A lemon drink with a pub-counter recipe.

Solo is an Australian lemon soft drink, not to be confused with Solo, the Norwegian orange soda. Its idea came from the Australian pub. The lemon squash, sweetened lemon concentrate topped up with water and served across the bar, was a familiar non-alcoholic order, and Solo set out to sell it ready-made. When Schweppes Australia launched a new variant in November 2008, the trade site foodbev reported the company’s account of the brand: the original Solo lemon drink was launched in Australia in 1973 as “the ready to drink version of traditional ‘pub squash.’”

Accounts of the very first years differ. English Wikipedia says Solo was first launched in 1968 by Tarax, the Victorian soft-drink maker whose range in the 1960s also included lemonade, a lime drink called Limelite and a raspberry called Crimson. Tarax had grown from a herbal “non-alcoholic beer” called Taraxale, its name taken from taraxacum, the Latin for dandelion, which George Pethard sold from Numurkah in northern Victoria before his son moved the business to Bendigo. Its marketing was ambitious for a regional firm: from 1957 it sponsored the long-running television programme the Tarax Happy Show. Cadbury Schweppes then took over Tarax in the early 1970s, English Wikipedia says, giving 1972 in one article and 1973 in another, and Solo became a Cadbury Schweppes brand while Tarax carried on as a regional label.

What has stayed constant is the idea the drink was built on: a lemon flavour strong enough to stand in for the pub squash it imitated. By 2008 Schweppes described Solo as the market leader in lemon soft drinks in Australia, saying the brand had grown by more than 30% in 2007, foodbev reported.

Cliffs, crocodiles and a man earning his drink.

Solo’s identity was built less on its pack than on a character. Through the 1970s and 1980s the brand’s television adverts followed the Solo Man, who kayaked down rapids, windsurfed and wrestled crocodiles before reaching for a can. In 2008 foodbev noted that Solo was positioned as “a very masculine drink,” with many adverts built around that male image, the most recent then being a “Man Cans” campaign.

The character was revived twice. In February 2012 Mumbrella reported that Schweppes had brought back Solo Man after 20 years away from Australian television screens, in a campaign by the agency BMF Melbourne for cinema, outdoor and online, directed by Hamish Rothwell. “I grew up watching Solo Man jump over cliffs, ride wind surfers through the desert and even wrestle crocodiles,” BMF’s executive creative director Dave Klein told the site, describing the job as showing why Solo is “the original thirst crusher.”

Six years later the Solo Man changed character. Campaign Brief recalled that the brand had become famous for its 1970s and 1980s adverts, in which the Solo Man tackled extreme activities to work up a sweat. In April 2018 Campaign Brief reported the brand’s first campaign in two years, “A Thirst Worthy Effort”, by TBWA\Melbourne with the media agency Carat. Instead of extreme sports, its heroes arc-welded costumes for a school play and assembled Swedish flat-pack furniture. “Modern masculinity takes many shapes and forms, and our new SOLO Man exemplifies exactly that,” Lisa Saunders, Schweppes’ general manager of marketing, said. The campaign ran across outdoor, print and online video for six weeks.

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.

From Cadbury Schweppes to Asahi.

Solo’s current owner arrived in 2009. Asahi Breweries of Japan agreed to buy the Australian beverage business of Cadbury Schweppes, and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which began its review on 17 March 2009, announced on 31 March that it would not oppose the deal. Asahi Beverages now describes that purchase of Schweppes Australia as the start of its Australian business, which later added Carlton & United Breweries.

The range has widened around the original lemon. Schweppes added Solo Strong, an energy variant with guarana and caffeine sold in a 440ml “man can,” in 2008, foodbev reported, when it called Solo Strong one of four Solo variants; its launch was backed by a light-hearted television advert in the style of the Man Cans campaign. Lemon-lime and zero-sugar versions followed. In June 2025 Asahi Beverages launched Solo Energy, in full-sugar and zero-sugar versions, the trade magazine Convenience & Impulse Retailing reported, with the brand’s marketing head calling it “a fresh take” on one of Australia’s most iconic drinks.

Not every extension kept the name. An alcoholic lemon drink launched in 2023 as Hard Solo was renamed Hard Rated after the Alcohol Beverages Advertising Code panel found in November 2023 that its branding breached the code’s provisions on appeal to minors; Carlton & United Breweries said it accepted the decision, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

For a design guide, Solo shows how a single character and a single flavour can carry a soft drink for half a century, and how far that character can be rewritten without losing the brand. Compare Bundaberg, another Australian soft drink with a strong regional story, and Solo, the unrelated Norwegian orange soda of the same name. For this guide we use lemon yellow, a squash green and a deep leaf green with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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