Hawaiian Punch

Proprietary sweet red soft drink intended to evoke a composite of tropical fruit flavors. Leo’s Hawaiian Punch, as it was initially branded, was invented in 1934, in Fullerton, California, by the Pacific Citrus Products Company. Originally, it was exclusively sold as a concentrated syrup to the soda fountain wholesale market (see also: tropical fruit punch syrup). The Hawaiian Punch syrup was a runaway success by the 1940s, but not just as an ice cream topping: the popularity of the syrup for flavoring and sweetening water spurred the concentrate’s introduction in retail. First a canned concentrate, and then also a frozen concentrate were offered. Hawaiian Punch was now a nationally-renowned flavor profile and brand. Eventually—by the 1970s or 1980s, a line of pre-diluted ready-to-drink products appeared. It is the ready-to-drink version that this entry pertains to. Hawaiian Punch has little historical relevance to mixed drinks beyond frat-house trash can punches, although Don the Beachcomber improbably employed a dribble of it in at least one version of his Cherry Blossom Punch in the 1970s. Note that, like many such fundamentally artificial products, Hawaiian Punch has undergone various modifications over the decades—the current product includes notably non-tropical ingredients like apple juice and apricot purée. Fruit juice is a generic category for the bottled, canned, or fresh pressed liquids of a large range of fruit.