Japanese cola aficionado Cola Kobayashi (that is what he calls himself, I can not figure out if that is really his name) was the first to make a craft cola syrup which has since become a craze in Japan.

He founded a company and started making Iyoshi Cola in 2018 when he was just 21 years old.

Iyoshi Cola is a syrup that you mix with water at home. However, in 2023 Cola Kobayashi teamed up with a bottler to make Ira Cola which is a canned, ready to drink beverage based on the Iyoshi Cola formula.

Cola Kobayashi has been a cola fanatic since he was a kid as he suffered from migraine and found that cola could ease the pain.

Kobayashi is a graduate from Faculty of Agriculture at Hokkaido University and Graduate School of Life Science at the University of Tokyo and has used his education in pursing his dream of creating his own cola.

For a long time his attempts were not to his satisfaction, though. After a couple of years he visited his home town and his grandfather’s abandoned workshop. His grandfather was a Japanese and Chinese herbal medicine craftsman. While looking at the documents and tools left behind in the workshop, Kobayashi got the idea that he could use them to make cola. He immediately tried changing the way he processed the cola, and the flavor and taste of the cola improved dramatically.

He ended up taking over his grandfather’s workshop and named it Ira Cola as a nod to his grandfather’s workshop, Ira-akko.