Mountain Dew’s origin

PepsiCo is one of the biggest brand owners in the world. One of the brands they own and produce is Mountain Dew. Mountain Dew’s origin lays in Tennessee. The yellow colored drink, originally was made by two Tennessee beverage bottlers Barney and Ally Hartman in 1940. Mountain Dew’s name was patented for the soft drink in 1948. The name originally was a 19th-century expression for whiskey, particularly Highland Scotch whiskey.

“Yahoo Mountain Dew… It’ll tickle yore innards” was printed on the first bottles. On the green bottles was a cartoon illustration of a hillbilly moonshiner with a gun printed. For many years, Grandpappy, an Appalachian man who carried a gun and drank a homemade liquor moonshine, served as the face of Mountain Dew.

There’s a big chance that Mountain Dew changed its original recipe over the years. First Mountain Dew had a considerably milder citrus flavor, and the green color wasn’t added until much later. Nowadays Mountain Dew has a bright yellow color, that comes from a synthetic food pigment called tartrazine better known as Yellow 5.

In most markets, there was just one flavor of Mountain Dew between the 1940s and the 1980s, which was a citrus flavored caffeinated drink. In 1988 Mountain Dew released the Diet Mountain Dew and the Mountain Dew Red. The Mountain Dew Red was released and then withdrawn. In 2001 a cherry flavored variation, better known as Code Red, made its debut. Over the years Mountain Dew developed their product line into specialized, limited editions, regional and retailer-specific versions of the drink.

Mountain Dew yearly releases a couple of flavors. At the moment they have released over a 100 different flavors and variations of the drink, most of them are limited editions and are released for special occasions. Some of them are permanent in Mountain Dew’s assortment, like the Code Red, Voltage, Baja Blast, Diet and a couple more.