A Parle Exports drink, years before Thums Up.

Maaza is a mango drink, and in India it has been a Coca-Cola brand for more than three decades — but it was not created by Coca-Cola. The Economic Times reported in 2007 that Maaza was launched in 1976 and was the brainchild of Ramesh Chauhan, whose company Parle Exports is now known as Bisleri International. English Wikipedia, citing the same report, also dates the launch to 1976 and credits it to Parle Exports.

The date matters because Maaza is older than the fizzy drinks that later made the Chauhan family’s name in soft drinks. After The Coca-Cola Company withdrew from India in 1977, English Wikipedia says, Parle Exports moved into carbonated drinks with the cola Thums Up, the lemon drink Limca and the orange drink Gold Spot. Quoted by Entrepreneur in 2017, Chauhan listed Maaza among the company’s brands as “a mango based non fizz drink.”

The drinks business ran largely through franchise bottlers. The Economic Times reported that of the sixty-two bottling plants behind the Chauhan brands before 1993, only four were owned by the company. The group also had a mango-processing business that supplied pulp to Maaza, which, the newspaper said in 2007, Bisleri had earlier sold to Jain Irrigation.

The Economic Times described its long-standing positioning as “Mango in the Bottle” and said in 2007 that the brand’s primary consumers were children. When Coca-Cola tried to stretch the name, the same report said, its orange and pineapple variants of 2001 were rejected by consumers; Coca-Cola India’s current brand page lists a Maaza Aam Panna alongside Maaza Original.

One trademark, two owners and a court case.

Coca-Cola’s return to India in 1993 changed the brand’s ownership. In 1993, English Wikipedia says, Parle Exports sold its carbonated drinks — Thums Up, Limca, Gold Spot, Citra and Rim Zim — to The Coca-Cola Company, and with them the Maaza trademark for the Indian market. The Times of India reported in 2008, quoting from a copy of the document, that the Maaza trademark was assigned to Coca-Cola under a general assignment agreement dated 11 November 1993, and that the agreements of 1993 and 1994 covered Maaza in “India and India alone,” as Chauhan put it.

Outside India the Chauhan side kept going. In June 2007, The Economic Times reported, Maaza Beverages, a soft-drinks company promoted by the Bisleri group, sold the Maaza trademark rights for international markets to its bottlers — Infra Beverages in Europe and House of Spice in the United States — and closed its international operations, which had been headquartered in New York. Coca-Cola, the newspaper said, had been interested in buying those rights but did not clinch a deal.

The split led to a dispute. In 2008, The Times of India reported, Chauhan served Coca-Cola with a 30-day notice and a legal notice alleging breach of the agreements, after Coca-Cola had filed applications to register Maaza in the Benelux countries and in Turkey, applications that the newspaper said were later withdrawn. Coca-Cola went to the Delhi High Court. In February 2013, The Economic Times reported, a division bench ruled that Bisleri could not market Maaza in India, though it could make the drink in India for export; Chauhan told the paper that Bisleri had used the Maaza name in the US, the UK, Europe and the Middle East since 1977. The same report said that in international markets both companies could technically sell Maaza. Separately, a Dubai-based business that sells drinks under the Maaza name says on its website that its journey began in 1974.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all drink names from India: Thums Up, Limca, Frooti, Paper Boat, Rasna, Bisleri and Maaza. Indian drink brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger food and drink groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the drink it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A mango in every season.

Under Coca-Cola, Maaza’s advertising has centred on mango. The Economic Times’ Brand Equity magazine wrote in November 2012 that the brand had built its equity on campaigns such as “Taaza mango Maaza mango” and “Bina Guthli Aam” — mango without the stone — and then “Har Mausam Aam,” a mango for every season. Leo Burnett had been Maaza’s creative partner for nearly ten years, the magazine said. That year Maaza ranked eighth in Brand Equity’s Most Trusted Brands survey, up from 32nd, and was the only beverage brand in the top ten.

Coca-Cola then set the brand a larger target. On 17 February 2016, PTI reported in The Hindu, Coca-Cola India said it planned to make Maaza a billion-dollar brand in retail sales from India by 2023. “Since 1993, when we brought Maaza into the Coca-Cola family, we have invested to make it the largest juice brand in the country,” said Venkatesh Kini, then president of Coca-Cola India — a claim that is the company’s own. The company said at the time that at least half of the bottling plants in its Indian system would get manufacturing lines for Maaza over the following years. In December 2017 it added a premium variant, Maaza Gold, according to a company press release carried by BusinessLine.

Today Coca-Cola India sells Maaza Original as a ready-to-serve fruit drink and says its mango pulp includes Alphonso. Its brand page lists the drink in Tetra Pak cartons, returnable glass bottles, PET bottles and cans, and states that Maaza is a registered trademark of The Coca-Cola Company.

For a design guide, Maaza shows how a single fruit and a single word can carry a brand through a change of owner and a split of its rights across borders. Compare Frooti, the Parle Agro mango drink, and Bisleri, the Chauhan company that created Maaza. For this guide we use a mango yellow, a ripe orange and a leaf green with a rounded bold sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Maaza’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.