Kool-Aid: 19 Facts About The Popular Drink

The Kool-Aid name is a friendly, harmless moniker that reflects the lighthearted deliciousness of the drink itself. But what if we told you that the sugary beverage was once marketed under a much different, more vaguely threatening name? 

Edwin Perkins, the inventor of Kool-Aid, grew a business selling smoking cessation products door-to-door into a massive company that eventually sold over 125 household products using direct sales. 

But it wasn't until Perkins' sales force added a summer soft drink concentrate called "Fruit Smack" to the product lineup that customers began to sit up and take notice. Coca-Cola was quickly catching on as the nation's sugary soda of choice, but Fruit Smack allowed families to make an entire pitcher of the drink for just pennies.

Perkins set to work on some of the product's marketing shortcomings, starting with the name. The company trademarked the name "Kool-Ade" in 1927, and it was changed to "Kool-Aid" a few years later. The reason for the change depends on who you ask; while many different stories circulate among the members of the Perkins family, the likeliest explanation is that government regulations prevented the company from using "Ade" (as in, "lemonade" or "limeade") in a product that didn't contain any fruit juice. Whatever the reason, "Kool-Aid" seemed to stick, and the product name hasn't changed again since.

If there was one family of products that Edwin Perkins was positively starry-eyed over, it was Jell-O. 

Perkins was first introduced to the wonderfully wiggly stuff as a child at the age of 11, way back in the year 1900. A powder that transformed first into a liquid, and then into a mysterious solid, available in six fruity flavors, would turn into a lifelong obsession that would impact everything from the way Perkins hyphenated all of his product names (including Nix-O-Tine, Motor-Vigor, Glos-Comb, Jel-Aid, and E-Z-Wash) to the way Kool-Aid would eventually be packaged, sold, and marketed.

When trying to figure out how to ship his flavor concentrates nationwide without the cost of breaking bottles, Perkins probably turned to his childhood memories of Jell-O for inspiration. He knew that reducing bold, fruity flavors to powdered form was possible, and he had already mastered the use of powdered fruit pectins for his "Jel-Aid" jelly-making product. Tweaking the Fruit Smack formula to eventually become Kool-Aid was just a matter of time and experimentation... but thanks to Jell-O, he knew from the start that it was possible.

In a fitting twist of fate, Perkins Products was taken over by General Foods in May 1953, which was also the parent company of his beloved Jell-O. It was, apparently, meant to be from the beginning.

You don't often hear about the success stories that came out of the Great Depression; mostly, we tend to think of our great-great-grandparents selling pencils on street corners, eating boiled potatoes from a battered tin bowl at the local soup kitchen, or falling tragically to their deaths while constructing gigantic gravity-defying government engineering projects. 

But it's precisely this catastrophic economic downturn and grim national mood that may have helped transform Kool-Aid into a household name. While banks all over the country were closing their doors and layoffs were rampant, Perkins Products saw a marketing opportunity; they slashed the price of a packet of Kool-Aid from 10 cents to 5 cents, and aggressively marketed the product with the message that you could produce a whole pitcher of their sweet, refreshing drink for the same price as a single bottle of Coca-Cola. Even with the majority of Americans facing the dim economic prospects of the Great Depression, most families still had a nickel to spend, particularly on such a bargain-priced beverage, and sales figures exploded. In a 1956 article in Advertising Age (via Adams County Historical Society), the price cut was described as "a daring gamble that made the company," and increased sales from $383,286 in 1931, to $1,564,292 just five years later.

The most popular anthropomorphized drink pitcher of all time didn't appear until 1975, and was an extension of a concept invented about 20 years earlier called Pitcher Man: a bulbous container of Kool-Aid with an animated mouth and eyes. According to company legend, inventor Edwin Perkins drew the inspiration for Pitcher Man from the smiley face his child drew on the condensation of a window. 

Pitcher Man was back-burnered throughout most of the 1960s, with the company marketing their project with celebrity spokespeople like The Monkees and Bugs Bunny, until the idea was revisited in 1975. According to Mental Floss, the evolution from Pitcher Man to Kool-Aid Man meant that though the face would no longer be animated, but "the addition of arms and legs gave the character a more bombastic personality. It also allowed him to commit sensational acts of property destruction."

But Kool-Aid Man's signature wall-smashing entrance happened almost entirely by accident. According to Robert Skollar, who was hired to oversee marketing in the 1980s, the sequence wasn't exactly planned. "Someone on set said that Kool-Aid Man really had to make an entrance, and someone else suggested he come through the wall," he said. Breakaway bricks were set up, turning the character's fiberglass shell into a wrecking ball, and cementing Kool-Aid Man's permanent place in pop culture history.

It's not unusual for popular food mascots to evolve and change over the years. Even the most popular characters, from Ronald McDonald to whatever that leprechaun's name is who shills for Lucky Charms, need a little freshening up from time to time. But not Kool-Aid Man; he's stayed remarkably similar since 1975.

Early incarnations of Kool-Aid Man featured simpler renderings of a pantsless, smiling, anthropomorphized pitcher with three ice cubes for brains crashing through walls to rescue children from boredom. The first major change to the Kool-Aid Man persona came in the early 1980s, when his age, which previous marketing campaigns had implied to be about 7 years old, abruptly got bumped up to age 14. Suddenly, Kool-Aid Man was old enough to play guitar and surf, all while wearing jeans, sunglasses, sneakers, and cool shirts.

The next major update to Kool-Aid Man didn't come until 2013, well after the completely bonkers television commercial heyday of the 1980s. That's when Kool-Aid Man made the leap from a live-action fiberglass costume to a fully computerized 3-D rendering. According to Milwaukee Magazine, the change meant that Kool-Aid Man would "be less about breaking through brick walls and shouting 'Oh yeah!' and more about making friends. Using the latest 3-D technology, Kraft has simulated a dewy coating of condensation on the Man's exterior, making him appear more fragile — and lifelike — than he has in past decades."

Kool-Aid is a victim of its own success. According to Consumer Reports, some products become so popular and iconic over such a long period of time that their trademarked brand name becomes synonymous with the thing itself. As a result of this phenomenon, Kool-Aid, produced and mass-consumed since the 1920s, doesn't necessarily refer to the name-brand Kool-Aid distributed by Kraft Foods. For some, if may also refer to any of the powder's competitors, such as Wyler's or Flavor Aid.

The cultural dominance of Kool-Aid even plays a part in a mass tragedy. According to Forbes, the phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid," means to blindly follow an individual or ideology to one's doom or detriment. In November 1978, Peoples Temple leader Jim Jones led a mass suicide of his adherents at his Jonestown compound in Guyana, according to the FBI. Fearing his whole operation was about to end, Jones took his own life with a self-inflicted gunshot wound while his followers were instructed to kill themselves by drinking a fruit drink mix that had been laced with a fatal amount of cyanide. More than 900 people died, many by literally "drinking the Kool-Aid" (via History). But the Jonestown deceased didn't technically consume Kool-Aid — the mix on hand was cheaper Flavor Aid.

Seemingly anything nonperishable that can be produced, bought, sold, and preserved can eventually be a collectible. And because some everyday objects simply don't last — either due to rot, use, or simply being thrown away — the items that stay intact can be worth a lot of money to collectors. Some people are willing to pay top prices for these rare relics of the past.

Even Kool-Aid packets or containers that are especially rare, limited-edition, discontinued, or widely-forgotten specimens can fetch huge sums in collectors' circles and on the secondary market. A 34-ounce, unopened canister of lemonade Kool-Aid dating to 1975 sold for $140 on eBay in 2022. Meanwhile, a lot of the not-rare but fondly-remembered (per Dinosaur Dracula) Rainbow Punch from the 1980s pulled in $150. A box of five "Great Bluedini" Kool-Aid packs from the '90s fetched $90 on eBay in 2022 and a single, rare Tropical Punch Kool-Aid, distributed only to Bob Evans restaurants in the 1990s, sold for just under $75. Maybe it's time to check your pantry.

It's hard to know exactly what's in a packaged, processed, shelf-stable food, particularly if it's created in a factory and crushed down into a slightly colored, extra-sweetened powder — as is the case with Kool-Aid. Even checking the label for ingredients can be a frustrating experience, as that list is often less than forthcoming. It's hard to know the exact chemical makeup or production history of each and every item in the food. For these reasons, vegans may have a hard time finding out if the food they want to eat adheres to their diet. Kool-Aid seems like a pretty good choice — it tastes like fruit juice, looks like real fruit juice, and is mostly sugar. So, many assume that it's not made with meat, or commonly used animal products like eggs, whey, or honey.

Kool-Aid's line of products isn't necessarily vegan-friendly, however. According to Vegan Decoder, the sugar in Kool-Aid could be problematic. U.S.-based sugar processors commonly refine and filter sugar with bone char, which is made from the ground up and burnt skeletons of animals. Sugar-free Kool-Aid mixes doesn't pass the vegan test, either. Those often contain the sugar substitute Sucralose, which has been tested on lab animals and is not considered to be strictly vegan. The same is true for various synthetic food dyes that are also used in Kool-Aid.

According to the American Pie Council, the United States is a hotbed of pie, with $700 million worth of the crusted dessert sold in stores each year. That figure doesn't include the countless amounts of pie served in restaurants or homes. Among the latter, according to What's Cooking America, are many examples of the many varieties of ice box pies that require no baking. Instead, many no-bake pies are firmed up by being placed in an ice box — or its modern cousin, the refrigerator. Just like a tall glass of Kool-Aid, ice box pies are ideal on hot days (they originated in the often sweltering U.S. South). There's a way to combine the two sweet and cooling treats: the no-bake Kool-Aid Pie.

According to Allrecipes, Kool-Aid Pie is fast, easy, and requires no actual cooking. Start by whisking together a can of sweetened condensed milk with a standard envelope of unsweetened Kool-Aid. Then fold in a container of frozen whipped topping, like Cool Whip, until it's fluffy. Spread the mixture into a pre-baked pie shell and refrigerate for an hour or more before digging in.

After changing the name from FruitSmack to Kool-Ade to Kool-Aid (via Daily Nebraskan), the next step for the burgeoning powdered drink mix was to scale up production. It moved its operations out of Nebraska and to the industrial hub of Chicago in 1931, according to the McCook Daily Gazette. Dissolving its powder-via-mail business model, Kool-Aid employed a more modern distribution system, placing its packets in stores at a price of 10 cents a piece. 

As this was during the Great Depression, Kool-Aid sold poorly. For many, the drink mix was considered an extravagance until company head Edwin Hastings ordered the price slashed to 5 cents. Almost immediately, sales jumped immensely and stayed high. By 1950, Kool-Aid factories produced Kool-Aid packets at a rate of one million per day. In 1953, the Perkins family sold their lucrative, still privately-owned business to General Foods, as per the McCook Daily Gazette. General Foods held onto Kool-Aid until 1989, when the company was absorbed by Kraft Foods.