When I was in high school in Maryland in the late 1970s, there was one vending machine on campus — not Coke, not Pepsi but RC. It was an old spring-loaded machine with a column of bottles pointing directly out from behind a glass door. A quarter released the lock on the bottles so you could pull one straight out.
My group of friends, who eschewed the cafeteria at lunchtime for a grassy spot by a copse of trees, became obsessed with the peach Nehi from that machine. It was kind of exotic, more the color of cantaloupe than peach, with a soft sweetness and a flavor so suggestive of actual peach you could overlook how artificial it was. We passed a bottle around the way we might a sleeve of Oreos or the last cigarette of the lunch break.
I hadn’t thought much about peach Nehi until I spotted a bottle at Rocket Fizz, the chain of shops selling retro soda and candy that used to have a branch in downtown Decatur. It looked different. The color seemed too intense, and the label was a reproduction of the original one, rather than the 1970s mod look I recalled.
I’d like to say nostalgia motivated me to buy a bottle anyhow, and that I had something of a Southern-fried Proustian moment. Alas, the Brick Store was right across the street, and my sugary soda-drinking days were behind me. We all grow up.
However, I lately have become interested in Nehi, a brand that once was as much of a cultural touchstone as Coke. Where did it come from? Where did it go? And how has it managed to survive?
If you think you can guess the origins of a peach soda, you’d be right. Claud A. Hatcher, founder of Chero-Cola of Columbus, introduced a line of fruit-flavored soft drinks in 1924 in a bottle so tall it was “knee high.” This new line proved so successful that the company changed its name to Nehi Corp. four years later. The stock market crash of 1929 didn’t offer an auspicious beginning for the newly formed and publicly traded company, but after a few years it had regrouped. After Hatcher’s death, the drink Chero-Cola fell into a competitor’s hands, so the company introduced a new formulation of the fizzy beverage, called Royal Crown Cola.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
One of the keys to Nehi’s success was an advertising campaign depicting a woman’s lower leg encased in a knee-high stocking, to reinforce the name’s origin and pronunciation. It proved a powerful branding image during the Great Depression and after, associating Nehi more with a time in history than its place of origin.
In the beginning, Nehi focused on its three core flavors: grape, orange and peach, and the company kept these as its main lineup through the 1930s and early 1940s. After World War II, however, Nehi went big. New flavors were added, including chocolate, lemonade and something called “blue cream.”
These were fun, but the beverage that really was slaking the thirst of post-war America was cola. In 1955, the company changed its name to Royal Crown Cola. The flagship product, meanwhile, pretty soon went by its nickname, RC.
This rebranding gave rival Coca-Cola the opportunity to make a play for the fruit-flavored carbonated soft drink market with its Fanta brand. First developed by Coca-Cola bottlers in Nazi Germany in World War II when America stopped shipping cola syrup, Fanta became more of an international brand, with different flavors developed for specific markets. (It has a peach flavor, too.)
I can remember the commercials that ran during Saturday morning cartoons when I was a kid. Fanta was “electric orange” — the drink that fueled groovy teenagers on Saturday night when they bounced around diners in their bellbottoms. Fanta also unveiled a cartoon spaceship commercial that suggested the animators had listened to a Beatles album backward while on acid.
Nehi, meanwhile, was a wholesome refresher on a hot day — the bottle that women with updos wanted in their ice chests at a picnic. Nehi tried modernizing, changing its logo from the boxy sans serif type first introduced in the 1920s to a swoopy lettering that nodded toward the counterculture.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Still, by the 1970s and 1980s, Nehi was a brand that evoked nostalgia and the way things used to be. Radar O’Reilly guzzled grape Nehi in “M*A*S*H,” set during the Korean War, as did the kids in “American Graffiti,” during the early 1960s days of sock hops and drive-ins. In “Paper Moon,” set in the 1930s, the urchin Addie uses Nehi as a bargaining chip with her conman father, and a poster with the leg logo even makes an appearance. It also appears indirectly in “A Christmas Story,” where the prominent leg lamp was based on the Nehi logo, according to Jean Shepherd, one of the movie’s scriptwriters.
By the time my friends and I found peach Nehi in that ancient vending machine (which would be carted away before graduation and replaced by a Coke machine with big, square plastic buttons) the drink was … quaint. Tasting it was like listening to your parents’ old vinyl records.
And yet it persisted. Since 2018, Nehi has been owned by a conglomerate called Keurig Dr Pepper that owns a shockingly large number of famous beverage brands — Clamato! Swiss Miss! Yoo-hoo! Snapple!
Nehi’s share of the soft drink market is a drop in the bucket. According to Beverage Digest, a trade magazine, Nehi moved about 2 million cases in 2023. That’s in contrast to the 630 million cases that Dr Pepper sold in the same time period. Small bottlers have the rights to bottle Nehi in various parts of the country. That means you might not have too much trouble finding a bottle of Nehi in Plano, Texas, but if you get a hankering for it in Chicago, you’ve got to pay through the nose on Amazon.
I suppose I could do just that — spend $27.99 for a six-pack of neon-orange soda, which might make me wince, but I don’t think I will. Some Proustian prompts are best left untasted.
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