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The 1990s brought major changes to both world politics and the soft drink industry.
Teem, a lemon-lime soda that once competed globally, pulled back from key Asian and European markets due to shifting business conditions.
The drink maintained loyal customers in Brazil and Nigeria, but lost ground in the wider beverage landscape.
During this time, industry giants PepsiCo and 7 Up's parent company absorbed smaller regional bottling operations through mergers.
These consolidations reshaped the soda market's structure.
By 2000, Teem had become a minor player.
While pockets of dedicated drinkers remained worldwide, the brand could no longer match its competitors' international reach and market dominance.
In the year 1959, on the cusp of a new decade brimming with cultural change, the Pepsi-Cola Company stealthily endeavored to formulate a lemon-lime soda to rival the dominant 7 Up.
Under cloak and dagger, their chemists toiled secretly on "Project Duet," but scarcely had the espionage commenced when trademark troubles transformed the title—a rival food manufacturer produced a margarine dubbed Duet, necessitating rapid alteration.
Project Duet become christened Teem, destiny and nomenclature intertwining as the citrus sip soon sated customers in Missouri, Canada, and beyond.
On the spring day of April 10th, 1959, St. Joseph, Missouri found itself the site of an intriguing new product's public debut—a citrusy, amber-hued soft drink dubbed Teem.
Representatives of the Pepsi-Cola Company, galvanized by their beverage's clandestine development, chose the humble city to conduct history's first taste test of their lemon-lime soda.
Their motley crew converged eagerly, inviting locals for inaugural sips to gauge the public palate, three curious Pepsi men awaiting the verdict on a drink that would soon quench thirst countrywide.
Scarcely 72 hours later, success cemented and flavors approved, advertisements extolling Teem's tart refreshment bloomed across St. Joseph's papers.
For over two decades, Teem's tangy effervescence flowed freely from bottles and cans across the United States and Canada, quenching consumers' thirst at grocery stores and gas stations alike.
Yet by 1984, the soda's once-steady stream had slowed to a trickle, displaced in the public's preference by ascendant rival citrus beverages.
Bereft of robust sales figures and confronting consumer indifference, the Powers-That-Be at Pepsi HQ reluctantly discontinued their lemon-lime fighter, conceding defeat amidst the ongoing Cola Wars.
Though banished from store shelves, vestiges of Teem's decades-long legacy lingered on—loyal soda jerks continued offering it on tap at old-fashioned fountains into the 1990s, preserving for a dwindling clientele the soda now evanescing from public memory.
By 1990, Teem had expanded from a niche product to a global soft drink, available in markets from the tropics to the Arctic.
However, even as it reached new territories, its popularity declined in established markets.
In Japan, vending machines replaced Teem with Italian beverages.
Similar changes occurred in South Korea and Turkey, where PepsiCo's partner companies introduced alternative drinks to take Teem's place.
Though vanquished from its native shores, Teem retained devotees scattered across the globe even as the millennium dawned.
In lands both flourishing and struggling, the lemon-lime libation flowed on - quaffed in the sambaing South American nations of Brazil and Uruguay.
Sipped in steamy Central American environs like famed banana republic Honduras.
Downed by Sherpas amid Nepal's vertiginous peaks.
Even in Africa’s most populous bastion, Nigeria, and on Indian subcontinent streets still shaking off the raj's rule alike, do Teem bottles receive ongoing thirsty patronage.
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