Food Theory: Pepsi has a NAVY?!

I'll have a Diet Coke please, we don't actually sell Coca-Cola, is it Pepsi? Okay, not really, it's kind of a running joke on these channels, you know, sir, please just have the soda, why is it so hard? the big thing drink the soda matthew or we will be forced to open fire okay, sure, give me diet coke or give me death what hello internet welcome to

food

theory

the choice of a new generation the choice of a new generation xbox versus playstation pc vs apple left twix vs right twix we've all seen some heated rivalries in the past, but none are greater than the battle between

pepsi

and coca cola in 1896 the coca-cola company was formed just two years later 1898 a small soft drink with the Brad's name The drink was renamed Pepsi Cola and with it the so-called cola war was born when companies tried to unite to become the world's favorite drink.

Over the next few decades, the two companies continued to introduce new, modern advertising. techniques in an effort to prove that they were the superior soft drink is that whatever you got in the rivalry, Pepsi would always be the one to catch up and declare bankruptcy not just once but twice, both in 1923 and 1931, when fluctuating sugar prices hit him hard in In fact, during this period the Coca-Cola company was offered the opportunity to buy the Pepsi Cola company three times for a price as low as 35,000, that's like half a million by standards. current, it is not much and Coca-Cola decreased every time.

Each time was a crucial mistake because soon after, in 1934, Pepsi began selling 12-ounce bottles for five cents, which is double the amount of drink other soft drinks offered at the time. This is the move that alone brought them back from extinction anyway in In these cola wars you can say that Pepsi has always had a bit of resentment constantly trying to beat its bigger and more successful rival by making a

pepsi

pepsi I'm on vacation hello, I'll have a coke , is pepsi okay? Pepsi is fine, Pepsi is more than fine, fine, so in 1989, Pepsi, so determined to get a leg up on Coca-Cola, made a deal with the USSR to become the exclusive soft drink for the Soviets, their payment for a fleet of warships that at that time would make Pepsi the sixth largest naval power in the world Pepsi, buddy, don't you think you're taking this whole cola war thing too literally?

Now I first came across this little tidbit during my research for Did Coca-Cola Invent Santa Claus? episode, but this couldn't be true, for example, why would a soft drink company need a

navy

, where would they put one, and why would they accept it from the US's biggest cold war enemy, the USSR? there was headline after headline new york times washington post business insider esquire reliable news sources so today matt pat is stepping into both the coal of wars and the cold war to reveal this story wide open it may not be particularly cheerful, but when When it comes to the investigation, you have the right person, baby, although the big climax of the story occurs in 1989, it actually begins 30 years earlier, in 1959.

During the height of the Cold War, the United States The United States and the USSR held exhibitions in each. other countries mainly because the USSR wanted to open trade with the US and so, of course, the US government saw an opportunity to overthrow communism from within using our most powerful weapon, capitalism, and That's why the US got to work designing the perfect sales pitch for the USSR. with the exhibition showcasing our cars, our fashion, even our houses, an exhibition full of American ingenuity provided by American companies, all eager to be trading partners, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was not very impressed with this exhibition, he basically found fault with everything what he could.

At least until then, Vice President Richard Nixon escorted the Soviet leader to the Pepsi stand and handed him that sweet, frozen drink on a hot Moscow day. In fact, he tried two types of Pepsi, one made with American water and one with Moscow water, and declared that the Eastern Bloc water was better, not a glowing review or anything, but the leader's photo of the USSR drinking a capitalist beverage was enough to turn Pepsi into a Soviet sensation overnight until 1972. Nixon is now president the cold war is still going on and the man responsible for the Pepsi booth, Donald M.

Kendall, is now the CEO of the entire company. His new goal is to capitalize on that initial success with the stand by bringing Pepsi to the USSR, since the company has a crucial advantage against Coca-Cola. in the eastern bloc and you know what works he makes a deal to ship pepsi syrup to russia based bottling plants in exchange for pepsi having exclusive rights within the ussr how does that taste like coke except You know there's just a little problem with that? okay hey man you see the soviet ruble was basically worthless outside the ussr and wasn't even allowed to be taken abroad so pepsi needed to find a creative solution and they found it in the form of russian vodka which they decided to make. they did things the old fashioned way and used barter, trading soda for Russian made stellichanaya vodka, giving pepsi exclusive seller rights here in the US and it worked at least for a while, pepsi became the first capitalist product Sold in the USSR, but matpat, I thought we were talking about Pepsi getting a

navy

, not a bunch of vodka, don't worry, I'm getting there, you see, in 1989, Pepsi was crushing there, it was selling Pepsi worth 300 million rubles in the USSR, which translates to about 4 million and Remember that the money of the 1980s brought it closer to about 9 million dollars of the current demand for these things.

Everything was looking great for Pepsi, except for the fact that the value of vodka had dropped significantly, it just wasn't getting back what Pepsi was putting into it. and that's why Pepsi wanted to continue earning dollar bills from them, they had to find something else they could pay with and this is where the navy comes in, according to the New York Times, the Soviets offered 17 submarines, a cruiser, a destroyer and a frigate to be able to pay for all that Pepsi Donald Kendall even supposedly joked with President Nixon that we're disarming the Soviet Union faster than you.

How do a bunch of ships pay for sodas? Well, the idea was that the ships were obsolete for the Soviets so they could give them to Pepsico who would then send them to be scrapped and the sale of said scrap would help pay for the soda syrup and that's it, that's the story no matter how crazy it may seem. it's there in crystal clear black and white in the new york times, which has to say a very good exchange, i would love to just sign on the other side of the dotted line and get a huge fleet of ships flying the theoretical flag on our way to face Mr.

Beast and his beast burger empire. Just kidding of course, so I'd buy a bigger army and then have a better miniature and can you imagine the opinions on that thing? The question still remains: does the ships that Pepsi supposedly got the 17 submarines, the cruiser, the destroyer and the frigate make them the sixth largest navy in the world, even if it was only for a short time before being scrapped. It's actually a very quick and easy question to answer. No, there is no possible way they can ever be considered as such. It's silly to measure the size of a navy by the sheer number of ships it has, it's just not a meaningful metric because it doesn't consider ship size, firepower, manpower, any of that, but suppose We are calculating Pepsi's. firepower purely from the 20 ships he was to possess.

I had to dig deeper to find the numbers for this one because this type of historical data just isn't clearly compiled anywhere, but I finally stumbled upon the worldwars.net browser base. Robust historical library of naval power statistics broken down by both year and ship category. I then entered a bunch of data to make a graph for every active ship for every country they had registered during the date of January 1, 1990, right at that time. that pepsi would be rising to its supposed naval prominence based solely on the number of ships pepsi would not have been the sixth most powerful navy in the world nor would it even have been in the top ten an accurate headline would have said that pepsi's 17 submarines are one cruise ship , a destroyer and a frigate would have placed it as the 23rd largest navy next to the Netherlands and just behind Norway, but since I don't know, I'm picky, I'm crazy, I have nothing better to do with my time.

I don't know, I calculated a more precise measure of naval strength. Tonnage refers to a ship's displacement in the water or the gross pounds of cargo it is capable of carrying. You would think it would be named after the word ton. you know, like the two thousand pound heavyweight, but no, it actually goes back to the word ton t-u-n barrels used to transport wine with tonnage again spelled with a t-u-n specifying the number of barrels that fit in the hole of the ship's Anyway, this is a measurement that most accurately describes the relative size of all the ships within the navy, as if you could have 700 ships, but they could all be tiny micro ships.

A great example of this actually comes from the data I collected based on pure number of ships. The USSR in 1990 would have crushed the US with 747 ships versus 461, but many of them were small ships based on tonnage. The US actually comes out on top by a wide margin, 4.7 million versus 3.5, so what happens if we recalculate Pepsi's ranking? Based on 1990 tonnage of the world's various navies, it fares no better falling one rank to the 24th largest navy between Canada and Australia. With all that in mind, it seems pretty ridiculous to consider 17 submarines plus a few warships as the sixth largest navy, so where did this idea come from?

It's just something someone said thinking, "Oh, no one's going to control us once you get past fifth place, no one really cares, and from there the myth got better, you know, what I find out most about all of this in each article". What I looked at would make the same big statement about Pepsi's navy, but no one bothered to cite a source. The most I got was a link to a YouTube video or some other article that made the same claim with as little evidence as I could. I can't even find quotes from Pepsi on this whole thing, not even from 1989 or 1990.

You would think that if a company was heavily involved in a cola war and the former CEO was joking with a president that they were doing a better job of disarming to a nuclear enemy that they would make some kind of big statement about this whole thing, but as I watched more and more newspaper articles from the moment I realized something that totally shattered my reality never happened, there is a second article published in the New York Times. almost a year after the first one and it says that the actual agreement was due to be signed in Moscow today, April 9, 1990, so the agreement being delayed doesn't necessarily disprove anything, at least it doesn't if that's all you read. right at the top of the article there is a paragraph explaining in detail what pepsico was getting out of this and things have changed quite a bit quote under the new deal the soviet union will exchange at least 10 tankers and freighters ranging in size from 28,600 tons at 65,000 tons with a total value of more than 300 million dollars, but wait, what happened to all the submarines, the destroyer, the frigate?

This particular quote from the agreement is also supported by a Washington Post article that was published. the next day, quote again, the soviet union will build at least 10 ships, mostly oil tankers, in the 25,000 to 65,000 metric ton range to help finance the estimated $1 billion that pepsico plans to invest in the project, The ships would then be sold or leased by Pepsico working together with a Norwegian partner in the international market. This tells us that at some point in the negotiations the agreement changed the New York Times and that the original article was not based on facts but on rumors of a deal in progress there was a point where the idea of ​​buying old warships and selling them for scrap was probably on the cards when the deal was done, they had moved on to something else, building the ships from scratch, all these new tankers then They would hire other countries to transport oil around the world, which, to be honest, is probably the smartest business move, or at least it would have been if you knew that the Soviet Union hadn't collapsed and that, my friends, it is probably the biggest twist in history, not only does Pepsi not have the sixth largest navy in the world, not only did it never get a single submarine, it didn't even get a single ship for all its problems, asAs you can imagine, it takes a long time to build a big ship and those Those of you who are paying attention in history class may remember that the USSR fell apart in December 1991, just over a year after the agreement was signed. tanker deal, suddenly the Soviet Union split into a series of smaller independent territories with redrawn borders that threw pepsi's investment in the region into chaos instead of dealing with a singular state pepsi now had to put together 15 deals different countries with things like their bottles coming from Belarus and their partially built ships stuck in the newly independent Ukraine - a Ukraine that everyone suddenly wanted a cut of the sales - Donald Kendall, who had since retired as CEO of Pepsi, left record that the soviet union had essentially gone bankrupt in modern times in 2020, russia is still pepsi's third largest market behind mexico in the united states with a reported revenue of three billion dollars a year, so you know, His investment there was not in vain and in 2004, former Pepsi CEO Donald Kendall received the Order of Friendship for his contributions to Russian trade from Russian President Vladimir Putin, ironically, although polls report that Coca-Cola is Actually Russia's favorite soft drink, possibly because Pepsi felt old at the time, a marker of the Cold War with an earlier life in the country by comparison. to the new rebel that entered the market after the cold war, coca or, you know, maybe coca just tastes better, oh yeah, and one last thing to mention about all of this is that, just as the Soviet communists told him They gave Pepsi a monopoly during the cold war, communist China did the same.

Exactly the same for Coca-Cola in 1978, so what's the moral of the story today? Friends, do your research, don't trust the clickbaity headlines that sound too incredible to be true in the newspapers. Be careful when trying to solve communism using soda. They are all valid. conclusions, but perhaps the most important conclusion of all of them the next time you make a deal worth 300 million dollars, make sure you get paid with your warships up front, but hey, that's just a

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