Yoo-Hoo is the name of a chocolate-flavored American soft drink.

Yoo-Hoo dates back to the 1920s, when Mr. Natale Olivieri sold Tru-Fruit soft drinks in his small store. Olivieri thought he could produce a chocolate soft drink and make profits. He liked to produce soft drinks that were all-natural, without any types of additives.

Olivieri was at his home's kitchen with his wife, who was preparing her home-made tomato sauce one day when Olivieri thought he could preserve chocolate beverages by using the same method his wife used to make the sauce. He asked his wife to use the process on six of the chocolate drinks he had prepared. Three of the drinks got spoiled, and Mr. Olivieri thought agitation would also be needed to produce an all natural chocolate drink. Because of that, he bought a rotating pressure retort . Soon after, his first group of chocolate drinks was sold.

The name Yoo-Hoo was already being used for Mr. Olivieri's other fruit drinks, so naturally, he applied Yoo-Hoo to his chocolate-flavored drink too.

(Sources in the beverage industry claim that Yoo-Hoo owes its famously open-ended shelf life to a steam sterilization process that takes place after the bottles are filled and capped, but before the labels are applied. As long as it is sealed, Yoo-Hoo cannot go sour.)

Yoo-Hoo would soon begin to be bottled by an important bottling company and to be sold at supermarkets.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Yoo-Hoo went through a very large promotional campaign that included Yogi Berra and the New York Yankees officially sponsoring the drink. The image of Berra drinking a bottle of Yoo-Hoo while wearing a suit, in particular, became famous.

Also during the '50s, B.B.C. Industries took over Yoo-Hoo. They held ownership until 1976, when it was bought by Iroquois Brands , which, in turn, sold Yoo-Hoo in 1981 to a group of private investors, which in turn sold Yoo-Hoo to Pernod Ricard in 1989.

In 2001, Pernod Ricard sold Yoo-Hoo to Cadbury Schweppes.

The soft drink company's headquarters are in Carlstadt, New Jersey, with plants in Hialeah, Florida and Opelousas, Louisiana.

External link

• Yoo-hoo Official Website