Red Bull sold 13.969 billion cans in 2025, the company says , and this week it added a Pistachio & Berries Winter Edition to the lineup.

It started with a business trip to Thailand in 1982.

Dietrich Mateschitz, an Austrian, worked in marketing. He’d been at Unilever and had moved to Blendax, a German company that made toothpaste and cosmetics. In Thailand, he tried a local energy drink called Krating Daeng, according to Wikipedia’s history of the company , which cites The Economist.

“One glass and the jet lag was gone,” he said later, as quoted in his Wikipedia biography .

The Man Behind Krating Daeng

Krating Daeng came from Chaleo Yoovidhya. He grew up in a poor farming family in central Thailand, didn’t have much formal schooling and started T.C. Pharmaceuticals in Bangkok in 1962, BevNET reported when he died in 2012. Thai truck drivers and factory workers were the ones buying his drink.

Mateschitz wanted to sell it outside Asia, so he went to Chaleo.…