From Fatigue Fighter to Heartburn Healer: The Evolving Marketing of a Functional Beverage in Sweden

ABSTRACT

This paper historicizes our understanding of the contemporary functional beverage trend by focusing on the marketing practices of the biggest-selling “health drink” in early twentieth-century Sweden: Samarin. Drawing upon a large dataset of Samarin advertisements, it uses multimodal critical discourse analysis to track the evolution of Samarin over a 48-year period, from its launch in 1923 to the introduction of the Market Practices Act in 1971, which clamped down on false advertising. The analysis demonstrates how Samarin advertisements were continuously reshaped to capitalize upon new scientific/medical discoveries, societal changes, and public interests, tapping into evolving ideas on health and diet to remain popular with consumers. Through these constantly shifting discourses, Samarin became mythologized and framed as a “good” food choice, essential to maintaining a healthy lifestyle. The findings reveal that many of these strategies are still used today, despite legislation in place that is supposed to protect consumers.

KEYWORDS:

• Functional beverages
• advertisements
• Samarin
• Sweden
• marketing
• science
• medicine

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ See Sanatogen advertisement: https://www.ebay.de/itm/283913279189

² Allsvenskan is the Swedish men’s national football league; Tre Kronor is the Swedish men’s national ice hockey team; and Vasaloppet is an annual long distance cross-country ski race.

³ In 1922, the State Institute of Racial Biology was founded in Uppsala. In the 1930s, a law was passed introduced compulsory sterilization of people who suffered from insanity, feeblemindedness, and other mental disorders

⁴ Similar rhetoric can be found in advertisements for radium-based products. See, Eriksson and O’Hagan (2021).