The official story of the Greek frappé begins in September 1957 at the Thessaloniki International Fair, where a Nestlé booth was demonstrating an instant chocolate drink shaken in cocktail shakers. With no hot water on his break, employee Dimitris Vakondios supposedly shook instant coffee with cold water and ice and invented the drink on the spot. Journalist Nikos Bakounakis raised doubts in 2006, and in 2013 the food magazine Gastronomos found Nestlé newspaper ads already promoting a Nescafé Frappé before the fair, plus a 1951 comedy starring Mimis Fotopoulos and Dinos Iliopoulos in which the actors shake the drink at an Athens patisserie and joke about being turned into a frappé.

The towering foam depends on chemistry: spray dried instant coffee loses its oils in the hot air column, so shaking it creates a stable three phase foam of air, water, and coffee solids that freeze dried coffee or espresso cannot match. That foam is intensely bitter, which is why Greeks drink from below through a straw. The frappé became an endurance drink for long café afternoons of talk and backgammon, spread abroad after the 2004 Athens Olympics, and paved the way for the freddo espresso and freddo cappuccino invented in Athens in 1991.

• The ad copy before the 1957 fair suggested drinking Nescafé over ice cubes or as an iced shake.
• Ordering vocabulary sets the sugar: sweet means four spoons, medium means two, and plain means none, with milk only on request.
• Christos Lentzos ran a coffee house in Athens from 1964 to 2013 and became famous for a blender made frappé.
• Sailors and campers without a shaker beat the coffee against the glass with a spoon, a version named for the spoon or the ship.
• In the 1980s Nestlé campaigns fused its brand so tightly with the drink that people ordered a Nescafé frappé.