The Boost! Timeline
From a pharmacy soda fountain in 1905 to the half-gallon jugs still sold today, the long, stubborn life of a New Jersey soda, year by year.
- 1905
A pharmacist opens shop
On April 20, Benjamin Rice Faunce is issued a New Jersey pharmacy license and opens his first pharmacy on Scott Street in Riverside. He later moves to 217 Bridgeboro Street.
- 1905
Tak-A-Boost at the soda fountain
Among his house-made remedies, Faunce sells a recreational drink called Tak-A-Boost, a concentrate dispensed at the pharmacy soda fountain and mixed with water, seltzer or milk.
- 1913
The trademark is registered
The Tak-A-Boost trademark is registered with the United States Trademark Office, formalising the name that had grown popular in Riverside.
- 1920s-30s
The drink spreads locally
Boost shops open in neighbouring towns such as Palmyra and Burlington. Storefronts appear in Blackwood and Riverside, cementing the drink as a Burlington County staple.
- Mid-century
A name in flux
Over the decades the product name is modified more than once, from Tak-A-Boost to Drink Atoast and back to Tak-A-Boost, while the flat, cola-citrus recipe stays the same.
- Vietnam era
Boost! goes overseas
The company begins shipping the drink to customers far from South Jersey, sending jugs as far as Italy and, later, to service members stationed abroad.
- 1997
Settled on “Boost!”
After years of variations, the name settles for good on Boost!, the exclamation point included.
- 2000s
Four ways to drink it
Boost! is offered in Original (sugar and caffeine), Caffeine-Free, and two Sugar-Free versions, all in the signature half-gallon glass jug, and still shipped worldwide on request.
- 2020s
A century-old habit
More than 115 years after Faunce mixed the first batch, Boost! is still sold by the jug in one small corner of Burlington County, a rare regional soda that never scaled and never disappeared.
Reading the Timeline
A century of a single soda rarely breaks into neat chapters, but a few turning points do stand out. The first is the pharmacy itself: without a licensed druggist mixing his own remedies in 1905, there is no Boost! at all. The soda began as a sideline to cough syrups and tonics, dispensed at the counter and sold by request, and only slowly hardened into the product a region would come to guard. The 1913 trademark marks the moment the name became worth protecting.
The middle decades are a story of small, local spread rather than expansion. Shops opened in neighbouring towns, the name drifted between Tak-A-Boost, Drink Atoast and back again, and the drink settled into the everyday life of Burlington County without ever reaching much beyond it. The overseas shipments that began around the Vietnam War era are the exception that proves the rule: the drink travelled only because individual people carried their loyalty with them, not because anyone set out to build a national market.
The final stretch is quieter still. The name locked to Boost! in 1997, the four variants were codified, and the half-gallon glass jug stayed the signature format. More than a century after the first batch, the drink is still sold in the same small corner it started in, which is exactly why the record is worth keeping in order, year by year.
A timeline like this also does something a plain history cannot: it shows the gaps. The long stretches with few entries are not empty years but quiet ones, decades in which nothing dramatic happened and the drink simply continued, which, for a product that outlived most of its contemporaries, is its own kind of achievement. Where the dates are firm they are given plainly; where the record blurs between one renaming and the next, the entry says so rather than inventing a tidy milestone. Read from top to bottom, the result is less a promotional story than a plain accounting of how a small New Jersey soda managed to last, and it pairs naturally with the interactive Soda Time Machine, which sets the same century against every other brand that came and went around it.
Read the full history of Boost! soda → · Try the Soda Time Machine →
Frequently Asked Questions
When was Boost! soda invented?
The drink dates to 1905, when pharmacist Benjamin Faunce began selling a concentrate called Tak-A-Boost at his Riverside, New Jersey soda fountain.
When was the Tak-A-Boost trademark registered?
In 1913, with the United States Trademark Office, formalising the name that had already grown popular around Riverside.
When did the name become Boost!?
After decades of variations between Tak-A-Boost and Drink Atoast, the name settled for good on Boost!, exclamation point included, in 1997.
Is Boost! soda still made today?
Yes. More than a century after the first batch, it is still sold by the half-gallon jug in one small corner of Burlington County, New Jersey.