On Wednesday, June 12, Joe Grimm spoke in the Sarah and
Daniel Opperman Auditorium in the Park Library and shared his entertaining
history of Faygo, published in his work, The
Faygo Book (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2018). The company has
been making soda pop, or as Detroiter’s simply call it, “pop”, since 1907.
Perry Feigenson had arrived in Detroit two years earlier and opened a bakery.
Business was okay, but Perry, who had been a baker since 1900, had come to an
unhappy conclusion - the hours were terrible.
Looking for a new business with better hours, he persuaded
his brother Ben to join him in Detroit. Ben had worked in a Cleveland soda pop
firm, a brother-in-law of the owner. Knowing this, Perry planned to go into the
pop business. Unfortunately, after Ben arrived in Detroit, Perry learned his
brother knew how to bottle pop, but Ben’s brother-in-law had never shared the
flavor formulas. Perry was unconcerned, assuming that it would be simple to
adopt the frosting recipes he used as a baker to the purpose.
Oddly enough, this notion worked. Why it worked is anybody’s
guess. Harry Lipsky was hired in 1958 as the company chemist. He simply didn’t
believe that you could use frosting recipes to flavor pop. Co-founder Perry,
who lived until 1964 finally decided one day he was getting too old to
personally flavor the pop, and pulled the young chemist aside to demonstrate how
to brew Rock & Rye, one of the firm’s signature flavors. After adding a few
cups of this and several dashes of that, the old man waved a towel over the
final mixture, while speaking an incantation.
Lipsky rolled his eyes at this performance but took careful
notes about everything else. After several months work, he scientifically
recreated the formula, without the mumbo-jumbo. What resulted looked the same
and smelled the same, but it didn’t taste right. He tried again, with the same
result. Finally, Lipsky reproduced the entire process as he had been shown it,
complete with towel and incantation, and to his amazement the flavor was
correct. Lipsky claimed that after that trial, he just gave up the science and
made Rock & Rye the old man’s way. Although lacking evidence, Grimm likes
to believe someone is still waving a towel and invoking the secret words over
every fresh batch of the flavor.
Whether their flavors came about by magic or skill, there was
always a lot of them. The Feigenson brothers’ business strategy was to market a
wide variety of flavors. Unlike companies like Coke or Dr. Pepper, which put
all their effort into a single flavor, Faygo marketed a “rainbow of flavors.”
Over the years, the company has marketed over one hundred flavors, some
becoming perennial favorites, some selling well for a time but then being
retired as sales lagged, and few notable flops. The
company even tried to market substitute adult beverages (minus the alcohol)
such as Chateaux Faygeaux, and Faygo Brau, which Faygo claimed was only to be
sold to those under 21, it lasted five months.
When Perry and Ben opened the Feigenson Brothers Bottling
Works in 1907, they faced many problems; one of the more intractable ones was
the length of their name. The glass bottles were small, holding only about 7
ounces of beverage. Printing “Feigenson Brothers Bottling Works” on each bottle
resulted in some pretty small type. They struggled with a solution for years.
Finally, in 1920, they found it. Their pop was renamed, “Faygo,” a nice, short,
five letter logo.
Faygo also became memorable for its advertising. Television
seemed like a golden opportunity for sales, and as Grimm noted, “no pun was too
low, to sell Faygo.” Perhaps the best know commercial appeared in 1956 when the
Faygo Kid rode onto the black and white television screen to save the day. When
Black Bart held up the “Wells-Faygo Express,” he assured the distraught woman
in the coach that all he wanted was the Faygo root beer. The Faygo Kid returned
the stolen drink, and when the question is asked, “which way did he go?” Black
Bart’s horse delivered the commercial’s tag line, “he went for Faygo!”
In another commercial, Herkimer Bottleneck, whose job was to
blow bottles in a pop factory, becomes “too pooped to participate.” His unhappy
foreman announces Herkimer will “blow or go," and gives him a bottle of
Faygo Uptown. In no time at all, Herkimer is back on the job. Both commercials
were made by one of the best animation firms of the day, the same firm which
made cartoon classics such as the Flintstones, the Jetsons, and Scooby-Doo.
Jim Henson, who would later invent the Muppets, also created
Faygo ads. In ten commercials, each a mere eight seconds long and planned to be
used in station identification slots, a Kermit-like Muppet named Wilkins tried
to get a grumpy Wontkins to drink some Faygo. Wontkins always says no, and
invariably something awful happens to him. The goal was to eschew the hard sell
for a laugh, and hopefully, get across the implied moral: never say no to
Faygo!
Faygo also employed local celebrities in ads. Detroit Lion’s
football player Alex Karras became a regular. Karras was a mountain of a man,
who after retiring from football, got even bigger. In one commercial, he is
seated in front of a table, facing an enormous pizza and a can of pop. The
announcer asks, “Hey um Alex? I thought you were on a diet?” To which Karras
replies, "I am on a diet, See? Faygo sugar-free Red Pop. Boy, nobody makes
a diet pop as good as Faygo." The announcer takes his point but says,
"Yeah, but Alex, what about the pizza." Karras pauses, and then
deadpans, "Faygo doesn't make pizza."
Faygo also tried to market is adult-aimed beverages through
creative advertising, When Frosh first appeared, an actor doing an impression
of WC Fields intoned, "Frosh is made for grown-ups. Yes, indeed. … Any
soft drink that's not made for small children can't be all bad." To get
the commercial right, Faygo's advertising firm went through 140 potential
Fields imitators. When they found the right one, Bill Oberlin, they discovered
he couldn't read lines. It took nine hours of taping to get five minutes of
commercials. But it was worth the effort.
Faygo today is still marketing a wide variety of pop. Its
history was told in colorful detail by Joe Grimm.