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. Each of them put in $500,000 for 49% of a new company, Red Bull GmbH. Chaleo’s son got the other 2%.
Bubbles and a Silver Can
The drink they brought to Europe wasn’t exactly the Thai version. They added some carbonation and put it in a slim silver can, BevNET reported.
Mateschitz spent close to three years on the formula and the brand, from 1984 to 1987, according to the company. Red Bull went on sale in Austria on April 1, 1987.
It got to the U.S. in 1997. In its first year there, it took about 75% of the American energy drink market, Forbes reported in 2005.
Where Red Bull Is Now
Red Bull is sold in 178 countries and had 21,924 employees at the end of 2025. Its turnover went up 8.6% last year, from about 11.2 billion euros to about 12.2 billion euros, the company says.
Mateschitz also put the name on sports teams. In March 2006, he bought Major League Soccer’s MetroStars and turned them into the New York Red Bulls, according to his Wikipedia biography.
Both founders have since died. Chaleo died in March 2012, worth an estimated $5 billion, according to BevNET. Mateschitz died on Oct. 22, 2022, at 78. Earlier that year, Forbes had put his fortune at $27.4 billion.
