Kool-Aid
There seems to be some dispute as to whether Edwin Perkins was 12 or 14 years old when he had his idea, but it was a doozie.
Young Edward had sent away for a mail-order “start your own business” kit, and quickly set about inventing a variety of flavorings and perfumes in his mother’s kitchen. Unlike many youthful experimenters, Perkins kept at it, year after year, and by 1914, at age 24, he was operating his own mail-order business, selling a soft drink syrup mix he called “Fruit Smack.”
But the Fruit Smack bottles were expensive to mail and often arrived damaged, so Perkins decided that product modifications were called for.
The solution, as it happened, was as close as his father’s general store, where sales of the new Jell-O dry dessert mix were booming. Perkins stopped selling the liquid Fruit Smack and began selling a concentrated drink-mix powder, which he at first called “Kool-Ade,” modeling the name on “lemonade.” But to Perkins, the “ade” suffix had medicinal overtones, so he changed the name to “Kool-Aid,” which conveniently carried a connotation of “aiding” drinkers in remaining cool.
The original flavors of Kool-Aid were Cherry, Lemon-Lime, Grape, Orange, Root Beer, Strawberry, and Raspberry. Today more than 563 million gallons of Kool-Aid are consumed every year.
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