Fritz-kola

German caffeinated soft drink

Fritz-Kola

Type	Cola
Country of origin	Hamburg, Germany
Introduced	2003; 21 years ago (2003)
Website	fritz-kola.com/en

Fritz-kola (stylized as fritz-kola) is a soft drink made in north Germany and shipped to many nations in the European Union. It has a relatively high caffeine content and is sold in glass bottles with labels which were originally black and white, using the faces of the two founders in the logo.

History

Two students from Hamburg, Lorenz Hampl and Mirco Wiegert, started selling Fritz-kola in 2003.^[1]^[2]^[3] They had a brewery help them develop a cola recipe, choosing to use less sugar and more caffeine (25mg of caffeine per 100ml^[1]) than Coke or Pepsi, and adding lemon flavour.^[2] They polled people outside a shopping centre to choose the company name. To save money, they used black and white labels and a photoshopped version of pictures of their heads as a logo; they sold the first crates to bars on a returnable basis, and did not establish an office for three years.^[2]

Hampl left the business in 2016. As of August 2020^[update], Wiegert heads the company and owns two-thirds of it. The company employs 280 people. Five bottling plants produce the cola, which is sold in a number of European countries; in 2019 its 330ml bottles outsold all brands except Coke, and its other major markets are the Netherlands, Poland, Belgium, and Austria.^[2] Sales in 2015 were €7.4 million.^[4]

Varieties

Through the years Fritz-kola has offered many variants of its cola as well as different kinds of soft drinks, including:

Fritz-kola:^[5]
- Fritz-kola^[6]
- Fritz-kola kola-coffee-lemonade^[7]
- Fritz-kola sugarfree^[8]
Fritz-limo:^[9]
- Fritz-limo orangeade^[10]
- Fritz-limo melon^[11]
- Fritz-limo lemonade^[12]
- Fritz-limo apple, cherry and elderberry^[13]
mischmasch kola-orange-lemonade^[14]
Fritz-spritz:^[15]
- Fritz-spritz organic cloudy sparkling apple^[16]
- Fritz-spritz organic sparkling grape^[17]
- Fritz-spritz organic sparkling rhubarb^[18]
fritz-mate (discontinued)

References

^ ^a ^b Sean Williams (2 January 2015). "The New and the Next: How Fritz-Kola Took on Coke (and Kind of Won)". Ozy.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Lorelei Mihala (17 August 2020). "Business: The two students who took on Coke and Pepsi". BBC News.
^ James Clay. "Fritz-Kola – the Hamburgian original proves soft drinks can be done better". www.jamesclay.co.uk. Retrieved 2017-08-27. Clay gives the founding year as 2002.
^ "Der erste Fritz" (in German). Forbes Austria. 14 August 2015. Retrieved 2020-08-17.
^ "fritz-kola Archive". Fritz-Kola.
^ "fritz-kola". Fritz-Kola.
^ "fritz-kola kola-coffee-lemonade". Fritz-Kola.
^ "fritz-kola sugarfree". Fritz-Kola.
^ "fritz-limo Archive". Fritz-Kola.
^ "fritz-limo orangeade". Fritz-Kola.
^ "fritz-limo melon". Fritz-Kola.
^ "fritz-limo lemonade". Fritz-Kola.
^ "fritz-limo apple, cherry and elderberry". Fritz-Kola.
^ "mischmasch kola-orange-lemonade". Fritz-Kola.
^ "fritz-spritz Archive". Fritz-Kola.
^ "fritz-spritz organic cloudy sparkling apple". Fritz-Kola.
^ "fritz-spritz organic sparkling grape". Fritz-Kola.
^ "fritz-spritz organic sparkling rhubarb". Fritz-Kola.