James Bond, soda pop and Captain Cook

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday November 30, 2012 

With a seductive smile, James Bond pours two fingers of scotch, picks up the crystal soda siphon and gives a short squeeze to the lever. A surge of foaming water shoots into the glass and he sips. Very elegant. But today you'd have one problem - where do you get the soda siphon?

Those fine Schweppes siphons have long gone and become expensive curiosities on eBay, certainly the company does not market them any more. For that matter Schweppes Australia is now a subsidiary of Asahi Breweries, which makes it as English as wasabi on sushi.

In Australia its competitor is star-spangled Coca-Cola. Between them they share a $4 billion market. The also-rans are way way behind. None of them seem to produce the old glass soda siphons any more.

Meanwhile, a major source of environmentalists pain is raised by the vast quantity of packaging that is generated by the industry - all those bottles and cans and boxes, though much of it is recycled. Then there's the manufacturing plants, warehouses, trucks and fuel. Does the world really need 206 billion litres of water a year, each in its own little plastic bottle?

One company has relaunched itself to take advantage of these green sentiments. Maybe it has been some years since you saw a SodaStream maker on a benchtop.

The unit holds a small cannister of carbon dioxide gas. Using one of the bottles they supply, part fill it with tap water and flavouring, fit it into the machine and press the top. A shot of CO2 surges into the liquid and you have soda water.

SodaStream goes back to 1903, invented by Guy Gilbey of the London gin family. In 1985 it became part of the Cadbury Schweppes empire but gradually lost its fizz. In 1991 Peter Wiseburgh bought the company, by 2003 he closed the original Peterborough factory.

In 2010 SodaStream International launched successfully on the Nasdaq exchange and currently has a market capitalisation of $722 million. Nowadays its main factory is controversially located on Israel's West Bank. They sell in 55,000 stores in 45 countries. And they have come out gunning for the much bigger guys.

Their world-wide campaign commercials show a SodaStream machine gassing a bottle - and then cut to pallets of soft drinks at the warehouse, or bottles on the production line, which explode with a noisy splash. The voice-over simply says: "With SodaStream you save 2000 bottles a year. If you love the bubbles, set them free."

CEO of SodaStream, Daniel Birnbaum, has deliberately chosen a controversial approach. After all how else do you get noticed as a pigmy among giants? His justification is the 460 billion bottles and cans manufactured every year. He claims the vast majority are dumped as waste across parks, oceans and landfills. "We challenge the entire beverage industry," he declares. "There exists a smarter choice."

Carbonated water was invented by English preacher-scientist Joseph Priestley in 1767. He was part of a scientific outpouring called the Midlands Enlightenment which gave us James Watt's steam engines, Samuel Johnson's dictionary, Josiah Wedgewood's ceramics and Erasmus Darwin's evolutionary theories that so influenced his grandson Charles. They were the men whose enquiring minds created the modern industrialised world.

Priestley's experiments interested the admiralty, who thought the pleasant liquid could benefit sailors on long sea voyages, particularly against scurvy. One of Priestley's early experimental devices was taken on the voyages of Captain Cook.

So quite possibly history's first refreshing glasses of soda pop were enjoyed in the waters off the sunny coast of Australia, before it was even Australia.

ray@ebeatty.com