Kool-Aid Is The Official Soft Drink Of This US State

Childhood summers always included Kool-Aid, that inexpensive soft drink mix that we kids could make ourselves by mixing it with sugar and water. After chugging a glass, we'd bounce around on a sugar high, our faces stained by the drink's vividly colored dye, half expecting Mr. Kool-Aid to come crashing through a wall to shout "Oh yeah!" We have an inventor named Edwin Perkins to thank for those experiences. Nebraska, where Perkins was born and raised — and where he created Kool-Aid — paid tribute to this unique drink powder and its inventor by designating it the official state soft drink.

While many states have official drinks, with milk being a popular choice due to the dairy industry's hard campaigning, there are only two that have designated official soft drinks. Maine went with Moxie, that old-school unusual herbal tasting soda. Nebraska honored Kool-Aid with the title since Perkins invented it there in 1927. He later moved the business to Chicago and sold it to General Foods in 1953, but his home state never forgot its native son, declaring Kool-Aid its official soft drink in 1998.

Born in Iowa in 1889, Edwin Perkins moved with his family to the rural plains of Nebraska as a child where they lived in a sod cabin and worked as farmers. In 1900, after the state experienced hard times due to a series of natural disasters that devastated farming, the family moved to Hendley, Nebraska, and opened a general store. While working there after school, Perkins became obsessed with creating his own food products after discovering a new powdered dessert called Jell-O, which, interestingly, is the state snack of Utah. He soon began a brisk mail-order business with more than 100 products, including Fruit Smack, a bottled soda concentrate that was sold door to door. 

In 1927, while living in Hastings, Nebraska, Perkins reformulated Fruit Smack after dealing with issues like broken and leaking bottles. He eliminated the problem by creating a powdered version, which he named Kool-Ade, before settling on the spelling still used today. Perkins used innovative sales techniques, like display cases, which he called the "self-selling silent salesman," to help market Kool-Aid, which became incredibly popular. 

In the early 1930s, Perkins moved his business to Chicago and began selling Kool-Aid globally. He sold the company to General Foods for stock a couple decades later, becoming extremely rich. When he died in 1961, his net worth was estimated at $45 million (around $490 million today). Back in Hastings, the town began celebrating Perkins' invention with Kool-Aid Days in 1997, a year before it became the state's official drink; the multi-day weekend festival still takes place every August.