An Amazon fruit, a São Paulo brewer and a 1921 launch.

Guaraná Antarctica was launched on 18 August 1921 by the Companhia Antarctica Paulista, the São Paulo brewer, under the name Guaraná Champagne Antarctica. Portuguese Wikipedia says the launch can be seen in the pages of the newspaper Correio Paulistano, and both the English and Portuguese articles credit the recipe to Pedro Baptista de Andrade, an industrial chemist and pharmacy professor, whose formula was approved by the state health service.

The drink did not come from nowhere. Guaraná is an Amazon fruit long used by indigenous peoples; Portuguese Wikipedia singles out the Sateré-Mawé of Amazonas, around the town of Maués. It records that the physician Luiz Pereira Barreto developed a method of turning guaraná into syrup in 1905, research that later underpinned Antarctica’s soda, and that a Belém firm, Oliveira Simões e Cia., was selling carbonated guaraná by 1915 and received a patent for its “Guaraná Efervescente” in 1917. In 1918 a Rio de Janeiro company advertised a “Guaraná Champagne” in three versions. That business did not prosper, and Antarctica’s executives bought it, keeping the Guaraná Champagne name.

The company behind the launch was already old. Portuguese Wikipedia traces Antarctica to a pig abattoir and ice plant in the Água Branca district of São Paulo in 1885, which joined with the German brewer Louis Bücher to make beer from 1888. The Companhia Antarctica Paulista was formally founded on 9 February 1891, came under the control of the coffee exporters Zerrenner, Bülow & Cia. in 1893, and from 1920 had its headquarters in the former Bavaria brewery in Mooca.

A label, a bottle and a new name.

Antarctica planned the production and marketing of its guaraná around a label that, Portuguese Wikipedia says, stayed practically unchanged until 1980. The same source dates a tinplate can to 1981 and says the 290 ml glass bottle introduced in 1984 became a symbol of the brand; it also dates the small Caçulinha size to 1949.

The fruit has always come from the Amazon. Portuguese Wikipedia says Antarctica bought guaraná directly from suppliers around Maués from the start and made the extract at its São Paulo plant until 1962, when it opened an extraction unit in Maués and bought the Fazenda Santa Helena there. Planting at the farm began in 1971; it covers about 1,070 hectares, half given to guaraná research and half kept as legal forest reserve. The 2016 slogan “De Maués para Suas Mãos,” from Maués to your hands, names that origin.

The biggest identity change came in 2002, when AmBev dropped “Champagne” and the drink became simply Guaraná Antarctica, which Portuguese Wikipedia describes as the new company’s only guaraná soda. Portuguese Wikipedia describes the campaign that marked the rename: the footballer Ronaldo, who had signed with the brand in September 1994, discussed a new haircut in a salon with Cascão from the Turma da Mônica comics, under the line “Novo visual, sabor original.” The same year the brand sponsored Brazil’s national team at the World Cup in South Korea and Japan, under a contract with the Brazilian football confederation that AmBev had signed in 2001.

Football is one thread in a long slogan list that Portuguese Wikipedia records, from “Viva mais com Guaraná Antarctica” in 1972 to “Tudo pede Guaraná Antarctica” in 1999 and “É coisa nossa!” in 2019. Line extensions have included Zero in 2007, Açaí in 2010 and Black in 2015.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make food or drink, and they come from five countries: Alicorp, Noel, Postobón, Guaraná Antarctica, La Costeña, Crown and Maeil, from Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico and South Korea. Food and 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 groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A food or drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the everyday meal or treat it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory or grown far beyond the town 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.

From Antarctica to AmBev to AB InBev.

Guaraná Antarctica has changed hands through mergers rather than sales of the brand. AmBev was created on 1 July 1999 by the merger of Antarctica and its long-time rival Brahma, of Rio de Janeiro; Brazil’s competition authority, CADE, approved the merger on 30 March 2000, on condition that the Bavaria beer brand and five plants were sold. Portuguese Wikipedia notes that the combined company had a crowd of overlapping guaraná sodas, from Guaraná Brahma and Kas to Antarctica’s own Polar, and discontinued most of them in favour of Antarctica’s.

AmBev then merged with Belgium’s Interbrew in 2004 to form InBev, which bought Anheuser-Busch in 2008; Ambev is today a subsidiary of Anheuser-Busch InBev, English Wikipedia says. Portuguese Wikipedia credits those mergers with the drink’s growing international reach.

Where it is made depends on the source. Portuguese Wikipedia says the first bottler franchises outside Brazil were set up in 1996 in Portugal, Japan and China, that in 1999 the brand began working with PepsiCo on international distribution, and that it is produced in Brazil, Portugal and Japan. English Wikipedia lists five producing countries: Portugal, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia and Japan.

For a design guide, Guaraná Antarctica shows how a soda can make a single Amazon ingredient, a long-lived label and a national football team carry a national identity. Compare Garoto, the Brazilian chocolate maker, and Postobón, Colombia’s home-grown soda company. For this guide we use guaraná green, berry red and soda amber with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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