There are few countries in the world where Coca-Cola isn’t the most popular soft drink. But in Peru, that position is held by Inca Kola – an almost 100-year-old beverage deeply embedded in the national identity.
The yellow soda – meant to evoke the grandeur of the ancient Inca Empire and its reverence for gold – was the creation of Joseph Robinson Lindley. The British immigrant had set out from the coal mining town of Doncaster, England, for Peru in 1910 and soon after set up a drinks factory in a working-class district of the capital, Lima.
He started producing small-batch carbonated fruit drinks and gradually expanded. When Inca Kola was created in 1935, with its secret recipe of 13 herbs and aromatics, it was just a year ahead of Coca-Cola’s arrival in the country. Recognising the threat posed by the soft drink giant, which had launched in the US in 1886 and made inroads across Latin America, Lindley invested in the budding television advertising industry to promote Inca Kola.
Advertisement campaigns featuring Inca Kola bottles with their vaguely Indigenous motifs and slogans like “the flavour that unites us” appealed to Peru’s multiethnic society – and to its Inca roots.
It fostered a sense of national pride, explains Andres Macara-Chvili, a marketing professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. “Inca Kola was one of the first brands in Peru that connected with a sense of Peruanidad, or what it means to be Peruvian. It spoke to Peruvians about what we are – diverse,” he says.
But it wasn’t only the drink’s appeal to Peruvian identity or its unique flavour (described by some as tasting like bubblegum, by others as being similar to chamomile tea) that enhanced brand awareness. Amid the turmoil of a world war, Inca Kola would also come to prominence for another reason.
Finding opportunity in a wartime boycott
At the tail end of the 1890s, Japan had sent roughly 18,000 contract labourers to Peru. Most went to the country’s budding coastal sugar and cotton plantations. Upon arriving, they found themselves subjected to low wages, exploitative work schedules, and unsanitary and overcrowded living conditions, which led to deadly outbreaks of dysentery and typhus. Unable to afford passage back to Japan after they’d completed their four-year contracts, many of the Japanese labourers remained in Peru – moving to urban centres where they opened businesses, notably bodegas, or small grocery stores.
Denied access to loans from Peruvian banks, as their community grew in number and economic standing, they established their own savings and credit cooperatives.
“Among their community, money began to circulate, and with it they raised the capital to open small businesses,” explains Alejandro Valdez Tamashiro, a researcher of Japanese migration to Peru.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the Japanese community emerged as a formidable merchant class. But with that came animosity.
By the mid-1930s, anti-Japanese sentiment had begun to fester. Nationalist politicians and xenophobic media accused the community of running a monopoly on the Peruvian economy, and, in the build-up to World War II, of espionage.
By the start of that war in 1939, Peru was home to the second-largest Japanese community in Latin America. The following year, one incident of racially motivated attacks and lootings against the community resulted in at least 10 deaths, six million dollars in damage and loss of property for more than 600 Japanese families.
Since its release, Inca Kola had been widely sold in the mainly Japanese-owned bodegas.
With the outbreak of war, its competitor, Coca-Cola, received a huge boost internationally. The US firm, which for years had used political connections to expand overseas, became a de facto envoy of US foreign policy, burnishing its image as a symbol of democracy and freedom.
The soda giant obtained lucrative military contracts guaranteeing that 95 percent of soft drinks stocked on US military bases were Coca-Cola products, essentially placing Coke at the centre of the US war effort. Coke featured in wartime posters while war photographers captured soldiers drinking from the glass bottles.
Back in Peru, in the wake of the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Coca-Cola halted distribution of its soda to Peru’s Japanese merchants, whose bodegas were by now one of the main suppliers of the US carbonated drink.
Recognising a brass tacks opportunity to boost sales, the Lindley family – already outselling a fledgling Coca-Cola domestically – doubled down as the main soft drink supplier to the spurned community. With Japanese-owned bodegas forming a sizeable distribution network across Lima, Inca Kola quickly stepped in to fill the shelf space left empty by Coca-Cola’s exit.
The wartime shift gave Inca Kola an even stronger foothold in the market and laid the groundwork for a lasting sense of loyalty between the Japanese-Peruvian community and the Inca Kola brand.
Hostility towards the community intensified during the war. Throughout the early 1940s, a deeply US-allied Peruvian government hosted a US military base along its coast, broke off diplomatic relations with Japan, shuttered Japanese institutions and initiated a government deportation programme against Japanese Peruvians.
Despite this, today more than 300,000 Peruvians claim Japanese ancestry, and the community’s imprint can be seen in many sectors, including in the country’s Asian-Peruvian fusion eateries, where Inca Kola is a mainstay on menus.
Taking on a giant – and then joining forces
Inca Kola would go on to narrowly outcompete Coca-Cola for decades. But by the late 1990s, the company was mired in debt after a decades-long effort to contain its main rival.
Following heavy losses, in 1999, the Lindleys sold a 50 percent stake of their company to Coca-Cola for an estimated $200m.
“You were the soft drink that went toe-to-toe with this giant international corporation, and then you sold out. At the time, it was unforgivable,” reflects Macara-Chvili. “Today, those feelings are not so intense. It’s in the past.”
Still, Coca-Cola, in recognising the soft drink’s regional value, allowed the Lindley Corporation to maintain domestic ownership of the brand and to retain bottling and distribution rights within Peru, where Inca Kola continues to connect with local identity. Unable to beat the brand outright, Coca-Cola sought a deal that allowed it to corner a market without displacing a local favourite.
Sitting outside a grocery store with two friends in Lima’s historic centre, Josel Luis Huamani, a 35-year-old tattoo artist, pours a large glass bottle of the golden soda into three cups.
“We’re just so accustomed to the flavour. We’ve been drinking it our whole lives,” he says.
“It’s tradition, just like the Inca,” declares 45-year-old food vendor Maria Sanchez over a late lunch of beef tripe stew at a lunch counter not far from Lima’s main square.
Dining with family and friends in the highland jungle region of Chanchamayo, Tsinaki Samaniego, 24, a member of the Ashaninka Indigenous group, sips the soft drink with her meal and says, “It’s like an old friend.”
This article is part of ‘Ordinary items, extraordinary stories’, a series about the surprising stories behind well-known items.
Read more from the series:
How the inventor of the bouncy castle saved lives
