A poster from the legendary advertising campaign by Charles Wilp.
The trademark Afri-Cola was registered in 1931 by the company F. Blumhoffer Nachfolger GmbH. The same company also produced Bluna, an orange soft drink. Today the brand belongs to the Mineralbrunnen Überkingen-Teinach AG.
In the hard competition of the sixties, Afri-Cola lost its influence on the German market. The commercial designer and photographer Charles Wilp started a marketing campaign to regain its image. The still-famous slogan is "Everything is in Afri-Cola...".
Today the rights to Afri-Cola and Bluna are owned by Mineralbrunnen Überkingen-Teinach AG. This company tried, in 1998, to use the retro trend to reintegrate these products into the German market, with some notable success to date. The taste of the 1998 drink, however, differed from that of the original. Also, the caffeine content was 250 mg/L up until 1998, which is unusually high. At the re-release, it had a content below 150 mg/L so that the content does not need to be listed on the bottle.
However, the new recipe bombed. Realizing this, the mixture was again changed to taste more like the original one, and the caffeine content was increased anew in 2005 to around 200 mg/L and caffeine was listed as an ingredient on the label. This mixture was also not sufficiently successful, and on April 1, 2006 the company changed the mixture back to the original recipe with caffeine content of 250 mg/L.
Availability outside of Germany
In the mid-1990s a U.S. company started importing Afri-Cola into the United States, mostly available in the Seattle area. At the time it was marketed as "highest caffeine content allowed by law" and positioned to compete with such high caffeine colas as Jolt Cola and Fukola Cola. For a while it was widely available at convenience stores and supermarkets in Seattle, but has since become harder to find, although still available in some cafes and specialty stores.
