Faygo Started as Cake Frosting — Really

If you grew up in Michigan, you grew up on Faygo. Redpop, Rock & Rye, grape — they’re practically a food group. But here’s the twist: Faygo’s flavors started life as cake frosting.

In 1907, two Russian immigrant brothers, Ben and Perry Feigenson, were working as bakers in Detroit. They decided to get out of the baking business and into soft drinks, and they had a clever shortcut: they reworked their three best cake-frosting recipes — fruit punch, strawberry, and grape — into carbonated “pop.” (That word “pop,” the story goes, came from the sound the bottle lids made.) They lived above their bottling plant and delivered pop by horse-drawn wagon the day after making it.

The company was first called Feigenson Brothers Bottling Works, but in 1921 they shortened it to Faygo because “Feigenson” wouldn’t fit on the labels. For decades Faygo was sold only in Michigan, because the pop had a short shelf life — until company chemists in the late 1950s figured out a water-filtering system that let it travel. Faygo became the last survivor of Detroit’s “Pop Alley,” where it once had more than 40 competitors.