Kool-Aid Was Invented Here

In nineteen twenty-seven, in a small city on the Nebraska plains, a man named Edwin Perkins mixed fruit-flavored powder in his mother's kitchen and changed the economics of American childhood thirst.

Perkins had grown up in Hendley, Nebraska, and built his career selling household products by mail order. His catalog included a liquid concentrate called Fruit Smack, which he had adapted from an earlier formula. The problem with a liquid, he realized, was shipping cost: the weight of the water made the product expensive to send. Perkins stripped the water out of the formula, reduced it to a dry powder, and packaged it in small envelopes that could be mailed for almost nothing.

He called it Kool-Aid. A packet sold for a dime. One packet made two quarts.

The timing was fortunate in a particular way. The Great Depression arrived just a few years later, and Kool-Aid's price was cut. For families with very little, it was one of the few small luxuries that remained affordable. Sales during the Depression years were, by reported accounts, enormous.

General Foods Corporation acquired Kool-Aid in nineteen fifty-three. It has passed through several corporate owners since and remains one of the most recognized beverage brands in the United States.

Hastings claims Kool-Aid with full civic pride. There is a Kool-Aid Museum in the town's Hastings Museum of Natural and Cultural History. Every August, Hastings holds Kool-Aid Days, a festival drawing visitors from across the region who come to celebrate a flavored drink powder that was invented in a Nebraska kitchen nearly a hundred years ago and somehow never stopped being ubiquitous.