Good-Bye Jolt, It Was Good To Know Ya!

Jolt Cola, the preferred high-octane beverage of students, computer hackers, musicians, and assorted night-dwelling ne'er-do-wells during the late 1980s and through much of the '90s, is seemingly destined to go the way of the black & white television, the floppy disc, and rock music in pop culture notoriety. The so-called "energy" drink's manufacturer, Wet Planet Beverages, has filed for bankruptcy, and cans of Jolt are beginning to disappear from store shelves across the country.

When I moved to West New York from Tennessee in late 2006, there were two things that I was happy to be moving closer to: Genesee Cream Ale and Jolt Cola, both of which are made and bottled in Rochester, New York. I had my first taste of Jolt in the late 1980s, shortly after it was introduced to the market. Back in the day, the cola was ubiquitous in Middle Tennessee, and I drank boatloads of the sugary, strongly-caffeinated soda.

You could buy Jolt in two-liter bottles at the corner convenience store then, like Pepsi or Coke, and I remember guzzling a bottle and a half of the liquid crack one night while working for my buddy Thom at his Kingpins Company. I pulled an all-nighter, crankin' out product, and when Thom came in the next morning he found a sugar-blasted, barely-coherent employee staggering around the office amidst a pile of half-completed work.

During the early '90s, while working at the long-gone Mosko's on Elliston Place, I sold a bunch of the stuff to punk-rock teens that stopped by on their way to Lucy's Records to catch a show, and to hacker friends of mine who just hung around on the "Rock Block" and in Dragon Park. I had mostly weaned myself off the Jolt by that time after almost a decade of addiction to the beverage, and as the '90s wore on, the drink became more difficult to find as dealers and distributors dried up. My wife once bought me a case of Jolt's Cherry Bomb soda for my birthday, finding the last remaining Tennessee distributor carrying the drink and buying it direct.

Jolt was formed in 1985 by SUNY Potsdam student Carl J. Rapp, who observed his classmates concocting all sorts of funky drink mixtures designed to keep them awake and alert while staying up all night studying. At the time, leading soft drink manufacturers like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Royal Crown were pushing drinks with less sugar, caffeine, and calories. Jolt went the opposite direction, proudly proclaiming on the side of every bottle and can that Jolt had "all the sugar and twice the caffeine" of other sodas. Jolt originally contained 72 milligrams of caffeine, the max then allowed by the U.S.F.D.A.

This was Jolt's glory days, and the cola would be written about in USA Today, joked about on David Letterman's TV show, and would appear in the background of movies like Jurassic Park, Hackers, and Gremlins 2. They'd license the name to caffeinated gum, and to bottlers in almost two-dozen countries. As time passed, The Jolt Cola Company changed its name to Wet Planet Beverages, and expanded beyond its original cola flavor to include new products like Cherry Bomb, Orange Blast, White Lightning (grape-flavored), and Electric Blue colas. When the rest of the soft drink industry went to high-fructose corn syrup in place of cane sugar, Jolt followed the leaders and changed its slogan to "all the flavor and twice the caffeine."

In the late '90s, however, Jolt found itself behind the sales eight-ball for the first time. Its status as the "original energy drink" would be overshadowed by the rapid commercial success of Red Bull, which was introduced into the U.S. market in 1997. As citrus-flavored, ginseng-and-taurine-infused energy drinks began to breed like horny little bunnies, Jolt found itself unable to compete in the new market. Unlike RockStar, which partnered with the powerful Pepsi company, or Monster, which hooked up with Coca-Cola, Wet Planet decided to go their own way and remain independent.

In 2005, Wet Planet Beverages overhauled the Jolt Cola line with a new look, a new can, and a new marketing plan. From this point on, Jolt would become known as an "energy drink," and to sell the corn syrup-heavy swill to hyperactive teens and club rats, the company introduced a hip new can that resembled a battery with a re-sealable top. It was this distinctive new can, combined with economic forces, which helped sink the company.

Wet Planet had contracted with Rexam, a beverage can manufacturer in Chicago, to purchase 90 million of the re-sealable battery cans at a cost of around three times that of a normal soda can. As drink sales slacked off through 2008 and 2009, however, Wet Planet had purchased only 27 million cans against its contract. Efforts to move to less-expensive packaging were stymied by Rexam, who would be owed $2.1 million if Wet Planet didn't fulfill its contact by the end of 2009. Unlike other companies in the energy drink market, Wet Planet was unable to lower the price of Jolt to match the price wars instituted by its competitors, hamstrung by that damn expensive can.

Thus cornered, Wet Planet Beverages filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Federal Court in September 2009, asking for the court's permission to sell the company's assets. Without a significant cash infusion, the company is basically dead in the water, unable to move forward with new products or supply its distributors with old products. During my recent visit to Angotti's, our local beverage store, I purchased the last can of Jolt Cherry Bomb that they had in stock. The manager told me that they had bought all of the Jolt they could get their hands on, and although demand for the soda remained high, there was none to be had from their distributor.

Regardless of what ends up happening to the Jolt name, the company's race is run. In my mind, the end began when they re-positioned the company as an "energy drink" instead of more honestly labeling it as a high caffeine cola. When Jolt switched to corn syrup from cane sugar, they changed the drink's great flavor, and removed much of what had made it unique in the first place. Perhaps if they'd kept the real sugar in the recipe, packaged the drink in traditional cans and bottles, and let the legions of legitimate energy drinks fight it out over their dwindling turf, Jolt Cola might have survived. Instead, it becomes yet another fallen icon of my misspent youth….