Steps
sodas and bottled drinks have probably the best Return on Investment of any legal business outside of pharma and alcohol.
You can start a bottling plan with about $500 USD in equipment and materials, then build up as income rises.
1)
Tips
tips
Warnings
Because of the huge Return on Investment of making and selling sodas, your problems might not be how good your stuff is, but whether you're stepping in someone's turf
Far far away and many years ago, dad and I started bottling a gin ale-type drink somewhre South. Honest and stupid that we were, we sought first official permit. We went through the very straightforward paperwork, but an "insider" told us, we would never receive a market permit. Turned out there were other interests at play... (there's a big bottling plant where we used to live)
Things You will Need
1) A clear commitment to hygiene. If your stuff is not safe, it will make people sick, and if you're not clear about this, if you don't care about making people sick, you probably could go into other lines of business that make even more money.
2) Safe water. If you have access to it, you're in business, you could start simply by bottling safe water! If your community doesn't provide you with it, selling safe water might be a great business, but you have to figure out how to get that safe water to begin with. Boiling it is a start, it is more expensive per unit than other methods, but has an extremely low cost to begin.
3) generic single-use bottles and tamper-proof caps - suppliers of these are usually a little bit out of the way, but I have found them in different countries. Metal caps are also a possibility, on reusable glass bottles, but hygiene and disinfection can really be complicated for small operations.
4) large vats that you can disinfect and use to prepare your mixes. Again, watch out for contamination.
5) some edulcorant. One advantage of chemical edulcorants (aspartame, sacharine) is that there is much less risk of fermentation. They can even be cheaper than sugar itself. And you can call your product "diet"! Yet sugar has some nutritional value, and that might be an ethical choice sometimes.
6) some color. Please, please stick to food-grade stuff. I know people sometimes use anilines to color foods in developing countries to make them attractive to kids. I mean, that's poisonous stuff, bad, bad. Depending on your circumstances, you could even make your own food coloring, good old caramel is a basic one, easy. Did'ya now that carmine red is an FD&A approved food dye (E 120), and comes from cochineal bugs? Near La Paz I can get as much cochineal as I care right off cacti.
7) some flavor. Here's your chance to make history. What everybody does, including the big companies is to boil stuff together. Ginger, cinnamon, whatever, be my guest. You may want to measure carefully what you use, so you can reproduce and fine-tune your flavor batch after batch. Once you have you flavor extract, mix it with measured amounts of color and edulcorant in the water, and you are ready to
Carbonate
Related How-Tos
relate
Sources and Citations
sources Natural food dyes, wikipedia
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