How about a cola company that does no advertising or marketing? Donates one cent per bottle sold to offset its carbon footprint? Where every customer can look at the company’s bank account, and if they disagree with how the founder is running things, can argue to have his share reduced? It’s called Premium Cola. There’s no salaries, no office, and no bosses, per se. All decisions are made equally by members of the cola collective. The drink is only sold to select locations in accord with the Premium Cola ideologies. Sound impossible to sustain?

Premium Cola started in Germany in 2001 as a protest project among lovers of a soda called Afri-Cola that had turned its back on them. The brand had changed its formula to one that was lower in caffeine and less strongly flavored. Afri-Cola devotees banded together, reverse-engineered the formula, and started brewing and selling their version of the soda. In 2006, owing to lackluster sales, the makers of Afri-Cola changed back to the original formula. But by that time, Premium Cola had evolved past a fan effort into something more, something more like the distilling and bottling of drinkable ethics.

Uwe Lübbermann Talks To PSFK (About Premium Cola) [psfk]
Premium-cola [Wikipedia]
Afri-Cola [Wikipedia]

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