Premium-Cola

Premium-Cola is a cola from Hamburg that began in 2001 as a consumer protest: when Afri-Cola quietly changed its recipe and lowered the caffeine, a group of loyal drinkers recreated the original formula and started bottling it themselves. What grew out of that protest is less a company than an experiment — a collective with no boss, no offices and no written contracts.

Around 1,700 people — drinkers, retailers, bottlers — take decisions by consensus in an open online forum, following a publicly documented "operating system" of rules. Premium famously inverts business logic: its "anti-volume discount" means small buyers pay less per crate than large ones, it does no advertising, and it deliberately caps its own growth to keep the structure humane.

Every figure, from margins to mistakes, is published openly, making Premium a working example of open-source economics. The flip side is scale: the cola is available mainly in Germany and Austria through specialist retailers and bars, and you will rarely find it in a conventional supermarket.