A pharmacist’s experiment in Riverside
Boost! began not as a mass-market soft drink but as the invention of a single druggist in Riverside, a small town on the Delaware River in Burlington County, New Jersey. Benjamin Rice Faunce, a local pharmacist, formulated the syrup in the early years of the twentieth century, and the brand traces its origins to around 1905. According to the accounts that have followed the drink for more than a century, Faunce set out to make a soft drink without carbonation, an unusual goal in an era when fizzing fountain sodas were the fashion. The result was a thick, dark syrup meant to be cut with plain water rather than poured ready-made from a bottle.
The name itself has a longer history than the modern label suggests. The drink was originally marketed as “Tak-Aboost,” a phrase that survives today in the way locals still say they are going to “take a Boost.” The formula was registered as a trademark in 1913, and the company built around it was organized in 1915. Over the decades the wording was shortened to the single, exclamatory Boost! that appears on the containers now.
What it is and how it tastes
Boost! is not a conventional soda. It is a non-carbonated cola-style syrup, sold as a concentrate that is mixed with water at home rather than consumed straight from the container. When diluted, it produces a caramel-colored, still (flat) drink with a strong, sappy sweetness and a distinct citrus edge. It carries none of the bubbles that most people associate with cola, and its heavy, syrupy character divides opinion sharply. Regional coverage of the drink has long noted that people tend either to love it intensely or to find its flavor strange, and even devoted drinkers describe the taste in blunt, affectionate terms.
Because it is a syrup, Boost! is bought differently from ordinary soft drinks. Rather than cans or single-serve bottles, it is traditionally sold in large jugs, including half-gallon sizes, and each household mixes it to its own preferred strength. That ritual of dilution is part of what sets the product apart and part of why it has remained a hyper-local specialty rather than a national brand.
A drink sold as a tonic
Much of the early identity of Boost! came from how it was positioned. Faunce is said to have developed the formula partly in connection with his own family, and the drink was originally promoted less as a treat than as something healthful. Period advertising leaned on claims common to the tonic and patent-remedy culture of the early 1900s, presenting the syrup as a source of energy and endurance and even suggesting it could help children take milk. Framing a soft drink as a wholesome, restorative beverage was typical of the age, when many now-famous sodas began life at the pharmacy counter and were marketed for their supposed benefits before they became simple refreshments.
A stubbornly local institution
What makes Boost! unusual is both its flavor and its geography. More than a hundred years after its creation, it has never expanded into a national or even statewide product. Instead it has remained concentrated in Burlington County, New Jersey, sold in Riverside and nearby communities such as Mount Holly, Delran and Burlington City, along with a handful of other towns in the western part of the county. For residents of that area it functions as a piece of hometown identity, a drink that outsiders have often never heard of and that longtime locals treat as their own.
This tight footprint has turned Boost! into a frequent subject of regional interest, with Philadelphia- and New Jersey-area outlets periodically profiling the syrup as a curiosity and a point of local pride. Its obscurity is central to its appeal: it is precisely the kind of product that most people encounter only if they grew up near Riverside or were introduced to it by someone who did.
Still being made
Unlike many of the sodas remembered in this archive, Boost! has never been discontinued. It continues to be produced and sold, still in the concentrated, non-carbonated form Faunce devised, and still primarily within its small corner of southern New Jersey. In an era when soft drinks are largely made and distributed by a few global companies, its survival as an independent, regionally bound syrup is remarkable in itself. It endures as a living example of the pharmacy-counter beverages that once defined American soda culture, one of the few that has carried that tradition, essentially unchanged, into the present day.
Source: reference ↗