How Pepsi Suddenly became a naval power in the Cold War
When you talk about the Cold War, you probably think about the USA and the USSR. You might even think about the smaller countries that encompassed much of the conflict such as Korea or Vietnam.
However if I were to guess you would not think about the extensive relationship between the soda company, Pepsi and the leading communist country of the Cold War, The Soviet Union.
See, many of the most developed companies in the west had no desire to associate with The Soviet Union as it seemed like bad press to their consumer base. On top of that there were very little openings for companies to showcase their products to The Soviet Union. One such opening was in the American National Exhibition that Eisenhower negotiated with Khrushchev to occur in, 1959. This was the first time that a leader of The Soviet Union tasted Pepsi and throughout time this relationship budded into an extensive trade agreement between the company and the global superpower with Pepsi trading their product for the Soviet vodka, Stolichnaya as the Soviet Ruble was worthless in other countries.
As this unusual relationship grew, Pepsi realized that they had grown the consumer base for Stolichnaya in The United States to as large as they could, however Pepsi was just becoming more and more popular for the Soviet Citizens and there was constantly more demand as each year passed. This led Pepsi to argue that they needed something else that they could make money off of from the Soviets as they didn’t need more Vodka yet the Soviets needed a lot more of the soda.
This is where the source of the title of this article springs from. In 1989, The Soviet Union agreed to sell Pepsi an assortment of naval ships worth $3 billion American dollars at the time. Now these were not just a bunch of smaller ships these were full on warships that the Soviet Union had; 17 submarines, a cruiser, a destroyer and a frigate. This temporarily had gotten Pepsi the 6th largest navy in the world.
Sadly, or Happily? Pepsi didn’t do anything fun with its newfound naval supremacy, they instead decided to sell the ships to a Swedish company for scrapping.
I still can’t decide whether this story or the story that Pepsi could have used one of the most powerful navies in the world is better but this is the one that we got for better or worse.