On May 8, 1886, the pharmacist John Stith Pemberton invented Coca-Cola in Atlanta, Georgia, creating a sweetened, carbonated beverage containing coca leaf extract and kola nut caffeine originally marketed as a patent medicine and nerve tonic. Pemberton's formula, prepared at Jacobs' Pharmacy in downtown Atlanta, combined sugar, caramel coloring, caffeine, and trace cocaine derivatives in a distinctive taste profile that would become one of the most recognized flavors in human history. Coca-Cola's evolution from medicinal tonic to recreational soft drink exemplifies the trajectory of many junk food products that began with health claims before becoming pure pleasure commodities.

Coca-Cola has become one of the most frequently referenced commercial products in modern and contemporary poetry, serving as a symbol of American consumer culture, globalization, and the ubiquity of branded pleasure. Poets from Langston Hughes, who used Coca-Cola imagery to explore Black urban life in the 1920s, to contemporary writers like Naomi Shihab Nye, who references the brand in poems about cultural displacement, have found in Coca-Cola a rich signifier for the spread of American commercial culture and its complex emotional associations worldwide.