Is there something special about this gas in particular that makes it especially suited? Why not use other gasses such as Nitrogen given it’s far more common and already used a lot in the food industry?
In: Chemistry
As others have mentioned, CO2 is the traditional means of carbonation as a byproduct of alcoholic yeast fermentation but also lacto fermentation, which is bacterial. Almost all traditional fermented drinks are either one, including the traditional root beers, ginger ales, sarsaparilla etc that inspired modern soda pops.
As a byproduct CO2 is incredibly cheap. Conversely, while nitrogen is plentiful in the atmosphere, it’s more inert and must be harvested by cryogenic fractional distillation, which takes energy, relatively a lot.
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