wimsey wrote:
JSA wrote:
TheRef65 wrote:
JSA wrote:
Well, I never saw Obama posing and praising Five Guys. Likewise, Reagan never endorsed a specific brand of jelly beans.
Very true, he just liked Jelly Bellys so he had them in a bowl on his desk. Similar to Carter who had a peanut farm and kept peanuts. The fact Reagan liked Jelly Belly did help their sales, to my knowledge, he didn't photo op and try and sell them.
Reagan used to give jars of Jelly Belly's to dignitaries as a gift, which I think is pretty cool. What I did not know, until recently, is that in his final year of office, he switched that the M&Ms and made M&Ms the "official" White House candy.
And Carter replaced Pepsi machines with Coke machines in the White House. Nixon was a pinko commie! Carter was a defender of freedom, truth and the American way!! (Except for the whole paving the way for sales to China thing.)
https://www.nytimes.com/...ssia-s-cola-war.html
"In popular lore, Coca-Cola has been the drink of the Democrats and Pepsi-Cola the beverage of the Republicans...In World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt asked a Coca-Cola executive to help supply cola to the troops overseas, and before long Coke had set up bottling plants all over the world.
When the Communist state ran the Soviet economy, Pepsi developed a cozy relationship with the Kremlin, and by extension the Soviet bloc, after a visit to Moscow by Vice President Richard M. Nixon in 1959. During that visit, the chairman of Pepsi, Donald Kendall, met with Nikita S. Khrushchev.
In 1972, after Mr. Nixon had become President, Pepsi became the first foreign consumer product to be sold in the Soviet Union.
A few years later Coke found a champion in Jimmy Carter, who replaced Pepsi machines in the White House with Coke machines after he was elected President. The Carter connection may also have helped Coke to become one of the first foreign products sold in China after Chinese-American relations thawed in 1979."
The best part of that Pepsi/Soviet story is since the USSR rubles were worthless internationally, the USSR would give Pepsi tomato paste (which Pepsi used for Pizza Hut Pizzas) and Stolichnaya vodka. After the fall of the USSR, Russia was in such dire straights that they ended up selling a bunch of old warships to Pepsi. So briefly Pepsi had the 6th largest Navy in the world. Until Pepsi was able to unload them for scrap value.