Why Today's Root Beer Is Missing Its Original Signature Ingredient

The next time you're drinking a root beer, sift through the list of ingredients on the backside of a bottle of A&W, Dad's, Barq's, Mug, IBC, or Red Arrow. You're most certain to find mentions of carbonated water and high fructose corn syrup. There may be some citric acid or cane sugar in the mix, perhaps a dash of sodium benzoate as a preservative to lock in the flavor. But there's one ingredient you won't find listed. 

Sassafras was the defining additive that gave root beer its signature taste when the frothy beverage became a popular soda sold over counters at U.S. drug stores in the 1800s. It remained the key ingredient for almost a century until the U.S. Food & Drug Administration banned sassafras from being used in commercially produced root beer over 60 years ago. But just as the Temptations survived sans David Ruffin and New Edition found a way to carry on after Bobby Brown, root beer remains a popular soda without the signature element that once served as its main flavorant. Global root beer sales neared $940 million in 2023 and the market for the carbonated soft drink is expected to grow another 5% to almost $1.3 billion by 2030.

Long before European settlers stepped foot on the soil of the New World, Native Americans had used sassafras for hundreds of years as a medicinal herb to treat all sorts of ailments. Root bark from Sassafras albidum trees was steam distilled into a tincture that could reduce fevers, treat rheumatism, and relieve diarrhea. Extracts from the perennial tree were also used as an additive for food and drink.

It wasn't until the Colonial era that a Philadelphia pharmacist named Charles Elmer Hires turned root beer into a household soda pop. Hires and his wife visited a New Jersey lodge for their honeymoon and he tasted the recipe of the innkeeper's wife. As Anne Cooper Funderburg recounted in her 2002 book "Sundae Best: A History of Soda Fountains," Hires was so intrigued with the drink that when he returned to the city of Brotherly Love, he began working with professors to develop an extract of his own. Hires' recipe included a medley of roots and herbs such as juniper, sarsaparilla and vanilla beans. In 1876, he began selling 25-cent powder packets in drug stores that could be added to yeast, water, and sugar to make five gallons of root beer. That was the beginning of Hires Root Beer Company. By the end of the 1800s, root beer was a folksy beverage like sweet tea in the South, one for which many families had their own unique and special recipe.

It was sassafras that traditionally gave root beer it's sweet taste and spicy kick. But the root has high concentrations of a compound called safrole. When lab studies proved that safrole causes cancer in rats, the FDA prohibited companies from using sassafras to make root beer commercially. Since then, root beer makers have replaced the tree root with a host of other ingredients, such as molasses and extracts from the Quillaia tree, to mimic the taste of good root beer, but none could produce quite the same flavor as sassafras.