A family firm that made boots before it made soda.

Bigga is a Jamaican soft drink made by Wisynco Group Limited, a manufacturer and distributor based in St Catherine, the parish west of Kingston. The company writes the name in capitals, as BIGGA, on its own pages. Its story starts well before soft drinks. Wisynco’s published history traces the business to Saleem Mahfood, who it says arrived in Jamaica in 1921 and in 1935 opened a wholesale haberdashery in downtown Kingston called Mahfood’s Commercial Limited, selling footwear, cloth and sewing goods to shops.

According to the same history, his four sons, Ferdinand, Sam, Joe and Robin, formed West Indies Synthetics Company Ltd in 1964, the name shortened to WISYNCO. It built a factory at Twickenham Park in St Catherine, and in 1965 began making rubber water boots under the Iron Man name. The company says it went on to plastic shoes for children, a range of men’s and children’s shoes under the Gator name in 1971, and plastic cups and containers from 1973. The company’s history presents this run of new lines as the way it earned the title “The Innovators,” which still sits at the top of its website.

Drinks came in through distribution first. Wisynco says that from 1985 it distributed beverages made in Trinidad, among them Carib beer and shandy and the Cole-Cold and Chubby soft drinks. In 1996, the company says, it stopped distributing the Trinidadian shandy and soft drinks, borrowed money to build a carbonated soft drink plant of about 10,000 square feet, and launched Bigga. The brand’s own page says it was developed by The Jamaica Drink Company, then a Wisynco subsidiary, and calls it the first locally made beverage the group developed.

Ginger beer, fruit punch and Jamaica Kola.

Bigga is a range of flavoured carbonated soft drinks rather than a single cola. The company lists flavours including ginger beer, fruit punch, cream soda and Jamaica Kola, alongside pineapple, apple, orange and grape. English Wikipedia’s list of Jamaican foods names Bigga among the island’s soft drinks, and its list of cream sodas includes Bigga as a Jamaican brand. Wisynco says the drink is sold in 355 ml, 600 ml and two-litre sizes.

The way Wisynco describes the brand is as much about Jamaica as about flavour. Its Bigga page says the word suggests something “larger than life,” calls the drink “bold, bubbly, colourful and effervescent” and “everything Jamaican,” and says the brand has often been aligned with national pride. Those are the company’s own words for the brand.

Where the drinks are made is stated by the company. Wisynco says it works from two main sites in St Catherine: the Lakes Pen campus, which holds its offices, its WATA water plant and its distribution operation, and the White Marl campus, which it says makes all of its other beverages. On that account Bigga is made at White Marl. The company says Bigga is also sold abroad, naming markets that include Barbados, the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, Guyana, Bermuda, the United States and Canada. For the group as a whole, Wisynco says its products go to markets across the Caribbean and Central and South America as well as the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.

Milk, chocolate and fruit drinks.

The seven brands in this group are all milk, chocolate and fruit drink names: Milo, Nido, La Lechera, Cacaolat, Granini, Ting and Bigga. Milk, chocolate and fruit 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 taste or moment 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 drinks 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 soft drink built on sponsorship and a bottling business.

The company around Bigga changed shape soon after the launch. Wisynco’s history says that in 2006 it formed Wisynco Group Limited by amalgamating three companies: West Indies Synthetics Limited, Wisynco Trading Limited and The Jamaica Drink Company Limited. The same year, it says, it began distributing Coca-Cola products on a non-exclusive basis, and in December 2010 it became the exclusive bottler and distributor of Coca-Cola products in Jamaica. It added its own WATA water in 2000 and the BOOM energy drink in 2010, and the company says it listed on the Jamaica Stock Exchange in 2018. In 2015, its fiftieth year, it says it added a new beverage manufacturing line and a cold storage facility. The Mahfood family still leads it: in 2013, the company says, Joseph Mahfood retired as chairman, William Mahfood became chairman and Andrew Mahfood chief executive.

Bigga’s name has also been attached to sponsorships. Press reports from April 2014, reproduced on Wisynco’s news pages, describe the Bigga Jamaica Oaks, the classic race for three-year-old fillies at Caymanas Park, as then in its seventh year under Bigga’s sponsorship, and the same month the brand was title sponsor of the fourteenth Bigga Westmoreland Curry Festival at The Manning’s School. In November 2015 Wisynco said Bigga and WATA had backed the video for “You Girl,” a song by Shaggy and Ne-Yo, with William Mahfood describing them as the company’s two major Jamaican products. In April 2020, a report carried on the company’s site said, Bigga gave almost 5,000 drinks to feeding programmes run by the Kingston and St Andrew Municipal Corporation.

For a design guide, Bigga shows a local soft drink whose maker describes it through colour, a big name and national feeling, across a range of flavours rather than one. Compare Ting, another Jamaican soft drink, and Red Stripe, the Kingston lager. For this guide we use fruit punch red, pineapple yellow and island green with a heavy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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