A father and son, a hand-made juice, a contractor and a packer in Indiana.

V8 is an American brand of vegetable juice and juice-based drinks, owned today by The Campbell’s Company. Its story begins in Illinois during the Depression. Campbell’s, in a company history published in December 2023, says W.G. Peacock and his son created V8 in Evanston, Illinois, after perfecting a blended vegetable drink in 1933. Food Dive gave the same year and the same father-and-son pairing in April 2025, placing the creation in Illinois. Mashed, in a history of the brand published in December 2021, named the father as William Gilbert Peacock and said the pair began by blending vegetables by hand in their basement.

Turning a home recipe into a product took outside help. Mashed says Peacock enlisted Frank Constable to manufacture the drink for Peacock’s firm, the New England Products Company, and English Wikipedia describes Constable as a Chicago contractor who worked for Peacock. Tomato carried the early recipe. Mashed says Peacock initially added beets and leafy greens, found the taste disappointing, and kept adjusting the blend until the flavours sat together. The food reference site CooksInfo says the early version did not taste very good and that Peacock reworked the formula, arriving at something better in 1934.

The drink did not start out as V8. Mashed and English Wikipedia both give the early name as Vege-min, and CooksInfo renders it as “Veg Min”. Mashed, drawing on the brand’s own history, says Constable moved from Vege-min 8 to V8 Vegetable Cocktail Juice, and thought the name suited a drink that was popular and powerful, like a car’s V8 engine. CooksInfo says the name was suggested by a clerk at a grocery store Peacock visited on his early sales rounds. The Terre Haute historian Tom Roznowski, in his 2009 book An American Hometown: Terre Haute, Indiana, as quoted by CooksInfo, wrote that Peacock decided on a new name after counting up the ingredients in his juice.

Demand outgrew the kitchen. CooksInfo says Peacock started production by 1936, with early sales in New England, and that by 1938 he could not keep up, because he was doing everything by hand. In April 1938, it says, he sold the recipe to the Loudon Packing Company of Terre Haute, Indiana, which took over processing and packaging. Roznowski’s book, in the passage CooksInfo quotes, says that after counting his growing orders Peacock decided the juice should have a new owner, and that Loudon Packing would soon produce and market “V-8 Juice”. The recipe was revised once more. Mashed, citing the brand, says Constable reworked it in 1947 to include the vegetables it uses today, and English Wikipedia also dates the new formula to 1947.

Loudon, Standard Brands, Campbell’s and a Napoleon, Ohio plant.

The packer changed hands during the war. CooksInfo quotes a report in the Pittsburgh Press of 23 May 1943 saying the directors and stockholders of the Loudon Packing Company had authorised the sale of all its assets to Standard Brands, Inc., and that Loudon, a Delaware corporation with its principal office in Terre Haute, would be dissolved once the sale was completed. CooksInfo says Campbell’s began negotiating with Standard Brands for V8 in 1945 and that the sale went through in 1948. English Wikipedia describes the 1948 purchase as an acquisition from the Charles Loudon Packing Company in Terre Haute.

Campbell’s already sold a tomato juice. CooksInfo says the company felt plain tomato juice was becoming a generic, low-cost product and wanted something proprietary. It also says production of V8 was moved to Saratoga, Indiana. Campbell’s own account, published in December 2023, says the acquisition included a manufacturing plant in Napoleon, Ohio, and that the plant still makes the juice today, along with the company’s soups and sauces. Food Dive, reporting in April 2025, described The Campbell’s Company as the firm that acquired V8 in 1948. Campbell’s has owned V8 since 1948.

Some of the supply has stayed in the same hands for generations. Campbell’s says that celery used in V8 has long been grown at the Willbrandt family farm in Decatur, Michigan, and Mashed, drawing on a Campbell’s article, says the farm’s celery trimmings are set aside for V8.

The parent company changed its own name in 2024. Campbell’s announced on 19 November 2024 that its shareholders had approved changing its official name from Campbell Soup Company to The Campbell’s Company, effective once an amendment to its certificate of incorporation was filed in New Jersey. The company said the change did not affect the Campbell’s soup brand or its packaging.

The range has widened around the original red juice. Food Dive dates the V8 Energy line to 2011, and says that four years later Campbell’s added Vegetable and Fruit Juice Beverages made with ingredients such as yellow carrots, sweet potatoes and pineapples. Mashed says V8 +Hydrate followed in 2018, and that a line of V8 protein shakes and bars introduced in late 2014 was withdrawn after a little over a year. In October 2024, Food Dive reported, Campbell’s partnered with the pickle maker Grillo’s on a Bloody Mary mix, and two months later with the cocktail brand Spritz Society on a Bloody Mary Spritz. Food Dive quoted Prabha Cheemalapati, Campbell’s vice president of beverages, saying the brand was “blurring category lines”. Not every market kept the drink. On 3 November 2023 the Campbell’s Soup UK website, run by Euro Food Brands, posted a goodbye from V8 to its UK customers.

Design and documentation.

Juice brands in general reach the shelf in a handful of familiar containers: glass bottles, plastic bottles, paperboard cartons, cans and small pouches or boxes made for a lunchbox. Each container shapes what a brand can do with its identity. A bottle can carry a moulded shape, an embossed name or a neck label; a carton offers flat panels that work almost like a printed poster; a can wraps its graphics around a cylinder that is usually seen from one side at a time.

Because the liquid inside often looks much alike from one brand to the next, the label tends to do the work of telling them apart: the name, the colours, a drawing of fruit or vegetables, and sometimes a story about the family, the farm or the town where the business began. Some juice names stay with the family that started them, while others change hands more than once over the decades.

Each guide sets out what independent sources record about the brand — who founded it, who owns it now, where its juice is made and how its labels and containers have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Hollywood fingers, a pop-art car built like a can, and a line that ends every spot.

Campbell’s used film stars to sell its new juice. The company says that in 1951 the future president Ronald Reagan appeared in a V8 advertisement. Mashed describes it as a print campaign in which Reagan, then an actor, held up his fingers in a “V” shape beside a comic strip that showed a cartoon Reagan discovering the drink. Mashed, drawing on the brand’s own history, says other stars of the period, among them Rhonda Fleming, Shirley Temple and Fred MacMurray, made the same gesture in V8 print and television ads. English Wikipedia lists V-8 advertisements of 1950 to 1952 in LIFE, Better Homes and Gardens and the Ladies’ Home Journal featuring actors including Gene Tierney, Ginger Rogers and Alan Ladd.

The brand also took to the road. Mashed says the V8 Roadster made its public debut on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1970. It was built by George Barris and his custom-car shop, Kustom Industries; Campbell’s calls it a pop art “fun-car” made in 1971 by Barris, whom it credits with the Batmobile from the 1960s Batman television series, the Munsters’ Koach and the Beverly Hillbillies’ jalopy. Mashed describes a steel body covered in a label design reminiscent of a V8 can, and, citing the auction house Bonhams, a Ford 302 V-8 engine and twin fuel tanks, one of them filled with V8 juice. The car toured the country as a marketing tool for Campbell’s and was sold to a car museum keeper in 1973, Mashed says.

The line most associated with the brand arrived on television. Mashed says that in the 1970s the company began advertising with the slogan “I could’ve had a V8!”, in spots where adults rapped themselves on the head after realising they could have chosen V8 over what they were drinking or eating. Campbell’s brought the tagline back in a campaign announced on 3 October 2011 that starred Jackie Chan. In two opening spots, “Balcony” and “Sidewalk”, Chan swooped into everyday scenes and swapped a stranger’s drink for a V8. The company said each spot closed with the “Could’ve Had a V8” line. The campaign was created by Y&R New York, shot in Los Angeles by the production company MJZ and directed by Craig Gillespie, with media planning by the New York office of The Media Edge: cia, according to the release.

Sponsorship kept the name on screen. Campbell’s says that in 2014 “Always Great! Wheel & V8 Week” opened a V8 sponsorship of the Wheel of Fortune bonus round, and that after the promotion it received a V8-branded wedge signed by the hosts, Pat Sajak and Vanna White. More recently the brand has played with flavour on the shelf. Food Dive said in April 2025 that Campbell’s had been releasing limited-time items in its energy line and tapping trends such as Hot Honey and Spicy for the core juice.

For a design guide, V8 shows how a short product name, a gesture and a single repeated line can carry a juice through its changes of owner, packer and campaign. Compare it with Prego and Swanson, fellow Campbell’s brands, and with Grillo’s Pickles, its Bloody Mary partner. For this guide we use tomato red, celery green, label cream and carrot gold with a heavy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep V8’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.