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Cola Cao

company

Layered newspapers, civic records and oral-history reels arranged as chronological evidence
History and societyInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMay 12, 2026
Entity authorityQ1364834
Source-derived summary

Cola Cao is a sugary chocolate drink with vitamins and minerals that originated in Spain and is now produced and marketed in several countries. The brand is owned by the Barcelona-based company Idilia Foods (formerly Nutrexpa).

History

In 1945, José María Ventura and José Ignacio Ferrero, two brothers-in-law from the Gràcia neighbourhood of Barcelona, Spain, created a soluble cocoa called Cola Cao. The "Cola Cao song" used to promote the product in 1952 is a nostalgia item.

In 1962, they began to broadcast their first advertisements on television, which adapted the radio tune to some cartoons. In 1972, Cola Cao was associated for the first time with the slogan "Olympic food", after becoming a sponsor of the Spanish Olympic team at the 1972 Summer Olympic Games. In the 1980s, "Cola Cao VIT" was produced, an instant and enriched version with vitamins of the classic Cola Cao. It went out of production in the late 1980s.

In 1988, in a connection with the 1992 Summer Olympics scheduled for Barcelona Cola Cao began sponsoring the Spanish Olympic Committee through the ADO Programme, an alliance that continues until today. Along the same lines and to promote urban sports, the brand installed what are popularly known as "Cola Cao Circuits" in green areas of a large number of Spanish cities, such as Esplugues de Llobregat and Córdoba, among others.

Editorial summary

“Cola Cao” enters the record as company. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Cola and company can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA useful synthesis for locating the documentary relationships between formal authority, participants and affected communities. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1945, 1952, 1962, 1972—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1945. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Cola and company.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Cola Cao” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Cola and company provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1364834. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1945, 1952, 1962 and 1972.

Critical limits

Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
Verify next

Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Cola Cao”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Cola Cao primary sources, Cola Cao archive and Cola research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Cola Cao”?
  2. Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
  3. What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Cola Cao” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.