If there’s one thing the United States has made famous – other than an individualism so fierce we will cling to it even when it’s literally killing us – it’s cobbling things together and somehow making them work.
Our system of weights and measures is a perfect example. It’s sort of metric but mostly not, but we can use the one the rest of the world prefers (eye roll) if we have to.
It makes sense then, sort of, that milk would be measured one way and water another. Why, though, did we chose their measurements?
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Basically, it comes down to timing – the soda industry was figuring out how to bottle larger quantities around the time in the 1970s when there was a significant push to make the metric system compulsory in the United States.
Also in the 1970s, Pepsi was looking desperately for a way to steal more of the market share from Coca-Cola, who was selling as much as 10 times as much product as Pepsi. The latter was searching for a new, eye-catching bottle to rival Coke’s classic (heh) glass, and thought they’d hit on something when they decided different could just mean bigger.
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John Sculley was a marketing exec at Pepsi, and asked chemical giant DuPont to come up with a material that would work for a larger bottle – and the now-iconic, plastic 2-liter was the result.
Customers would get more soda for their buck, and retailers wouldn’t have to worry about broken class. After watching a dropped bottle bounce and not break, Sam Walton got on board – along with the rest of America – and Sculley made it to the CEO’s chair at Pepsi (and later Apple).
The reason the bottle was crafted to be two liters instead of say, half a gallon, is because in 1975, Congress passed the Metric Conversion Act, and it had looked like – finally – America was going to fully make the switch.
In the end, the legislation left the decision up to each private business, and while some – like the pharmaceutical industry – switched of their own accord, most industries did not.
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Milk was already being sold by the half and full gallon, and never switched. It also helps that soda, unlike milk, doesn’t spoil as it’s shipped all over the world, which means they have more to gain from embracing metric measurements.
The beverage industry, like many others, have chosen to kind of go halfsies on the whole “embracing the metric system” thing – you’ll see both measurements on the packaging, just in case.
