Episode Details

Kool-Aid began in 1927 in Hastings, Nebraska, when Edwin Perkins turned his liquid concentrate Fruit Smack into a powder to avoid the costs of shipping heavy glass bottles that often broke. Sold for pennies in paper packets during the Great Depression, it became a national hit. Perkins moved to Chicago in 1931 and sold the brand to General Foods in 1953, and Hastings still celebrates with Kool-Aid Days every August. This episode follows the product through the wall-smashing Kool-Aid Man, a 2013 CGI makeover, and Kraft's 2011 marketing shift toward Hispanic and Black consumers.

We also look at how the product was used in ways its inventor never expected: as a cheap dye for wool and hair, as a collectible that sells for hundreds of dollars, and as a way to hide LSD, both in the CIA's MKUltra experiments and at Ken Kesey's acid tests. The episode then turns to the 1978 Jonestown massacre, the dispute over whether Kool-Aid or Flavor Aid was used, and how the phrase drinking the Kool-Aid entered the language.

• How dehydrating a drink solved a 1920s shipping problem
• The Kool-Aid Man as a mascot of disruption
• Flavor expansion, off-label dyeing and vintage packet collectors
• LSD, MKUltra and the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
• Jonestown, Flavor Aid and the origin of drinking the Kool-Aid