No one really knows how Dr Pepper got its name, but there’s no doubt about its birthplace. America’s oldest soft drink was invented in Waco in 1885 – one year before Coca-Cola was first concocted in Atlanta.

The Dr Pepper Museum and Free Enterprise Institute, which opened in Waco in 1991, pays homage to the product that began in Morrison’s Old Corner Drugstore. Since then, it has become one of the top-selling soft drinks in the world.

“Dr Pepper ranks sixth or seventh in worldwide sales – figures are in the billions of dollars and millions of cases,” says Jack McKinney, executive director of the Dr Pepper Museum and Free Enterprise Institute, which is housed in the historic Artesian Manufacturing and Bottling Co. building on Fifth Street in downtown Waco.

“The museum has three floors with exhibits about the history of the bottling industry and free enterprise economics, and includes a replica of the Corner Drugstore and an animated figure of Dr. (Charles) Alderton, the pharmacist,” McKinney says.

At the museum soda fountain, visitors sip Dr Pepper sodas, floats and milkshakes, as well as treats flavored by another Waco-based soft drink – Big Red.

In 2007, self-described “soft-drink guy” Gary Smith of Austin purchased Big Red Inc., named for the beverage invented by Grover Thomsen and R.H. Roark at the Perfection Barber and Beauty Supply in Waco in 1937.

Big Red concentrate is still produced in Waco, and about 40 independent operations bottle and sell the product.

Smith, former chief operating officer for another beverage, Red Bull, plans to keep Big Red’s headquarters in Waco while expanding the soft drink’s distribution nationwide.