A Newcastle chemist’s shop and a drink for the sick.

Lucozade started in a chemist’s shop in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1927. Its first name was Glucozade, and it was a carbonated glucose drink intended to give energy to people recovering from illness. The shop, at Barras Bridge, traded as W. Owen & Son. English Wikipedia, citing The Northern Echo in 2013, credits the drink to the pharmacist William Walker Hunter, who traded under that name. A profile on the Jesmond Old Cemetery website, citing H. G. Lazell’s 1975 history of Beecham, says Hunter had bought the pharmacy from a Mr Owen, carbonated the drink in the shop’s basement and flavoured it with lemon and orange oils. Newcastle’s Discovery Museum describes the inventor as a chemist named William Owen.

The name changed early. The Discovery Museum says the drink became Lucozade in 1929, while English Wikipedia places the renaming after Beecham’s purchase. In 1938 the pharmaceutical group Beecham acquired the drink and the business, and marketed it, English Wikipedia says, as “an energy drink for the sick.” The Discovery Museum says it was used by hospitals throughout Britain and became a symbol of recovery.

For more than four decades the pack itself spoke of convalescence. Until 1983, according to Jim Blythe’s textbook Consumer Behaviour as cited by English Wikipedia, Lucozade was a carbonated, slightly orange-flavoured drink sold in a glass bottle wrapped in cellophane. A 1964 advertisement in the Daily Mirror carried the line “Lucozade aids recovery.” That wrapped bottle, and the line that went with it, defined the brand for the first half of its life.

From the sickroom to the running track.

The turn came in 1983. English Wikipedia, citing David Taylor’s book Brand Vision (2007), says Beecham repositioned Lucozade that year as a drink for energy and sport under the line “Lucozade replaces lost energy.” Its television advertising featured the Olympic decathlon champion Daley Thompson, and a marketing case-study book published by Pearson in 2011 says UK sales tripled to almost £75 million between 1984 and 1989.

The range and the bottle changed with the new audience. English Wikipedia, citing the brand’s own history page as archived in 2005, says orange and lemon flavours followed in 1986 and a tropical flavour in 1990, that the drink moved from glass to plastic bottles, and that a 1996 relaunch brought a new 300ml bottle and a new logo for what became Lucozade Energy.

Lucozade Sport, an isotonic sports drink, launched in 1990, Transform magazine reported in 2017. Early-1990s advertising for it featured the footballer John Barnes and the line that it “gets to your thirst, fast,” and the rugby player Jonny Wilkinson later appeared in the brand’s campaigns, English Wikipedia says. In September 2016 Lucozade Sport went through what Transform called the biggest rebrand of its 25-year history: the London agency Bloom introduced a colour-led design, and a new bottle developed with Touch Packaging Innovation added brightly coloured lids to tell flavours apart and a textured grip carrying the brand’s pattern.

The drink itself was reformulated in 2017. The Daily Telegraph reported that October that Lucozade’s sugar content had been cut and the sweeteners aspartame and acesulfame K added, ahead of the UK’s soft drinks levy, which took effect in April 2018.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make soft drinks or cordials, and all of them come from Britain: Irn-Bru, Vimto, Ribena, Lucozade, Tango, Fentimans and Belvoir Farm. British soft-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 drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A soft-drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single recipe than by a bottle, a colour, a name and the moment it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its bottling 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 drinks are actually made and bottled.

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

GSK, Suntory and an arc turned on its side.

Lucozade followed Beecham through its mergers, into SmithKline Beecham in 1989 and into GlaxoSmithKline in 2000. In September 2013 GSK agreed to sell it, together with Ribena, to Japan’s Suntory for £1.35 billion, The Guardian reported, noting that both drinks were made at the Royal Forest Factory in Coleford, in Gloucestershire’s Forest of Dean. The UK business, formed in January 2014 as Lucozade Ribena Suntory Limited, trades as Suntory Beverage & Food GB&I and has its head office in Uxbridge, west London.

The biggest identity change in the brand’s history came in April 2024, when The Drum reported the first major brand redesign in almost 100 years. The design agency Pearlfisher brought Lucozade Energy and Lucozade Sport together under one masterbrand, with the platform “Bring the Energy” developed alongside the advertising agency adam&eveDDB. The Lucozade arc was placed at the heart of the design, the wordmark was turned from a vertical to a horizontal lockup, and yellow was carried throughout. Pearlfisher partner David Jenkinson told The Drum that, with the arc elevated to the centre, the task was to refine and communicate the distinct offerings.

Lucozade is still made in the Forest of Dean, the company says. In 2026 it announced a £25 million line at Coleford, called Apollo 5, which Food Manufacture reported is expected to be operational in 2027, the year Lucozade marks its centenary; the company said the line is part of more than £57 million earmarked for its UK manufacturing. The company says the Coleford factory has been making drinks for about 80 years.

For a design guide, Lucozade shows how a brand can keep its name and its arc while moving its whole meaning, from the sickroom to the sports field. Compare Ribena, made at the same Coleford site for the same owner, and Irn-Bru, another long-running British soft drink. For this guide we use an energy yellow, an orange and a deep amber with a heavy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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