A dairy farmer, a glut of passionfruit and a syrup.

Passiona began as a way of using up fruit. English Wikipedia says it was developed in the 1920s by Spencer Cottee, a dairy farmer near Lismore in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales, so that surplus passionfruit from his farm would not go to waste. It dates the first production to 1924 and says Cottee described the drink in an address to the Mullumbimby Chamber of Commerce in 1925, citing a report in the Brisbane Courier of September that year. The food historian Jan O’Connell, on her Australian Food Timeline, also gives 1924 and describes Passiona first as a fruit syrup, which a Lismore bottler, Bryants, sold in aerated form around the district.

Cottee was already a figure in the dairy trade. His obituary in the Lismore Northern Star of 9 June 1944, republished by Obituaries Australia, describes him as an authority on dairying, a former director of the Norco co-operative and a pioneer of the casein industry, and calls the founding of Passiona Products one of his most successful enterprises, one that “found its first basis in experiments he made in the Tregeagle district” before being firmly established in Sydney. The same obituary reports that he died in Lismore that month, aged 80.

The name was protected early. Australia’s official trade mark register shows that a figurative mark carrying the word PASSIONA was filed on 17 January 1925, and that it is still registered a century later. The register describes its image as a border device with leaves, a passionflower and passionfruit, and lists it in the class for goods such as passionfruit pulp, jam and jelly. English Wikipedia notes that the name has also been used on the Cottee’s range of jelly crystals.

A Sydney factory, a governor’s wife and licensed bottlers.

The drink moved to the city quickly. English Wikipedia says a factory was set up in Sydney in 1926 and that Passiona was marketed to the public in 1927, citing a Brisbane Courier report of January 1927 headed “A New Beverage. Advent of Passiona.” O’Connell records that the early advertising leaned on vice-regal approval: a 1927 advertisement quoted Lady de Chair, wife of the Governor of New South Wales, praising Passiona as a base for fruit cup and noting a repeat order for Government House. The same advertisement, she notes, told readers how to say the name — “PASH-ONA.”

Rather than bottle everything itself, Cottee licensed the drink to bottlers around the country. English Wikipedia and O’Connell both name Geo. Hall & Sons in South Australia and Bowral Bottlers in the New South Wales Southern Highlands among them, citing Bill Clarkson’s 1997 history of Australian soft drinks. O’Connell adds that newspapers in the 1930s reported Australians taking Passiona with them as far as Canada and Jerusalem, and that in 1951 a Passiona Bottling Co. was formed in Sydney to acquire from Cottees Passiona Ltd the rights to aerate its bottling syrups and concentrates.

The fruit itself came from several places. English Wikipedia says the pulp was first supplied by growers on the Australian mainland and later also by a co-operative on Norfolk Island, and that Cottee’s went on to set up plants in the highlands of New Guinea, at Goroka and Mount Hagen, citing a 1964 Tariff Board report to the Australian Parliament on passionfruit juice and pulp.

The drink kept a place in political memory too. O’Connell records that when Senator John Faulkner paid tribute to the former prime minister Gough Whitlam in October 2014, he recalled sharing “a cup of tea or a glass of Passiona” with him every week.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all soft-drink names from Australia, Britain and the United States: Kirks, Solo, Passiona, Bickford’s, Ben Shaws, Fever-Tree and Shasta. Australian, British and American 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 product than by a bottle or can, a name and the flavour 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 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.

Cottee’s, General Foods, Cadbury Schweppes and Asahi.

Passiona has changed hands with the Cottee’s business around it. English Wikipedia says the beverage business that began with Passiona syrup was spun off as Cottees Passiona in 1927, and that the Cottee’s company went on to make cordials, jams, marmalades, toppings and jellies under the family name. In 1965, it says, citing the Cottee’s company history, Cottee’s was bought by the American food group General Foods, and in 1984 the Cottee’s businesses were sold to Cadbury Schweppes.

The drink and the jams then went separate ways. In June 2007 Cadbury Schweppes sold its Australian spreads and desserts to H.J. Heinz, while the drinks stayed with its Australian beverage arm. In December 2008 the Sydney Morning Herald reported that the Japanese brewer Asahi had agreed to buy Schweppes Australia from Cadbury, and English Wikipedia says the deal included the Cottee’s cordial and Passiona trade marks. The trade mark register records the assignment of the 1925 Passiona mark from a Cadbury company to Asahi Breweries by a deed dated 3 April 2009. Asahi Beverages, as the Australian business is now called, dates its arrival to 2009, when its parent acquired Schweppes Australia.

English Wikipedia lists Asahi Beverages as Passiona’s maker today, the same company that owns the Cottee’s cordials it grew up with. The trade mark register still lists the 1925 Passiona mark, with its passionflower, leaves and fruit, as registered and renewed to 2029.

For a design guide, Passiona shows how a farm-surplus syrup with a registered passionflower mark became a national soft drink that has passed through four owners. Compare Cottee’s, the cordial brand it started, and Solo, another Asahi soft drink. For this guide we use a passionfruit purple, a pulp gold and a leaf green with a soft serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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