Cockta

Cockta is a soft drink from Slovenia.

Its main ingredient comes from the dog rose berry. The other ingredients come from 11 different herbs, lemon and orange. It contains neither caffeine nor orthophosphoric acid.

History

Origins

The story of the Cocta drink begins in the early 1950s. It was then that the management of the company Slovenijavino came up with the idea of producing an original refreshing Slovenian beverage which would be able to compete against similar drinks from abroad. The chemical engineer Emerik Zelinka, an employee of the Slovenijavino research labs and the father of Cockta, created a refreshing drink using local herbs, while at the same time making it original rather than trying to copy similar foreign drinks.

Zelinka and his team were successful, and Cockta was born, with a new, defining taste derived from a blend of eleven different herbs. One of them that contributes to its familiar and characteristic aroma is rosehip, previously used only during the season of the Common cold for making rosehip tea.

Rise in popularity

The development and promotion of the new Cockta product was one of the first market-based projects in those days. The marketing campaign was very carefully prepared: it brought in designers, including some students of architecture, who designed the corporate image using the modest selection of typefaces they had at their disposal. They also had to design an original characteristic bottle based on contemporary beer bottle design, and finally, the cardboard packaging and delivery vehicles.

Many older Slovenes will still remember the posters which swept the entire country as part of the marketing campaign: they featured a suntanned young woman, with a hairstyle considered trendy at the time, in a pony tail, with blue eyes, holding in her hands a bottle of the mysterious new beverage. Slovenia’s first premium-quality refreshing beverage and its excellent corporate image were presented to the public for the first time in March 1953 at the traditional international ski-jumping competition in Planica. Since then, Planica and Cockta have gone hand in hand, and have been associated with each other for over fifty years.

In the years that followed, Cockta became a drink for the young and not-so-young generations, for everyone who appreciates a healthy lifestyle. In the first year of production, four million Cockta bottles were sold in Slovenia alone, and ten years later, sales climbed to 71 million. From Slovenia, Cockta spread to other markets of Yugoslavia, where it established both licensed and proprietary bottling facilities.