Goli soda vs ramune: one bottle, two countries
India's goli soda and Japan's ramune share an English bottle from 1872. How they differ, how they are alike, and whether there is an Indian ramune.
By The Pop Journal5 min read
The 60-second sip
- Goli soda is India's marble soda and ramune is Japan's. Both use the Codd-neck bottle patented in England in 1872.
- Goli means marble in Hindi and Gujarati; ramune comes from the English word lemonade. In Delhi the same drink is called banta.
- The bottle and the pop are the same. The flavours, the serving and the customs around them differ.
- Yes, there is an Indian ramune: goli soda. Goli Pop Soda takes it to the world, in glass.
Ask for a marble soda in India and in Japan and you will be handed the same bottle under different names. The glass is the same shape, the marble sits in the same neck, and the sound when it opens is the same. What changes is what people do with it.
Goli soda
In much of India the drink is named after its marble: goli. It has been sold since the late nineteenth century, usually lemon or orange, from carts and small shops where the seller opens the bottle for you. Generations in India grew up on it: cheap, local and bottled in the next street.
Banta
In Delhi and across the north it is banta. The classic serving is not drunk straight from the bottle: the soda is poured over crushed ice with lemon juice and a pinch of black salt and spice. It is a drink of hot afternoons, and of the stalls outside colleges and markets.
Ramune
Ramune is the Japanese name, and a name rather than a brand: many makers in Japan sell it. The word is how “lemonade” sounded to Japanese ears. By most accounts it was first sold in the 1880s through the port of Kobe. Today the drink belongs to summer: festivals, fireworks and the small ceremony of pushing the marble in with the plunger that comes in the cap. In Japan the bottle decides the name: under a marble it is ramune, under an ordinary cap the same kind of drink is called “cider”.
Side by side
| Goli soda | Ramune | |
|---|---|---|
| Home | India | Japan |
| The name | Goli: a marble | From “lemonade” |
| Also called | Banta (Delhi), kanche wali soda | Marble soda |
| Typical serving | From the bottle; over ice with lemon and spiced salt as banta | From the bottle, at summer festivals |
| Classic flavours | Lemon, orange | Lemon-lime, then many fruit flavours |
| The bottle | Codd-neck, sealed by a marble | Codd-neck, sealed by a marble |
| Bottle material today | Mostly glass | Glass or plastic, by maker |
Is there an Indian ramune?
Yes: goli soda. The Codd-neck bottle reached India and Japan in the same century, and both countries kept it when most of the world moved to metal caps. If you have opened a ramune, you already know how to open a goli soda, and the other way round.
Nearly lost, and back
In India the bottle came close to disappearing. From the 1990s, large international brands, plastic bottles and cans took over the shelves, and many small soda makers closed. What survived was memory, and a few bottlers who kept going.
On 23 March 2025 the Government of India announced that goli soda was returning to world markets under a new name, Goli Pop Soda, with trial shipments to the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and the Gulf. The bottle that left England in the 1870s was on its way back, from India: still glass, still sealed by a marble, opened the same way.
Where this comes from
- Banta, Wikipedia
- Ramune, Wikipedia
- Tsunagu Japan: what is ramune, Japan's summer festival drink?
- Codd-neck bottle, Wikipedia
- Government of India, Press Information Bureau, release 2114131 (23 March 2025)
Last checked against these sources on .