How Hastings earned the score
Population 25,152 (US Census 2020), the seat of Adams County, Nebraska, laid out in 1872 where two railroads crossed on the open plains.
Situation Kool-Aid was invented here in 1927, when mail order businessman Edwin Perkins dehydrated his Fruit Smack syrup into a powder that could ride anywhere in an envelope. The name became one of the most recognizable brands on earth, and in 1998 Nebraska’s official soft drink, but the town on the postmark is easy to drive past without learning any of this.
Action Since 1998 Hastings has built a civic ritual around the claim: Kool-Aid Days every August with the world’s largest Kool-Aid stand, a permanent Kool-Aid exhibit inside the largest municipal museum between Chicago and Denver, a historical marker on the old factory, and a downtown that keeps adding sculptures, a taproom, and a state creative district designation.
Result The first Kool-Aid Days poured more than 480 gallons for more than 5,000 people in a single day. The festival now runs three days with more than 20 free flavors. And the invention story still outruns the visit built on it, which is exactly what a 66, On the Map, says out loud.
Situation: the most famous thing ever made here fits in an envelope
Stand on West First Street in Hastings, Nebraska, and the birthplace of a global brand looks like what it is: a plain two story commercial building at 518 West First Street, across the tracks from a 1902 Spanish Colonial Revival depot. There is no admission booth and no line, just a historical marker, window displays about what happened inside, and the long Nebraska light. Here in 1927, Edwin Perkins solved a shipping problem and accidentally created one of the most famous product names in American life.
Perkins started smaller than the town did. Born in 1889 in Lewis, Iowa, he grew up working the counter of his father’s general store in Hendley, Nebraska. By 13 he was the village postmaster, per Nebraska Studies, running a mail order business out of the back of the post office. In 1920 he moved to Hastings, the regional trade center, and by 1921 his Onor-Maid line counted more than 125 products: lotions, medicines, soaps, flavorings, and fruit drink concentrates.
One of those concentrates carried the future. Fruit Smack was a liquid that families mixed into pitchers of water, and it sold well. It also shipped in four ounce glass bottles that leaked, broke, and cost real money to move, per the Made in Chicago Museum’s company history. Perkins had admired Jell-O since childhood, and Jell-O showed what a flat envelope could do. In 1927 he worked out how to take the water out of Fruit Smack. The powder went into printed paper packets his own shop produced, in six flavors: grape, orange, cherry, raspberry, lemon lime, and root beer. He called it Kool-Ade, soon respelled Kool-Aid. It cost a dime.
The envelope did what bottles never could. By 1929 the Hastings Daily Tribune could report the product was being marketed all over the country. On January 1, 1931, chasing rail connections and jobbers, Perkins moved the company to Chicago, and Hastings’ most famous export stopped being made in Hastings four years after it was born. The Depression should have killed a flavored luxury; instead Perkins cut the price from a dime to a nickel, printed the arithmetic on the envelope, five cents makes ten big, cool glasses, and watched volume explode. By 1950 the Chicago plant was producing 323 million packets a year and clearing more than 10 million dollars in net sales. In February 1953 General Foods bought the company, and Perkins retired that May.
That is the situation Hastings inherited: total, permanent ownership of an origin story, and almost none of the apparatus that turns a story into a stop. The company left in 1931; the fame compounded somewhere else. For most of seven decades the fact sat quietly in the local paper and the museum’s files, a thing everyone here knew and almost nobody arrived for.
Task: turn a pantry staple’s hometown into a reason to leave the highway
Three problems define the assignment.
The brand belongs to someone else
Kool-Aid is a corporate trademark, owned today by Kraft Heinz. The town can celebrate the product, but it cannot control the packaging, the advertising, or where the Kool-Aid Man appears. Every festival poster is a licensing conversation before it is a civic decision.
The product is everywhere; the story is only here
A waterpark must be visited. Kool-Aid can be consumed anywhere on earth for pennies, so the product itself generates zero travel. What Hastings exclusively owns is the origin: the building on West First Street, the archives, and the name Edwin Perkins. Origin is a museum asset, and museum assets convert only when a visitor can touch them.
The city has other jobs
Hastings is a working county seat of 25,152, with manufacturing, agriculture, a college, and a history that includes hosting the largest naval munitions plant of the Second World War. Tourism is a side bet here, not the economy. That explains the modesty, and the opportunity: the claim has never been asked to carry the town, so nobody has built it to.
Action: a nickel packet’s worth of civic ritual, built since 1998
The modern era of the claim has a precise start date. On May 21, 1998, Governor Ben Nelson declared Kool-Aid the official state soft drink of Nebraska, honoring Perkins and his wife Kitty while milk kept its separate title of state beverage. Twelve weeks later, on August 15, 1998, Hastings threw its first party for the fact. The first Kool-Aid Days was a one day event at Highland Park behind the Hastings Museum, and nobody involved knew whether anyone would come. By the end of the day more than 5,000 people had taken a sip and more than 480 gallons had been served. The next summer attendance grew to about 6,000, per the Omaha World-Herald’s retrospective, and in 2000 the main events moved downtown and one day became three.
Today Kool-Aid Days owns the second weekend of August, running across the Adams County Fairgrounds and Lake Hastings, with dates already posted for August 14 to 16, 2026. The Grand Parade delivers the official arrival of Kool-Aid Man. The Kardboard Boat Races put children in corrugated hulls. There is a duck race, a fishing tournament, a bike tour, and a Kwickest Drinking Contest. The centerpiece is the World’s Largest Kool-Aid Stand, which in 2025 served more than 20 flavors, unlimited, free, under that summer’s theme, Grape Escape. Board member Brad Cunningham put the mission simply to KSNB: keep the tradition alive in the town where the drink was born.
The stand, measured
The founding numbers are the honest baseline: 480 gallons and 5,000 visitors on day one in 1998. The stand has been billed as the world’s largest ever since, and the festival’s listings note two Governor’s Awards for Nebraska’s most outstanding event in its population class, 2006 and 2010, plus an American Bus Association Top 100 Events in North America nod for 2011. The drink is free. The point was never revenue at the stand; it was giving the claim one weekend a year when it is unmissable.
The year round keeper of the claim is the Hastings Museum, founded in 1927, the same year as the powder, and today the largest municipal museum between Chicago and Denver, with a 70 foot wide theater screen and a domed planetarium. Its permanent exhibit, Kool-Aid: Discover the Dream, is where the origin story finally gets staging: a hands-on Kool-Aid stand for kids, two of the actual Kool-Aid Man costumes from the television commercials, a recreation of the D.M. Perkins general store where Edwin learned to sell, the Kool-Aid Man’s Hollywood footprints, and, since 2023, a Kool-Aid Man statue at the entrance, per the state tourism office’s write-up.
Downtown gives the claim somewhere to live. The Hastings Downtown District is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and its bones are brick in both senses: beginning in 1880, Hastings brickyards ran for six decades and at one point produced 70 percent of all brick made in Nebraska and all of the state’s paving brick, per Traveling Through Nebraska, and the streets still show it. The downtown association counts 13 public sculptures along First Street, Second Street, and Eastside Boulevard, and the Nebraska Arts Council has named Hastings one of its newest state creative districts. Two blocks from the birthplace, Steeple Brewing pours in the former Pioneer Market at 717 West First Street. None of this is Kool-Aid themed; all of it is the connective tissue a themed visit would need.
And then there is the town’s other Depression era machine of delight. The Jacob Fisher Rainbow Fountain was built as a temporary exhibit for the 1932 Adams County Fair, moved to Highland Park in 1933, and named for the mayor through a pair of winning school essays. Its sprays reach 67 feet through 14,000 watts of colored light, computerization in 1983 took its combinations of water and color from 32 to more than 2 million, and the city bills it as the largest of its kind between Denver and Chicago. Through the Dust Bowl years it ran as a deliberate sign of hope. Hastings’ two most beloved artifacts, a nickel packet and a lit fountain, are both Depression answers to the same question: how do you sell relief for almost nothing?
The town underneath the claim
Hastings was founded in 1872 where the Burlington and Missouri River line crossed the St. Joseph and Denver City line, named for a railroad contractor, Colonel D. T. Hastings, and it boomed to 2,800 people inside eight years, per the town’s history. In 1942 the Navy built its largest ammunition depot of the war on 49,000 acres east of town: more than 2,000 structures, over 40 percent of the Navy’s wartime munitions, and a workforce that pushed the city from just over 15,000 people to 22,252 at the peak. A blast on September 15, 1944 killed nine workers. The 1902 Burlington Station still stands on First Street, and Amtrak still calls there. Hastings holds more twentieth century American history than its search results suggest; Kool-Aid is the only piece with a global fan base.
Result: a real weekend, a real museum, and a claim still bigger than the visit
Score the built work honestly and both halves of the sentence are true. The festival is real: a 5,000 person, one day tribute that grew into a three day weekend recognized twice at the state level. The museum is real: accredited, ambitious for a city this size, and the only place on earth where the Kool-Aid origin story is professionally staged. The fountain, the sculptures, and the brick are real. A visitor who plans around the second weekend of August gets a full, cheerful, sticky fingered show.
The other 51 weeks are the On the Map band. The composite lands at 66 because the connective tissue between claim and visit is thin. The birthplace is a facade with window displays, not a door you can walk through. Outside festival week the city’s public face leads with almost everything except its most famous fact; the claim lives at the museum and in August, not in the town’s everyday brand. Year round photo moments, take home merchandise beyond the museum store, and anything bookable in February are close to nonexistent. The scorecard below reads exactly like that sentence: the anchor and web presence grade in the mid 70s while brand identity and return signals sit in the 40s and 50s. Top shelf material, mid shelf staging.
Be precise about what is not wrong. The claim is not contested, seasonal, or fragile, and nobody else can take it. The festival does not depend on one founder, the museum is municipally funded, and the state designation is permanent. Hastings’ problem is purely one of conversion, the most fixable kind a town can have.
What is next: the exhibit moves upstairs
The most concrete next move is already scheduled. The museum closed the current Kool-Aid exhibit on January 1, 2026, and is rebuilding it on the second floor as part of a larger remodel, with reopening planned for late winter or spring, per the Hastings Tribune. Moving the town’s best story out of the basement is a fair summary of the whole assignment. The creative district designation gives downtown a funding lens, the festival holds its August date, and the 2026 stand will pour whether or not anything else changes.
Takeaway: an origin claim is a deed, not a draw
The transferable lesson in Hastings is about the difference between owning a story and staging one. An origin claim is the most durable asset in small town tourism: it cannot be copied, franchised, outbuilt, or moved, and Hastings holds one of the cleanest in American food culture, notarized by the state itself. But a deed is not a draw. Attention converts where a visitor can walk through a door, hold something, and photograph themselves inside the story. Detroit Lakes, Minnesota learned the inverse lesson when it commissioned physical icons first, the Thomas Dambo trolls we covered in our Detroit Lakes report, and let the icons generate the story. Hastings has the opposite inventory: a world class story waiting on its icons.
The work is not mysterious. A staged birthplace you can enter. The claim on the city’s own front pages twelve months a year. A packet of the state soft drink in every hotel lobby, and a photo stop that works in January. When the staging catches up to the story, the composite follows, because the hard part, owning something the whole world already knows, was finished in 1927 by a postmaster’s kid with a shipping problem.