Foodanddrink

The origins of Dr Pepper’s name are still a mystery—but there’s one wild theory

Delish · Jun 05, 2026 10:39 · 3 min read

Was Dr Pepper Invented By An Actual Doctor? — Dr Pepper was invented in 1885, but its name and 23 flavors are still full of mystery. Here’s what we know about the iconic soda’s origin.

More than a century later, the beloved soft drink is still keeping some of its biggest secrets close.

How does one even begin to describe the taste of Dr Pepper? Admittedly, even the brand doesn’t seem totally sure.

Back in the 1900s, the company used slogans calling it the “most misunderstood” and “most original” soda around. Eventually, it finally settled on “Authentic Blend of 23 Flavors,” which is slightly more descriptive but somehow raises even more questions. The closest anyone may have come to pinpointing the taste was probably a viral TikTok jingle: "Dr Pepper, baby, it's good and nice. Doo doo doo."

Many of us, Delish editors included, have tried to crack the mystery of those 23 flavors. But perhaps the biggest Dr Pepper mystery is not what is inside the drink. It is who the drink is actually named after.

Thankfully, that is one question we can at least attempt to answer. We dug into the origin story of Dr Pepper—America’s most misunderstood, original, authentic, good-and-nice beverage—and here’s what we found.

When Was Dr Pepper Invented?

This photograph highlights not only the Richardsonian-Romanesque arches of the Milton W. Scott-designed building but also the specially designed trucks used by the bottling plant in the mid-1920s to deliver the product to merchants.

Dr Pepper is the oldest major soft drink in America, invented a full year before Coca-Cola. It was created in 1885 at Morrison's Old Corner Drug Store in Waco, Texas. There, a young pharmacist named Charles Alderton spent his days filling prescriptions and mixing drinks from the soda fountain (even a pharmacist needs a side hustle).

Alderton loved the smell of the store—a sweet, constantly shifting mix of syrups floating through the air—and had the idea to make a drink that tasted like that aroma.

To do it, he blended 23 fruit extracts and flavorings to create the first version of Dr Pepper, which was originally called a “Waco.”

Who Is Dr Pepper?

Charles C. Alderton, the originator of Dr Pepper (1857–1941), a pharmacist born in Brooklyn, New York.

As it turns out, nobody can agree on who Dr Pepper’s namesake is. The Dr Pepper Museum in Waco has gathered more than a dozen competing theories over the years, but none has ever been definitively confirmed.

The most romantic version claims that Wade Morrison, the drugstore owner, named the drink after Dr. Charles T. Pepper, the father of a young woman he once hoped to court. That’s certainly one way to ask a girl out.

A simpler theory suggests that “Dr.” was simply fashionable branding at the time, used to signal medical credibility, while “pepper” referred to the “pep,” or energy boost, the drink was meant to provide.

What’s In Dr Pepper?

Photograph of a six-pack of bottled Dr. Pepper (1960s) shot by WBAP-TV (Television station: Fort Worth, Tex.). Provided by the UNT Libraries Special Collections to The Portal to Texas History.

The 23 flavors are still a tightly guarded trade secret, allegedly split into two separate halves and stored in different Dallas bank vaults. Former CEO Woodrow Wilson “Foots” Clements once said: “I’ve always maintained, you cannot tell anyone what Dr Pepper tastes like.” Fans have tried, of course, with popular guess lists that include flavors like almond, cherry, molasses, and rum—but there’s no real way to know for sure.

Even the government got involved at one point. The FDA ruled that Dr Pepper is officially not a cola, not a root beer, and not a fruit-flavored soft drink. Instead, the agency had to come up with an entirely separate category: pepper soda, a classification that basically exists for Dr Pepper alone.

And honestly, isn’t that what makes Dr Pepper so special? It’s the scientific creation of a pharmacist, not a chef. It isn’t meant to taste like one specific thing. It’s supposed to taste like Dr Pepper.

How Many Flavors of Dr Pepper Are There Now?

Photograph of a display at the Dr. Pepper Museum in Waco, Texas that features 1960s cans, bottles, and containers for Dr. Pepper. Part of the collection entitled: Randy Mallory Papers and was provided by the UNT Libraries Special Collections to The Portal to Texas History.

These days, Dr Pepper comes in 14 varieties, including Diet, Zero Sugar, Cherry, Cream Soda, Strawberries & Cream, and Blackberry, which became the newest permanent flavor in 2025.

Not every Dr Pepper experiment, however, involved a new flavor. During his time as CEO, Clements reportedly worried that sales dropped in the winter. His solution was Hot Dr Pepper, introduced in the 1960s—the same soda, but heated up and served with a thin slice of lemon. Ads at the time compared it to tea, just with the sugar already mixed in.

Clements even claimed to drink three or four cups of it every morning. It never truly took off, but it never completely disappeared either. In fact, the Dr Pepper Museum still serves Hot Dr Pepper every winter, much to the delight of exactly the kind of person who visits the Dr Pepper Museum in winter.

So who is Dr Pepper? A pharmacist's fever dream. A Virginian doctor's namesake, maybe. The pep in someone's step. Or perhaps, Dr Pepper is just the friends we made along the way.