Hastings, Nebraska: the small town where Kool-Aid was invented

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Walk with me for a bit through the halls of the Hastings Museum in South Central Nebraska. You can see models of the dinosaurs that once roamed the Great Plains. There’s giant rocks and crystals that can be found in the area. And of course, there’s an endless collection of historical dioramas. But there’s one thing in this museum’s collection that really jumps out. It’s this big, round fiberglass mascot suit.

Teresa Kreutzer-Hodson: I’m gonna say it’s probably about five feet in diameter. It’s pretty good size. So it is a hard shell. It has a metal frame harness in it that you would put across the top of your shoulders. We actually had one of our staff members get into it. And he’s like, “Oh my gosh, this is so heavy.” And like, it was killing his shoulders after like, 10 minutes. He’s like, “I can’t, I’ve got to get this off.”

Amanda McGowan: The suit is shaped like a big glass lemonade pitcher, though in this case, specifically, it’s filled with a bright red liquid. This pitcher also has legs and a face. Maybe you see where I’m going with this. This pitcher is the Kool-Aid Man.

Ohhhhhhh, yeah!

Yeah, the Hastings Museum is a proud owner of the original Kool-Aid Man suit from the 1970s.

Teresa: You look at some of those old commercials where the Kool-Aid Man is running through and I can go, “Yep, that’s the fiberglass suit. You see this poor guy trying to move it, or woman, I don’t know, whoever’s in it. It’s like, oh my goodness, knowing how heavy it is, I feel sorry for him.

Amanda: If you’ve ever walked through an American grocery store, I’m sure you know what Kool-Aid is. It’s a powdered beverage that comes in an envelope, and you add sugar and water to it. It’s actually been around for almost 100 years. But in the city of Hastings, Kool-Aid is a big deal. There’s even an annual festival dedicated to it. And that’s because the Kool-Aid man is a local legend. Not this mascot, but the actual Kool-Aid man, the guy who invented Kool-Aid, which happened right here, 100 years ago, in Hastings.

I’m Amanda McGowan, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Today’s episode is brought to you in partnership with Visit Nebraska. And today we’re going to dive into the most famous rags-to-riches story of the Nebraska Plains.

It’s about the real Kool-Aid man, Edwin Perkins. He was kind of a cross between an ad man and a mad scientist. Picture if Beaker from the Muppets and Don Draper were fused into one person. There’s something very American, to my mind, about Edwin Perkins’ tale. It’s about coming up with something brand new and then figuring out how to sell it to as many people as possible. And in the process, transforming one small town in south central Nebraska. That’s after this.

This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast : a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , and all major podcast apps.

Amanda: Hastings, Nebraska is a city of about 25,000 people. It’s less than two hours outside of Lincoln, and it’s had a few claims to fame over the years. It was the largest navy ammunition depot in the country during World War II, and for a time, it was known as the cigar-making capital of Nebraska. We’ve also done an episode about Hastings, ‘ The Goose Who Wore Nikes .’

I’ll post a link in the episode description. I can’t even describe it in one line, it won’t do it justice.

But today, what Hastings is arguably most famous for is for being the place where Kool-Aid was invented and the story behind it. It’s kind of like a classic Horatio Alger rags to riches tale, you know, the one that we love to tell in the United States, but with a 20th century twist that involves chemistry, patent medicine with laxatives in it, and the Kool-Aid Man. So let’s get into it.

It all started back in the 1890s when the Perkins family made the trip out west to Nebraska from Iowa. Back in Iowa, the family had been in the general store business. In Nebraska, they were hoping to become farmers, but their timing was just not great.

There was this drought all across the state. And as the story goes, their young son, Edwin, came up with the family’s plan B.

Teresa: As Edwin says, he convinced his dad to go back into the general store business. I don’t know how much of that’s true. He was only 11 at the time, but... You know, it makes for a good story.

Amanda: This is Teresa Kreutzer-Hodson. She’s the director of the Hastings Museum in Hastings, Nebraska.

Teresa: And I have spent the last 30 years researching and doing exhibits and telling stories and even writing a book about the history of Kool-Aid. So I’ve been getting to know Edwin Perkins and his family very well.

Amanda: So 11-year-old Edwin Perkins convinces his father to open a general store. And soon Edwin became the most enthusiastic child employee that they had ever seen. He was especially interested in this new product called Jell-O. It was a powder, but if you added water to it on the stove, it became a solid dessert. Edwin thought this was just totally magic.

Teresa: He just kind of started getting curious about products. And he sent away for this magazine to get formulas to mix things up. He would mix up concoctions in his mother’s kitchen and stink it up. And that was one of the family stories, too, is that, you know, it was always he was concocting something.

Amanda: His first big break as an amateur chemist was this product called Nix-O-Tine. Nix-O-Tine was an herbal remedy that was supposed to help you quit smoking. But the ingredients were pretty interesting. It included silver nitrate and laxatives. So whether it worked or not has been lost to history. But in the process, Edwin found that this whole making products thing was less about what you sold and more about how you sold it. He targeted a very specific market with Nix-O-Tine, which was World War I veterans. See, cigarettes had been put in ration boxes.

So many soldiers coming back from the war all of a sudden had new smoking habits that they were trying to kick.

And with the success of Nix-O-Tine under his belt, Edwin started a brand new business called Perkins Products.

Teresa: He ended up with like 125 or 126 different products. And they ranged from like food coloring and food flavorings to like motor cleaner and perfume and hair products and cleaning products. Yeah, it was like all across the board.

Amanda: So it was a bit surprising that their most successful product was something that you could drink. It was called Fruit-Smack. Fruit-Smack was a drink concentrate, you know, like the kind they would have at soda fountains to make soft drinks. But unfortunately, it was sold in glass bottles, and these bottles kept breaking as people brought them door to door and tried to sell them. So Edwin began to wonder if there was a way around this problem, if he could maybe invent around it. He thought back to his childhood at the general store and to Jell-O.

And he started tinkering.

Like a mad scientist in his lab, Edwin set out to transform Fruit-Smack into a perfectly portable powdered potion. And after some trial and error, and as Teresa tells me, some possible help from a compounding pharmacist in Florida, Edwin came up with a winning formula.

He called it Kool-Aid.

First, it was actually spelled “Ade” (A-D-E) but that gave them a little bit of trouble with the Food and Drug Administration.

Teresa: If you had A-D-E in the name, it actually needed to have real fruit juice in it. which is still a thing today. So, you know, his were all artificial flavors, so he had to change it.

Amanda: It was changed to Kool-Aid (A-I-D) and that’s what it is to this day. But as Edwin knew, coming up with a new product was only half the battle. Now we had to figure out how to get people to actually buy it.

And I should point out, this was a period in time when American shopping habits were going through this pretty drastic transformation. So in the early part of the 1900s, if you wanted to buy groceries, you would go to a general store like the one that Edwin’s family had. You would order flour and the clerk would scoop it out of a big barrel and give it to you. Kind of like shopping in bulk. But by the 20s and 30s, around the time Edwin was working on Kool-Aid, you started to see specialized grocery stores with aisles that the shoppers would wander up and down.

And there were brands on the shelves and they were competing for your attention. So Edwin did some research.

Teresa: One of his nephews talks about going to a grocery store with him. And he said it was not a quick trip. He would scour the grocery store shelves looking for new products. And then he’d stand there and study them. And he’d look at the ingredients. And he looked at the packaging. And, you know, a grocery store trip for a carton of eggs and a gallon of milk was a two-hour adventure.

Amanda: What he came up with was a super bright and colorful store display for Kool-Aid. He called it the “Self-selling silent salesman.” The guy has a way with names, you have to admit.

Teresa: That’s a mouthful. But it’s basically the box that you put the Kool-Aid in and set on the counter and, you know, by the register where you get that impulse buying. You know that there’s things in that aisle when you go to check out that you’re going, “Mom, mom, mom, I want this!” You know. He knew how to work it.

Amanda: No doubt this was the bane of the existence of every parent shopping with a child at the time, but it was successful. And speaking of marketing to kids, Edwin also figured out how to get customers hooked on Kool-Aid. He came up with this prize system where if you mailed in enough Kool-Aid packets, you would get stuff. like an aviator cap or a decoder ring or even like a little circus playset.

Teresa: He just knew how to reward people. That’s where I really think his genius is, is just in that ability to connect with people.

Amanda: Kool-Aid was successful pretty much right off the bat. It debuted in 1927, and by 1931, they were already shipping nationwide. Not even the Great Depression slowed things down.

Teresa: In 1933 he lowered the package price to five cents and he made more money than he did when he had it at 10 cents because it was so cheap to buy and you could get a treat without spending a lot of money.

Amanda: But Kool-Aid hitting the big time also meant leaving Hastings behind. Edwin had invented Kool-Aid in Hastings. He had based Perkins Products there for many years and he produced Kool-Aid in a small factory in downtown Hastings. But in 1931, he decided to pick up stakes and move the business to Chicago. He could have a bigger factory there, and they could ship to more places around the country more easily. But it seems Edwin always viewed Hastings as his real hometown. As he neared the end of his life in the 1960s, he requested to be buried in Hastings, and that is where Edwin Perkins is buried today, in the city’s Parkview Cemetery.

Funny enough, the Kool-Aid Man character that is so famous today didn’t really come about until after Edwin left the company. He sold the business in the 1950s to General Foods, and the Kool-Aid Man was a fever dream, shall we say, created by an advertising executive who worked there.

Teresa: As the story goes, he was watching his kid draw faces in a frosted glass, and he came up with the idea of using a frosted pitcher and putting in symbols. And that kind of continued until they developed the Kool-Aid Man, which made his first appearance in 1975.

Amanda: But Teresa says over the last 30 years, there’s been a lot more interest in Hastings and reconnecting with the history of this famous product that was invented there and with the story of the town’s real Kool-Aid Man, Edwin Perkins. It’s been a little bit of a challenge sometimes because Edwin didn’t actually leave many papers behind when he died. Teresa and her colleagues have had to get a little bit creative with their research methods. She told me about a time in the early 2000s when they visited the old original Kool-Aid factory in Hastings. At the time, it was being used as a furniture store.

Teresa: We went in and we took some pictures and everything and we went upstairs. There was these two glass bottles in the corner and they had Perkins Product Company on it. So we were like, “Can we take these?”

Amanda: Today, Kool-Aid’s history is a huge draw for Hastings. They even have this entire summer festival dedicated to Kool-Aid called Kool-Aid Days. This might seem a little bit odd, a town so entwined with a product that they have an entire festival oriented around it. And it is, you know, great advertising for Kool-Aid, I’m sure. But this is a very real part of the town’s story. And Teresa tells me it’s a source of local pride.

Teresa: Hastings has embraced the birth of Kool-Aid location. And so we have developed the Kool-Aid Days festivities. It happens the third weekend of August, typically. There's a very large parade in our downtown. There’s other activities and games and a very large Kool-Aid stand that goes out to our fairgrounds. Here at the museum, we do some smaller activities. We have the five of the six original flavors that are left that we serve. We kind of go with the historic side of it. And we do some smaller games and activities.

And of course, then we highlight the exhibit as well. It’s fun. It’s a little crazy around here.

Amanda: If you’re in town for Kool-Aid Days, you can also swing by the Hastings Museum. They have a substantial exhibit dedicated to the history of Kool-Aid. And Teresa says they like to tell young visitors that if they set up a lemonade stand or a Kool-Aid stand in their front yards, they’re kind of following in Edwin’s footsteps.

Teresa: They’re young entrepreneurs just starting out and stuff like that. So, you know, you can come from humble beginnings and, you know, you work hard and you can make something, you know, which is kind of that American dream too. Edwin was kind of that living proof of that.

Amanda: I’ll post more information about visiting the Hastings Museum and Kool-Aid Days in the episode description. And I’ll also point out that if you’re in Hastings, you can swing by the original Kool-Aid factory. It’s today been converted into apartment buildings. So I guess you could live there too if you are that into Kool-Aid. But they do have a display in the front window that's all about the Perkins family and the history of Kool-Aid. And you can check it out. I’ve got to get something to drink. This episode is making me thirsty.

Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Sirius XM Podcasts. The production team for this episode includes Dylan Thuras, Kelly McEvers, Doug Baldinger, Kameel Stanley, Johanna Mayer, Manolo Morales, Jerome Campbell, Alexa Lim, Casey Holford, and Luz Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tindall.