Nebraska State Soft Drink: Kool-Aid

Nebraska's official state soft drink is Kool-Aid, designated in 1998 because the drink was invented in Hastings by Edwin Perkins — giving Nebraska a rare soft drink designation with an unambiguous, homegrown origin story. Most states that designate a soft drink are simply endorsing a regional preference. Nebraska is marking a birthplace.

The state already designates milk as its official state beverage. Kool-Aid is a separate symbol in a separate category.

The reason is geographic and historical, not promotional. Edwin Perkins was a Hastings resident when he converted Fruit Smack into a powdered drink mix in 1927. He named it Kool-Aid, launched it from his home, and built its early distribution through a mail-order catalog he ran out of the same Nebraska town. The product's entire formative period — the invention, the reformulation, the Depression-era pricing strategy — took place in Nebraska.

The Nebraska Legislature treated the 1998 designation as a record, not a marketing decision — a statement that a globally distributed product has a specific Nebraska address at its origin. That kind of clean provenance is uncommon for an official state symbol. Most symbols recognize something abundant or native. Kool-Aid recognizes something invented.

Edwin Perkins was not a laboratory scientist — he was a self-taught entrepreneur who had been developing mail-order products since his teens. By the early 1920s, he was operating out of Hastings, running a catalog that included food products, flavoring extracts, and household goods. One of those products was Fruit Smack, a bottled liquid concentrate designed to be mixed with water and served as a soft drink.

Fruit Smack had a fundamental problem: it was heavy, expensive to ship, and fragile in transit. For a mail-order business dependent on reliable, low-cost delivery, glass bottles were a liability.

In 1927, Perkins eliminated the liquid from Fruit Smack entirely. He concentrated the flavoring into a dry powder, packed it in a paper envelope, and produced something that weighed almost nothing, survived shipping without breakage, and cost a fraction of the bottled version to store and deliver. He called the first version Kool-Ade — the spelling shifted to Kool-Aid not long after.

The original product launched in six flavors and sold for ten cents per packet. That price point turned out to be decisive. Through the Great Depression, as household budgets collapsed across the country, Perkins kept the dime price intact. Families who could no longer afford bottled soda could still afford Kool-Aid. A practical packaging decision made in Hastings, Nebraska, in the late 1920s ended up shaping the drink habits of a generation.

Perkins eventually moved his operation to Chicago as the brand scaled beyond what Hastings could support. Kool-Aid passed through corporate ownership, became a mass-market staple, and long ago lost any operational connection to Nebraska. What Hastings kept was the origin story — and it has never been shy about it.

The city holds an annual Kool-Aid Days festival, not as a tribute to a forgotten local product but as an acknowledgment that the drink served globally was formulated on a residential street in south-central Nebraska. The 1998 state soft drink designation made that connection official. Its invention happened in Hastings.