Most Popular Soft Drinks: Rise & Fall (1950–2026)

See the most popular soft drinks from 1950 to 2026 through this animated history of global sales. Track how brands like Coca-Cola and Pepsi dominated the market over seven decades. Beyond just the rankings, the data highlights significant shifts in consumer behavior. We track the introduction of diet colas and measure how regulatory changes like sugar taxes impacted the sales performance of various soda brands. This breakdown is designed for anyone interested in business history or market trends. The numbers are millions of liters of finished beverage per year, worldwide. They are reasonable RECONSTRUCTION designed to show trends and relative scale — they are NOT OFFICIAL per-brand, per-year sales data. Do not cite them as if they were. Brands: Coca-Cola · Pepsi-Cola · Dr Pepper · 7Up · RC Cola · Mountain Dew · Sprite · Fanta · Tab · Nehi · Hires Root Beer · Moxie · Diet Rite · Surge Where the data comes from: The series is a reconstruction of estimated global volumes, built by anchoring known reference points and interpolating the years in between. Main sources: The Coca-Cola Company — SEC Form 10-K (2000, 2010, 2024, 2025): unit case volumes + Trademark Coca-Cola share of system volume. Federal Trade Commission (1999) — historical U.S. carbonated soft drink volumes and market shares for Coca-Cola, Pepsi, 7UP, RC Cola and Dr Pepper. MarketLine (2024) — global carbonated soft drinks market size (~221.5 billion liters), used as a sanity check. Euromonitor (secondary reference, via a published case) — 2009 brand-level volumes for Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Sprite and Fanta. PepsiCo, Dr Pepper, Coca-Cola corporate histories — launch dates and brand milestones (Fanta 1955, Sprite 1961, Tab 1963, Mountain Dew rights 1964, Surge return 2014, etc.). Portland Press Herald (2018) — a production reference for Moxie's current scale. Subscribe for weekly data visualizations, and tell us in the comments which industry you want to see analyzed next.