Pepsi Logo Blue

Why this color matters

Everyone knows Pepsi is blue — which is exactly why it makes a treacherous colour card. Two things trip players up. The blue is younger than the brand by half a century: Pepsi spent its first fifty years dressed in red. And the scoring blue is a medium, faintly cyan blue — #004B93 — not the near-black navy or the bright royal blue most memories reach for.

The half-billion-dollar blue

In 1996 Pepsi bet the brand on this colour. “Project Blue” was a reported $500 million push to repaint everything — cans, trucks, stadium boards — in one saturated blue, chosen partly to pull the cans out of the sea of Coca-Cola red. Its centrepiece: Pepsi wrapped an Air France Concorde, F-BTSD, in cobalt and unveiled it on 2 April 1996 with Claudia Schiffer and Cindy Crawford on the tarmac. Much of the press judged it a costly flop — all Pepsi had really done was change the colour of its cans.

Project Blue represents a quantum leap into the future and redefines how the Cola Wars will be fought and won in the 21st Century.

John Swanhaus, Pepsi VP, launching Project Blue (1996)

Born red, in a drugstore

The drink began in 1893 as Brad's Drink, mixed by pharmacist Caleb Bradham at his soda fountain in New Bern, North Carolina, and renamed Pepsi-Cola on 28 August 1898 — most likely after dyspepsia, the indigestion it claimed to soothe (despite the name, pepsin was never actually in it). Blue arrived only during the Second World War, when Pepsi ringed its bottle cap in red, white and blue — a patriotic gesture that doubled as a way to look nothing like all-red Coke. By 1945 that cap was the logo.

The exact blue

The scoring target is #004B93 — HSB(209°, 100%, 58%): fully saturated, but only medium in brightness, with a hue that leans a touch toward cyan rather than the purple side of blue. That is the whole trap. It is darker than a sky or app-icon blue, yet well clear of a black navy; and it sits a little cyan-ward of a royal blue's 225°. Picture it next to the white swoosh: crisp, printed packaging blue — not sky, not midnight.

Why the darkness mattered

The Concorde stunt hid a lesson in exactly how dark this blue is. Supersonic jets are painted white for a reason — white sheds the frictional heat that builds at Mach 2. Pepsi's darker fuselage absorbed it, so the airframe ran hotter and the jet was cleared to hold top speed for only about 20 minutes at a stretch; engineers kept the wings white because their fuel tanks acted as heat sinks. A medium-dark blue, it turns out, is dark enough to slow the fastest airliner ever built.