Heir who took Orangina from Algeria to fame

Bottling plants set up to supply American troops during the second world war gave many Europeans their first taste of Coca-Cola, so the corporate history would have it. Jean-Claude Beton, the man who made Orangina a global brand, told a similar story to explain the place the small, bulbous bottles of fizzy orange came to hold in France.

French troops fighting in Algeria in the 1950s became partial to a drink that was then produced at the Beton family's factory in Boufarik, among the orange orchards of the Mitija plain. When the company moved its headquarters to Marseille shortly before Algeria won independence, it found a thirsty audience among the soldiers returning through the port: as Beton put it, "they asked for Kronenbourg for their beer and Orangina for their soft drink".

By then Beton, who has died aged 88, was already well on the way to establishing Orangina as a brand that could not only rival Coke in France but eventually enter the American market itself.

Born in Algeria on January 14 1925, he was 11 when his father Leon met a Spanish pharmacist who had developed an orange concentrate he called Naranjina. Leon bought and adapted the recipe - citrus concentrate and sugar mixed with his own blend of essential oils and slightly sparkling water - and renamed it. But with war the venture went nowhere until 1951, when Jean-Claude relaunched Orangina - pressing the first oranges at Boufarik on January 23, the birthday of his wife Madelaine, who survives him along with children Eric and Francoise.

At first the drink was sold only in north Africa but he soon opened the Marseille base to supply the French mainland while retaining ready access to the raw materials.

His training was as an agricultural engineer but his flair was for marketing - and that swiftly became essential to the future of the business.

Beton had come up with the curvy bottles and cloud of orange pulp that were to become Orangina's trademarks - but they were unpopular with cafe owners because the vessels wasted shelf space and the residue made their glasses more difficult to wash up.

Since cafes were at that time the prime way to distribute the drink, he had to appeal directly to consumers. In the early days he would hire students or send the company's employees around cafes ordering Orangina, to help generate a buzz. But he also set about creating a vigorous brand identity, by commissioning Bernard Villemot - a poster artist who also crafted graceful Art Deco-inspired images for Perrier and Air France.

Villemot was working with one big constraint: under regulations in force at the time, Orangina - although much closer to a juice than other fizzy drinks on the market - did not contain enough fruit to justify advertising it with an orange. Instead, he showed the rounded bottle on a cafe table, topped by a curl of orange peel in the shape of a parasol - an elegant image that indelibly associated the brand with Mediterranean sunshine and the joys of postwar cafe culture.

It was the start of a decades-long collaboration and a series of cult ad campaigns. One early television commercial showed a bartender shaking the bottle as if mixing a cocktail - something that became a signature for the brand. Another, in 1989, fuelled a global craze for the lambada.

By 1957 Beton had sold 50m bottles of Orangina and, for the next 30 years, it was second only to Coke in France. Exports to the US began in 1978; to other countries in the 1980s. But it was not until 2003 that production resumed in Algeria, under a franchise. To mark the occasion, Beton himself returned for the first time since 1967, to make an emotional visit to the original factory.

He remained chief executive, then chairman, of the company for five years after it was bought in 1984 by Pernod Ricard, another family group with roots in Marseille.

Despite a reputation as an old-style, authoritarian boss, he was on first-name terms with staff and is said to have been ahead of his time in promoting both profit-related pay and employee share ownership.

French politicians had intervened to stave off a takeover bid from Coca-Cola but subsequent owners included the UK's Cadbury, of which Schweppes was then part - leading Beton to joke that Algerian Orangina and Indian tonic water were "uniting the best that is left of the colonial empires".

The two drinks brands remain together, under the ownership of Japan's Suntory. Beton's own interests, after stepping down from Orangina in 1989, turned meanwhile to another tipple: indulging a passion for viticulture, like many other French executives he bought a vineyard in Bordeaux.

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