In 1893, in the back of a pharmacy in New Bern, North Carolina, a young chemist named Caleb Bradham was mixing something he thought might make people feel a little better.
He called it Brad’s Drink.
It was sweet, bubbly, and built around a blend of sugar, water, caramel, and kola nuts — the kind of concoction a curious pharmacist might put together at a soda fountain, more experiment than enterprise. Bradham believed a good-tasting drink could aid digestion and boost energy. He sold it to customers who came in for their prescriptions and stayed for the soda.
It worked. Word spread. By 1898 he had given it a new name — Pepsi-Cola, a nod to the pepsin enzymes and kola nuts in the formula — and by 1902 he had incorporated the Pepsi-Cola Company right there in New Bern.
The rest is the kind of history that’s easy to take for granted because the ending is so familiar. One of the two dominant soft drink brands in the world started not in a factory or a corporate laboratory, but in the back room of a small-town drugstore, invented by a man who was simply trying to make something people would enjoy.
New Bern Today
The original pharmacy on Middle Street is long gone, but New Bern has held onto the story. The birthplace of Pepsi is marked and open to visitors — a small museum and gift shop on the site where Bradham once mixed his tonic, run by the local Pepsi bottling company. It’s the kind of stop that takes maybe an hour and leaves you thinking about the distance between a soda fountain experiment and a global brand.
New Bern itself is worth the detour. It’s one of the oldest towns in North Carolina, with a well-preserved colonial downtown, a waterfront on the Neuse River, and the kind of walkable historic district that rewards slow exploration. The Pepsi birthplace fits naturally into a town that has clearly made peace with its own history — keeping it visible without letting it overwhelm everything else.
Caleb Bradham never got to enjoy the full arc of what he started. The company he founded went bankrupt in 1923, undone by wildly fluctuating sugar prices after World War I. He sold the Pepsi-Cola trademark and spent the rest of his life back in New Bern, working as a pharmacist.
He mixed a good drink, though. You have to give him that.
