In my second installation about quirky towns of New Zealand, I’d like to introduce you to Paeroa. Paeroa is on Highway 2 about an hour and a half South of Auckland and it was here that Lemon and Paeroa (L&P) was created. L&P was originally made from effervescent mineral water from mineral springs in Paeroa. Today it is owned and produced by Coca Cola.
L&P is sold all over New Zealand and can be found pretty much everywhere that Coke is — including as a fountain drink at McDonalds and other fast food restaurants. But what puts the town of Paeroa on the quirky towns list is that they have a giant L&P bottle on display near the site where the product was originally manufactured. So if you’re driving through Paeroa, there’s no doubt you’ll know where you are. You can see a pic of the bottle and more on the history of L&P on Paeroa’s website.
It was L&P that originally created an advertising slogan “World famous in New Zealand” that has since been borrowed to describe just about anything that is well known here but unknown to the rest of the world. L&P (like most Kiwi things) doesn’t take itself too seriously and has fun with its advertising and commercials. One of the best (and worst) is an L&P advertisement about Stubbies. Stubbies deserve a whole blog of their own and I’ll get to that, but they are very short male shorts that were really common in New Zealand for way longer than they should have been:
They did another commercial later on, poking fun at themselves for being world famous in NZ:
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Wendy's Gone Walkabout 