Why is RC Cola popular in Tajikistan? | Hacker News Reader

Why is RC Cola popular in Tajikistan?

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60 pointsbenbreen37 comments

I spent a bit of time working in Tajikistan a while back, and I've never encountered such a vertically integrated country. It's like everyone sits on an organigram that goes right to the top.

There will be a very limited number of importers and distributors, effectively one at the top end. So no real variety in available anything. No real competition. If the system is running RC then we drink RC.

RC is also available where I live (also FSU). It's poor man's coke, Tajikistan is the poorest country in the FSU. The more expensive coke is not going to sell well in a country that at one point was the most remittance dependent in the world.

TJK also has abysmally poor water infrastructure. Coke's normal strategy is to bottle water locally and add syrup. They may have balked at this in TJK.

RC are either braver on this front, or being produced in a neighbouring country and being cheaper overall, more viable to import.

I'm always surprised to find other folks who love RC Cola as much as I do. I live in a weird rural area in the US and it's just always been around. I had no idea that outside of our little bubble that no one seems to know about it, and it's even weirder to find the other spots across the world that have their own little bubble of availability.

Ale8!

I post because there is something glorious about an outlier in a consumer space that is largely homogenous.

I will look for some RC cola because you posted this!

I grew up rural in the US and love it too! I can’t find it anymore after moving to the burbs.

RC is hands-down the best cola there is! I have family in Appalachia where RC is very popular. Along with moon pies!

It must have been available in the Cleveland area (or maybe western Pennsylvania) sixty years ago, for I know that I have consumed it, just not recently.

I bet that a bit of a search in YouTube would pull up the All in the Family bit in which the son-in-law establishes that he can in fact distinguish RC Cola from Coca-Cola in a blind taste test.

I have fond memories of my grandfather serving RC Cola to me in a small town in Norway 30 years ago. Imported to the town by a small independent shop focusing on cheaper alternatives to the big brands.

Few years ago, IKEA sold RC Cola in their restaurant in Norway, but haven’t seen it recently.

Still pops up once in again through catering services, probably because of a lower price point.

I quite like RC. Also only tasted it in Norway years ago. It's slightly more caramel flavoured than Coke or Pepsi, but not nearly as much as Dr Pepper which is too much for me. The best thing about RC from my perspective is that it is the only cola I have ever tried where it took me a second to taste the difference between their regular and diet version, even a few decades ago. My parents regularly tried to get me to pick the sugar free versions and RC was the only one where I almost had to concede that they tasted the same.

RC Draft Cola was available in the rural US back in the 90s. It used cane sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup. It was creamy and subtly flavored. It seemed hand-crafted but came from a reasonably big distributor. It was a special treat, almost a dessert drink.

Gone now.

Apparently it only exists in New Zealand these days.

OMG, I had forgotten that Royal Crown ever existed. It was a minor, but still important cola beverage, here in Puerto Rico back in the '70s.

It was still available in Quebec, Canada when I was young in the 90s/early 2000.

That was a trip down memory lane.

> Throughout the 1950s, Coca-Cola executives stressed that its bottlers were “local, independent” businesses; “everywhere you find Coke, you find it is a local enterprise,” Coca-Cola’s president H. B. Nicholson claimed in 1953.46

This strikes me a little like Apple's outsourcing strategy.

To gain access to the Chinese market they have to manufacture and run services locally there. There's no way the CCP would allow them anywhere near their current market share if their products were imported.

Similarly Apple's market share in India has been historically low. The Indian government was pretty hostile to Apple imports too until Apple started partnering with local contract manufacturers.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the long term as automation improves. Could there be a future where multi-nationals set up standardised, mostly automated assembly plants in each market just to get preferential treatment from each government? Then just shut up shop and move if they ever turn hostile.

It's got to be some MBA's wet dream at least.

It's the opposite of globalization, so not exactly an MBA wet dream.

That is globalization precisely.

It helps that the product is made up of super easy to source ingredients except for the whole song and dance about the "secret formula".

This is also how auto manufacturing works, and is built in to a lot of the defining trade agreements.

Final assembly happens locally. This make up "value add" minimums to avoid tarrifs. It's also good PR. No one care where the aircon is made. They care where the panels are stamped out.

That's what makes GM a Holden, and part of Australian culture... for example.

There also is a practicality to it. Coke's local bottling make their whole supply chain more resilient. Coke are very good at supply chains, generally.

Someone needs to start importing Moon Pies into Tajikistan!

In Czechia, RC Cola is locally produced by Kofola [0]. Kofola itself is a cola-like drink invented in 1959 [1] in communist Czechoslovakia as a better alternative to western Coca Cola (and in Czechia it is still considered much tastier than Coca Cola or Pepsi). But me personally I prefer the Kofola's RC Cola suger-free variant, as it is the least weird tasting sugar-free cola-like drink I ever encountered.

[0] https://cs.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RC_Cola

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kofola

It was not invented as "better" alternative, just to have something that can be produced from local ingredients.

Fun fact: When there was a shortage of caffeine they extracted it from coffee roasting soot [1]

For the record I like Kofola more than Coke/Pepsi

[1] https://dvojka.rozhlas.cz/kofola-s-nedostatkem-kofeinu-se-pr...

Producing something you can't get from local ingredients sounds like better alternative to me :D It's just semantics.

Slightly related question: Coca Cola started to sell a "cinnamon" version recently. But wasn't cinnamon always part of the formula?

https://us.coca-cola.com/products/coca-cola-flavors/cinnamon

Why is this flagged?

Although I stopped drinking soda years ago, back when I did I considered RC to be the best of them all. It was a shame when it vanished form the shelves in my part of the US.

I was surprised to find RC is also common in the country Georgia (Sakartvelo), but Coke seemed to most common, and I do not recall ever seeing an RC advertisement, especially with tanks.

Funny. Georgia (US) is well known as the home of Coca-Cola but when I was a kid, i remember all my kin in South Georgia drinking RC Cola.

And it turns out that Georgia (US) is also the birthplace of RC Cola, but Columbus, Georgia instead of Atlanta, Georgia. The inventor was angry at Coca-Cola for refusing to sell him syrup at a bulk discount so he made his own competing product instead, which he sold at a lower price than Coca-Cola.

RC Cola was hugely popular in Philippines too when I was a kid. Coca cola I remember was crazy expensive, so RC Cola it is.

I remember it being pretty popular in Kosovo as well, in case any European HNer wants to check it out.

Seeing a trend in Germany for non coca cola coke (Fritz ,Afri, ...). Those are however mostly local. Not much royal crown here. Actually seems to be a brand of Dr. Pepper Snappe, which is also not so wide spread in Germany. Only Pepsi has a decent share afaik.

In Switzerland we also see all these regional colas, plus some hyperlocal ones (Vivi cola). Some claim to be very old brands, but if you go and look you'll see that the brand were only recently revived after a long hiatus

Pepsi fundamentally changed their recipe. Not really the way to keep customers onboard.

Really? Pepsi is the same as its always been in the U.S. (OK, actually the recipe changed when they switched from sugar to HFCS, but that was a long time ago).

At least some places, like the UK, "regular" Pepsi is now reduced sugar and full of sweeteners [1]

I first worried I had covid or something when I ran across the new version because it suddenly started tasting differently. I've preferred Pepsi for decades because it tasted sweeter to me so now it's coke all the way for me.

[1] https://news.sky.com/story/pepsi-dramatically-cuts-sugar-con...

The Fritz rhubarb soda is incredible and I wish it were easier to find here in Ireland. It’s everywhere in Berlin.

Fritz also starts to be popular in NL, I think they're trying to position themselves as the "alternative to the mainstream cola" and inbetween the "regular cola, decent taste" and "red-bull-like caffeinated beverage"

In Czechia Fritz is popular in bars as a sort of fancier cola.

Very popular in Montenegro as well.

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