot, animated by Disney in the 1950s?
Fresh-Up Freddie
Freddie taught viewers how to plan parties and even appeared in the ad breaks of the 1957 Zorro TV series.
Q 18The lemon-lime drink later renamed Sprite was developed in West Germany in 1959 under what name?
Fanta Klare Zitrone
It reached the United States in 1961 as a rival to 7 Up, and its ads later coined the word 'lymon'.
Q 19Fanta's name was born when Max Keith told his German team to use their what?
Imagination
The German word is 'Fantasie', and salesman Joe Knipp shot back 'Fanta!'.
Q 20Wartime German Fanta was made from sugar beet, whey and which fruit by-product?
Apple pomace
Sugar was so scarce that many Germans used the drink to sweeten soups and stews rather than drinking it.
Most commercial root beers switched to artificial flavoring, though safrole-free extracts of the real thing exist.
Q 24Which state made Moxie its official soft drink in 2005?
Maine
The drink dates to about 1876 and its name gave American English the word for spunk and determination.
Q 25Moxie's famously bitter taste comes from an extract of which root?
Gentian
Creator Augustin Thompson claimed it came from a rare unnamed South American plant; E. B. White called it 'the path to the good life'.
Q 26Canada Dry's popularity as a cocktail mixer took off during which period of American history?
Prohibition
Its flavor helped mask homemade liquor, and by 1930 sales had jumped from two million to ten million bottles a year.
Q 27Johann Jacob Schweppe founded his carbonated-water company in 1783 in which city?
Geneva
The German watchmaker moved the business to London in 1792, and the brand has held a British royal warrant since 1836.
Q 28Joseph Priestley made the first carbonated water in 1767 above a vat at what kind of Leeds business?
A brewery
He found the water had a pleasant taste and served it to friends, but never tried to make money from it.
Q 29Priestley's 1772 paper described 'impregnating water with fixed air' — the 18th-century term for which gas?
Carbon dioxide
He made the gas by dripping oil of vitriol, now called sulfuric acid, onto chalk.
Q 30Priestley gave Cook's second voyage a method for making carbonated water, wrongly hoping it might cure what?
Scurvy
He has been called the father of the soft drink, and the Royal Society gave him the Copley Medal in 1773.