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Yoo-hoo began in 1920s New Jersey as a bottled chocolate drink.
The beverage moved from local delis to national supermarkets through acquisitions by larger companies, including Dr Pepper Snapple Group in 2002.
Baseball stars like Yogi Berra promoted Yoo-hoo in TV ads during the 1950s and 1960s, making it an iconic American drink still loved by many today.
In 1928, Natale Olivieri mixed chocolate syrup with milk in his Garfield, New Jersey bottling plant, inventing Yoo-hoo.
Olivieri brought in years of experience bottling raspberry and orange sodas.
Yoo-hoo was first sold in glass bottles to local shops.
In 1947, Thomas Giresi built a 50,000-square-foot bottling plant in Batesburg, South Carolina.
The facility housed six production lines that filled glass bottles with Yoo-hoo at a rate of 250 bottles per minute.
By 1950, Yoo-hoo established its corporate headquarters in a converted warehouse at 600 White Plains Road in Tarrytown, New York.
The company then added a modernized plant in Carlstadt, New Jersey that specialized in aluminum can production, and a facility in Aspers, Pennsylvania that focused on plastic bottle manufacturing.
These three plants formed a distribution network that supplied Yoo-hoo to grocery stores and vendors across the eastern seaboard.
In 1960, Yoo-hoo hired Yankees catcher Yogi Berra to sell chocolate drinks to adults.
Berra appeared in television commercials and print ads alongside teammates Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford, wearing their pinstriped uniforms while drinking Yoo-hoo from glass bottles.
His catchphrase "It's Me-He for Yoo-hoo!" played on his nickname and appeared on billboards across New York City.
Before this campaign, Yoo-hoo was largely a favorite drink for children.
After Berra's ads ran, sales to adult consumers rose 40% in the Northeast market.
Yoo-hoo's ownership changed hands five times between 1950 and today.
BBC Industries bought the chocolate drink brand in the 1950s and held it for two decades before selling to Iroquois Brands in 1976.
Private investors purchased Yoo-hoo in 1981, then sold it to French drinks company Pernod Ricard in 1989.
Pernod Ricard later sold the brand to Cadbury Schweppes in 2001, splitting its operations between Mott's for production and Snapple for marketing.
Keurig Dr Pepper now owns and produces Yoo-hoo.
Yoo-hoo added four chocolate-based flavors to its product line between 1970 and 2015: coconut, mint, banana, and strawberry.
Each flavor mixed Yoo-hoo's signature chocolate base with a distinct natural extract.
The drink's core recipe changed in 2019—water now makes up 90% of the beverage, followed by high-fructose corn syrup at 8% and whey protein at 2%.
This new formula replaced the previous dairy-heavy mixture that had defined Yoo-hoo since its creation in 1926.
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