Pepsi Logo History: From the 1898 Script to the Globe, an Evolution

A pharmacist’s drink in New Bern

Caleb Bradham ran a pharmacy in New Bern, North Carolina, and in the 1890s he mixed a fountain drink that customers called Brad’s Drink. In 1898 he gave it a new name, Pepsi-Cola. That year is the one PepsiCo counts from, which is why the 2023 redesign was timed to the brand’s 125th anniversary.

The first logo was the name written in red script, but it was a strange script. The strokes ended in sharp points and long spiky flicks, so the letters looked closer to thorns than to handwriting. It was the opposite of calm. Within a few years the lettering was smoothed into a rounder red script with more even curves.

That rounder script carried the brand through the early twentieth century and, inevitably, invited comparison with the Spencerian lettering of its larger competitor. If you put the two side by side, the resemblance is hard to miss. The Coca-Cola logo history shows how much more stubbornly the other brand held on to its own hand.

The bottle cap behind the globe

The Second World War produced the most important idea in Pepsi logo history. During the war the bottle cap was printed in red, white and blue, a patriotic gesture, with the script across the white band. Illustrations of that cap appeared in advertising from 1945, and it slowly became the brand’s main symbol rather than a piece of packaging.

In 1962 the company made its boldest edit. The script went, and so did the word Cola. A heavy sans serif PEPSI sat across a stylized cap with a serrated edge. The change aimed the brand at younger drinkers and away from the soda fountain, and it ended the lettering contest with Coca-Cola by simply leaving the field.

Around 1970 the literal cap disappeared too. The serrated edge was replaced by a flat circle split into a red top and a blue bottom, with a white wave running through the middle, and the wordmark was made smaller to fit. This is the shape most people mean when they talk about the Pepsi globe.

Evolution of the globe, 1987 to 2003

The evolution after that was a long series of small moves. In 1987 the lettering was updated to a squarer, wider face. In 1991 the wordmark moved out of the globe and above it, set in italic capitals, and the globe shrank to a supporting role. For a few years the name came first.

Blue then took over. In April 1996 an Air France Concorde was repainted in Pepsi blue and unveiled at London Gatwick, the most extravagant piece of packaging news any soft drink has managed. Packaging went largely blue, and by the end of 1997 the globe was shaded to look three dimensional, the first version officially named the Pepsi globe.

The 2003 revision pushed that further, with highlights and darker edges that made the globe look like a glossy sphere. It suited the period. Bevelled, shiny icons were everywhere in the early 2000s, from computer desktops to mobile phones, and nearly every major brand added a reflection to its mark before flattening it again a decade later.

The 2008 smile in Pepsi logo history

In 2008 the brand made the most debated move in Pepsi logo history. The white band, symmetrical since the cap, was redrawn as an asymmetric curve that read as a grin. The wordmark became a lowercase pepsi in a thin geometric sans serif. Different products were meant to get wider or narrower smiles.

The reaction was harsh, largely because a leaked design document explained the curve with references to gravitational pull and other cosmic ideas. It became a punchline among designers. Yet the logo stayed, with a minor revision in 2014, for fifteen years. Sales did not collapse, which says something about how much a logo can and cannot do.

The 2023 redesign of the globe

On March 28, 2023, PepsiCo unveiled a new logo, the first update to the globe in 14 years. The name PEPSI returned to the centre of the globe in a bold custom typeface, and the palette gained black and electric blue. The black, the company said, reflects its focus on Pepsi Zero Sugar.

The design openly looks back. Placing the wordmark across the middle of a flat globe recalls the version used from the 1970s into the early 1990s, which many fans had never stopped preferring. PepsiCo also added a pulse, a rhythmic motion graphic meant to evoke the ripple, pop and fizz of the drink, and a new can silhouette.

The rollout was staged. The new identity reached North America in the autumn of 2023 and launched worldwide on March 1, 2024, across more than 120 markets. As of 2026 it is the logo on cans, coolers, trucks and stadium signage. The brand once sponsored the halftime show, a story in the history of Super Bowl commercials.

What Pepsi logo history says about redesign

Read Pepsi logo history from start to finish and one element is constant: the three colours. Red, white and blue came in with the wartime cap and never left, even when blue swallowed the packaging in 1996 or black joined in 2023. Letters, shapes and the wordmark’s position all moved. The palette, almost alone, stayed.

Count the versions and Pepsi changes its mark far more often than most brands its size, which the logo redesign frequency report puts in context. Each change answered a moment: wartime patriotism, a youth market, glossy screens, flat apps. The brand treats its logo as a mood rather than a signature.

The 2023 return to an older form fits a wider pattern among famous logos of the 2020s, as brands such as Burger King reached back to designs from the 1970s to the 1990s. Whether the globe will stay put this time is an open question. The smile lasted fifteen years; the record suggests nothing at Pepsi lasts much longer.