Rivella: The Whey Soda from Switzerland
Few national drinks were born out of waste. When milk turns into cheese, it leaves behind a liquid that dairies once poured down the drain - today the Swiss put bubbles in it and fill bottles with it.
Rivella is a Swiss sparkling soft drink made from milk whey, and Switzerland counts it as its national drink. It sounds like an idea that could never have got off the ground. Which is more or less how it started.
A Name from the Railway Timetable
Company lore has it that founder Robert Barth was leafing through the Swiss railway timetable when he came across the Ticino village of Riva San Vitale, and crossed it with the Italian rivelazione, revelation. So a company from the German-speaking part of the country sells a drink with an Italian name - everyday Swiss diplomacy. Rivella is a national drink, not a shared one: nobody else in the world makes the recipe, and even the Swiss National Museum calls it the national beverage. It has travelled abroad all the same: the Dutch have been drinking it since the 1950s, and the Netherlands is still its biggest foreign market. Twice it tried to push further, into Britain and America, and twice it quietly withdrew.
The Whey Beer America Turned Down
The story starts with a failure. In the late 1940s Jean Barth went to America to broker deals for Swiss companies, and from a biologist's estate he acquired a recipe for beer made from whey. He tried to sell it in the land of Coca-Cola - without success. So he came home and offered the recipe to his brother Robert, a law student. In 1951 Robert set up a company called Milkin-Institut in Stäfa, hired the dairy biologist Hans Süsli and a year later was filling the first bottles. The beer turned into a soft drink, production soon moved to Rothrist, where it sits to this day, and the company is still in the hands of the Barth family. The recipe America turned down grew at home into a drink whose only real rival in Switzerland is Coca-Cola. History has a sense of symmetry.
What's Inside and Why the Color Matters
The whey in the bottle isn't just window dressing: in the classic red version it makes up 35 percent of the contents. It's the same liquid the rest of the world now knows mainly as gym protein powder - the Swiss instead carbonate it, color it with caramel and flavor it with a blend of herbal and fruit extracts whose composition the company keeps to itself. Don't go looking for milk in the taste: lactic acid gives Rivella a gently tart bite, closer to iced tea than to a milkshake.
You drink it chilled and without ceremony, with lunch or on a mountain hike; in Switzerland it's as much a table drink as cola is everywhere else. One practical note: the colors on the labels aren't flavors, they're codes. Red is the original. Blue is the same recipe without sugar - it has been on the market since the late 1950s and was one of the first diet sodas in Europe. Green adds green tea, and yellow is the vegan one, the only one without whey. If you want to take a bottle home (see what to bring back from Switzerland), go for red: it's the original - and unlike wine, it's easier on the wallet.
Half a Liter of Blue
I bought my Rivella in Basel, in an ordinary supermarket, and I went for the blue Zero. What surprises you about the first sip is mostly what isn't there: not a trace of milk, just a fizzy, barely sweet soda with a herbal aftertaste I couldn't pin on any fruit I know. I'm glad I tried it; I don't think I'll be turning into a regular drinker of the Swiss national drink, though. Half a liter of that experience cost 1.60 CHF (1.60 EUR).
