⚙️ Table Talk #176: The Boxer, The Billionaire & The Capri Sun ☀️
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Written by Luke Hemsley
TABLE TALK #176
There are few drinks more evocative of a nineties British childhood than Capri Sun. The silver pouch. The tiny orange straw. The battle to pierce one with the other.
It feels so familiar that it's easy to assume Capri Sun has always existed. It hasn't.
Its story begins in Germany in the late 1960s, with two flavours, a packaging problem and a French sewing-machine.
🍝 MAIN COURSE 🍝
Rudolf Wild was already in the drinks business when he found himself with a problem.
He wanted an alternative to the traditional glass bottle for a new product line, but couldn't find a suitable bottling facility nearby. The answer came from a rather unlikely place: Thimonnier, a French sewing-machine company that had patented a stand-up drinking pouch and the machinery to produce it.
Wild bought all of their machines.
There were a few teething problems, but by 1969, Capri-Sonne was ready to launch in Germany in orange and lemon. The name had been borrowed from Capri, the Italian island beloved by German holidaymakers, but the pouch was the clever bit.
Most drinks brands spend decades trying to create distinctive packaging. Capri Sun started with it. A shiny little pouch that a child could identify from across a playground. Genius.
Photo Credit: Capri Sun via History Oasis
By the mid-Seventies, Capri Sun was already a market leader in Germany, but it was Rudolf's son, Hans-Peter Wild, who had much bigger plans for the silver pouch.
In 1979, he recruited the inimitable Muhammad Ali. Not a children's television presenter or a cartoon character. Muhammad Ali. Heavyweight champion of the world and quite possibly the most famous sportsman alive.
His payment? A lifetime supply of Capri Sun, or so the story goes.
A drink named after an Italian holiday island, packaged using French technology, being promoted around the world by an American heavyweight boxer. And somehow it worked.
Capri Sun spread around the world, arriving in America in the early Eighties and reaching more than 50 countries by the following decade.
Photo Credit: Capri Sun via History Oasis
Today, the numbers are nuts.
Around six billion pouches are drunk globally each year, across more than 100 countries. Even the European Space Agency has got involved, adapting the pouch for astronauts aboard the International Space Station.
And behind all that scale is still Hans-Peter Wild, Capri Sun's owner and chairman, now well into his eighties.
A recent interview with the company's CEO offers a particularly entertaining glimpse into how that works. Wild apparently still supplies ideas weekly, sometimes daily.
The interviewer pointed out that Wild had previously said he spent much of his time aboard his $74 million yacht and asked whether meetings therefore had to take place on board.
Apparently not. They call each other.
🍮 SWEET ENDINGS 🍮
If the unlikely history of a childhood lunchbox staple is your sort of thing, Capri Sun is far from the first everyday foodstuff to have fallen under the Table Talk microscope.
Have a rummage through the Table Talk archives and you'll discover how Irish butter conquered the world, the secrets behind Worcestershire sauce, the love-it-or-hate-it history of Marmite, the story behind Tabasco and the unlikely rise of Viennetta.
There's a treasure trove of strange stories hiding in plain sight.
🍷 WHAT'S NEW
FROM
WEDNESDAY'S DOMAINE? 🍷
A little bit of good news: our trial with Young’s has been extended, which means our 6.5% wines will be sticking around in 21 of their pubs for a little longer.
We’re taking that as a good omen - and keeping everything crossed that a full listing might be somewhere down the line.
In the meantime, you can find us everywhere from The Ship in Wandsworth to the Cutty Sark in Greenwich, with the full list of participating pubs here.
Until next time,
Luke x