Charles Leiper Grigg was born in 1868 in Price’s Branch, Missouri. As an adult, Grigg moved to St. Louis and started working in advertising and sales, where he was introduced to the carbonated beverage business.
By 1919, Charles Leiper Grigg was working for a manufacturing company owned by Vess Jones. It was there that Grigg invented and marketed his first soft drink called “Whistle”.
After a dispute with management, Charles Leiper Grigg quit his job (giving away “Whistle”) and started working for the Warner Jenkinson Company, developing flavoring agents for soft drinks. Grigg invented then his second soft drink called called “Howdy”. When he eventually moved on from Warner Jenkinson Co., he took his soft drink “Howdy” with him.
Together with financier Edmund G. Ridgway, Grigg went on to form the Howdy Company. So far, Grigg had invented two orange-flavored soft drinks. But his soft drinks struggled against the king of all orange pop drinks, “Orange Crush”. “Orange Crush” grew to dominate the market for orange sodas.
Charles Leiper Grigg decided to focus on lemon-lime flavors and and by in October of 1929 he had invented a new drink called, “Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Sodas”.
The name was quickly changed to ” 7 Up Lithiated Lemon-Lime” and then again quickly changed to just plain 7up.
