Histories of some of the smaller national franchisers (Dad's Old Fashioned Root Beer, Nesbitt's Orange, Orange Crush, Whistle/Vess, and others) have yet to be written; however, most of the major brands (and a few smaller ones) have attracted at least one historian.  Coca-Cola, the undisputed historical leader in soft drink sales has received historical coverage in at least four books (one by the Coca-Cola company) and numerous articles (Coca-Cola 1974; Dietz 1973; Hoy 1986; Munsey 1972).  Pepsi-Cola, the number two American cola, has only attracted the attention of two book-length historians (Martin 1962; Rawlinson 1976).  Dr Pepper, the leading non-cola producer, decided to cash in on the interest in nostalgia and bottle collecting by commissioning three books as well as supporting the Dr Pepper Museum in Waco, Texas (Ellis 1979; Ellis 1986; Rodengen 1995) along with an internet link (Dr Pepper).   Shorter histories of Seven-Up and Canada Dry were included in the most recent Dr Pepper history (Rodengen 1995), and one short Seven-Up history is currently on the internet (7-Up).  Only one author has so far created a Royal Crown Cola history written in a two-part magazine article, along with another in a Sunday newspaper supliment, and a final unpublished manuscript by the Royal Crown Cola Company (Vaughn 1995a; Vaughn 1995b;  Sellers 1960; Royal Crown n.d.).  A single internet history of Nehi-Royal Crown is also available (RC).  A single article has addressed the history of Canada Dry (Witzel & Witzel 1999).  While paper publications have yet to surface, a few other bottlers (A & W Root Beer, Barq's, Clicquot Club,  Grapette, and Squirt)  have their stories told on the internet (as of March 2001).  Four short histories of bottlers have vanished from the net, but their contents are reproduced here (Barq's Beverages, Clicquot Club, Frostie Root Beer, and 7-Up).  [Two major problem with the internet are that sites come and go unpredictably and that few sites give authorship to their work.]  Two classic volumes have at least provided cameo glimpses into the backgrounds of several national bottlers (Paul & Parmalee 1973; Riley 1958).

The Colas:  Coca-Cola
     Pharmacist John S. Pemberton created the syrup formula for what would become Coca-Cola around 1885 and mixed the first batch in a three-legged iron kettle in his back yard in Atlanta, Georgia.  According to tradition, he had been trying to discover a headache cure.  That year he formed the Pemberton Chemical Company and, in 1886, took his now-perfected formula to Willis E. Venable at Jacob's Pharmacy.  Tradition also suggests that a new clerk at the pharmacy accidentally mixed the syrup with carbonated water, thereby adding the final vital ingredient.  Shortly thereafter, the bookkeeper, Frank M. Robinson suggested the name, Coca-Cola.

     The company placed the first Coca-Cola ad in The Daily Journal (Atlanta) on May 29, 1886.  The advertising budget for that year was $73.96.  Although the product's popularity grew slowly during the first few years, the company's advertising campaign proved one of its most valuable assets.  Although the earliest ads were medicinal in nature, the company soon realized that the real potential lay in touting the product as a beverage.  Coca-Cola also developed the franchise system in 1899.  By 1903, The Coca-Cola Company expended $762,502.65 for promotion.  Advertising became one of the company's most valuable assets, and soon the Coca-Cola name spread over the entire world (Dietz [1973] provides an excellent summary of Coca-Cola advertising with shorter sections on Hires, Dr Pepper, and Pepsi).

     After several financial and ownership changes, Woolfolk Walker and Asa G. Candler formed the firm of Walker, Candler & Company in 1888, the year that Pemberton died.  Candler purchased Walker's share of the company, became sole owner in 1891, and changed the name to The Coca-Cola Company.  The company incorporated the following year.  By the time Candler died in 1929, Coca-Cola was a resounding success.

     Initially Coca-Cola was sold only at soda fountains where carbonated water and syrup were mixed for each individual drink.  Pemberton, a pharmacist, never thought of packaging the product.  A persistent legend claims that Candler paid an unnamed man a sum between $5,000 and $50,000 for the secret of getting rich.  The man "gave him a slip of paper with  just two words on it:  'BOTTLE IT'" (Tchudi 1986:29).  The legend is false.  Joseph August Biedenharn of Vicksburg, Mississippi first bottled Coca-Cola in 1894.  Biedenharn's bottling, however, was strictly local in scope.  It was not until 1899 that Benjamin F. Thomas and Joseph B. Whitehead suggested to Candler that Coca-Cola should be bottled on a national scale.  Candler discouraged the idea but finally agreed to give the two lawyers rights to bottle Coca-Cola throughout the United States with the exception of Mississippi, New England, and the area around Corsicana, Texas.  Thomas and White named their new operation The Coca-Cola Bottling Company.  John T. Lupton soon became a partner of Thomas.  Thomas and Whitehead disagreed on which color the bottles should be (Thomas chose amber; Whitehead demanded colorless) and divided their territory into the mid-Atlantic states and the West Coast for Thomas with the remaining unclaimed states going to Whitehead.  It was not until 1954 that the five bottle franchisers were consolidated into The Coca-Cola Company.

     Robert W. Woodruff became president of Coca-Cola in 1923.  Woodruff instigated a single-minded policy:  the only product associated with the company would be Coca-Cola.  Like Candler before him, Woodruff was very conservative.  It was not until 1955 that company executives convinced him to expand from the time-tested six-and-one-half-ounce bottle to other types and sizes of packaging that included ten-, twelve-, sixteen-, and twenty-six-ounce returnable bottles.  Non-returnable bottles and flavors such as Fanta, Fresca, Tab, and Sprite eventually followed.

The Colas:  Pepsi-Cola
     In 1893, Caleb D. Bradham bought the local drugstore in New Bern, North Carolina, and renamed it Bradham's Pharmacy.  He began experimenting with new beverage mixes and eventually created a cola drink that he called Brad's Drink.  He renamed the drink in 1898, and, although the lettering and style of the trademark would change in the intervening years, the name Pepsi-Cola has remained to the present.

     Bradham formed the Pepsi-Cola Company, a North Carolina corporation, on December 30, 1902 and began bottling Pepsi (6-ounce bottles) in 1904, and, in 1909, Pepsi became one of the first companies to switch from the traditional horse-powered vehicles to motorized delivery.  He began franchising the product to independent bottlers the following year.  Pepsi survived Prohibition and the Great Depression, and all went well until the end of World War I.  The US government had placed price controls on sugar during the war that locked the price at 5.5¢ per pound.  At the war's end, the government released its controls and the price of sugar increased dramatically.  When the price of sugar rose to 22.5¢ per pound in 1920, Bradham was forced to answer a serious question.  Would prices continue to rise?  With bottles of Pepsi selling at 5¢ each, such high prices were disastrous.  Bradham gambled that prices would continue to rise and bought a large quantity of sugar.  He guessed wrongly.  The price of sugar plummeted to 2¢ per pound.  It was a blow the corporation could not withstand.

     The stockholders formed a new corporation, Craven Holding Company, in North Carolina in 1922, and the old company was declared bankrupt the following year.  Roy Megargel formed yet another corporation, Pepsi-Cola Corporation, in Virginia and acquired the Pepsi-Cola trademark, along with the business and its good will.  Megargel reformed the corporation into the newly-formed National Pepsi-Cola Corporation in 1928, but by 1931, that, too, had fallen into bankruptcy along with many other victims of the Great Depression.

     Charles G. Guth, president of the Loft Corporation, purchased the trademark and assets and formed yet another corporation (in Delaware) titled, Pepsi-Cola Company.  In late 1933, Guth introduced a sales ploy that would spring Pepsi into national prominence.  The industry standard since the turn of the century had been a six- or seven-ounce bottle sold for 5¢.  The new Pepsi-Cola Company began vending a twelve-ounce bottle for the same price.  By the middle of 1934, sales had vastly improved, and Pepsi began nationwide franchising.

     Spearheaded by James A. Carkner, the Loft Corporation began litigation against Guth in 1935, asserting that Loft, not Guth, legally owned Pepsi-Cola.  In a decision dated September 17, 1938, the Delaware Court found in Loft's favor, although Guth remained as manager of the company.  Hard feelings, however, could not be settled, and the Board of Directors removed Guth from his position as General Manager in 1939.  To further complicate matters, in 1938, Coca-Cola brought suit against Pepsi-Cola in Canada for use of the word "Cola" in its trademark.  The ultimate decision, rendered in 1942, was in favor of Pepsi.  Pepsi could continue being a cola.  Despite all the confusion at the end of the decade, Pepsi offered a standardized bottle to their franchises.

     Another reorganization took place in 1941 during which Loft and Pepsi merged creating still another parent company, again called Pepsi-Cola Company.  By this time Pepsi was sold internationally and presented Coca-Cola with serious competition.  Sugar rationing in World War II again presented a problem but without the resulting disaster suffered after World War I.  The company was finally stabilized and became a major influence in the beverage industry.

The Colas:  Royal Crown Cola
     Claud A. Hatcher, along with his father and two partners, formed the Cole-Hatcher-Hampton Grocery Company  in 1901 and bought out their partners in two years.  Hatcher developed Royal Crown Ginger Ale and a drink he called, Mello, and, in 1904, reorganized the grocery company into the Union Bottling Works.  The company introduced Chero-Cola in 1904, and the drink rapidly became their top selling product, instigating a name change to the Chero-Cola Company in 1912.  In 1920, a court battle with Coca-Cola forced the company to drop the word "cola" from its label.  Chero sales plummeted.

     Hatcher then created a new line of drinks with fruit flavoring that he called Nehi.  The new drinks, introduced in 1924 became so popular that Hatcher renamed the company Nehi Corporation in 1928.  Like others, Nehi suffered during the Great Depression.  When Hatcher died unexpectedly in 1933, his replacement, Hilary R. Mott, revitalized the company.  Mott championed the idea of a cola drink to compete with Coca-Cola, and Rufus C. Kamm developed Royal Crown Cola.  The new cola was introduced to a limited audience in mid-1934 but was not fully available to the public until the following year.  Royal Crown soon came to dominate the Nehi product line, and the company again renamed itself--Royal Crown Cola Company in 1959.

     In 1961, Royal Crown test marketed a new product, Diet Rite Cola.  Using cyclamate to replace sugar, the company presented Diet Rite to the public the following year.  The sugar-free beverage soon accounted for fully 50% of RC's profits.  When the US government banned cyclamates on October 18, 1969, RC chemists quickly reformulated Diet Rite to include a mixture of sugar and saccharin.  Because the Coca-Cola Company used saccharin without sugar in Tab, Diet Rite sales plummeted and never recovered.

     Victor Posner, a noted corporate raider, instigated a hostile takeover of Royal Crown beginning in 1983.  Under Posner's nine-year rule, advertising was significantly reduced, and conditions were so restricted that the situation was referred to as a "marketing nightmare" and a "corporate holocaust" (quoted in Vaughn 1995b:57).  Royal Crown survived and is still in the process of recovery.

     Although the company never achieved top status (Coca-Cola has always retained the number-one position), it set industry standards in a number of areas.  Royal Crown introduced the first successful soft drink cans in 1954 and sixteen-ounce bottles in 1958.  The company also produced the first diet drink (1962), the first caffeine-free cola (1980), and the first salt/sodium-free cola (1983).  Recently, Royal Crown has attempted another industry first, with the introduction of Royal Crown Draft Premium Cola.  Between the new product and the bottling of "private label" beverages for other companies, Royal Crown appears to be making a come back.

The Fruit Punch:  Dr Pepper
     Charles C. Alderton worked as a pharmacist for W. B. Morrison in Morrison's Old Corner Drug Store in Waco, Texas.  In 1885, he invented a new drink formula which became very popular with Morrison's customers.  Morrison bought the formula from the young man and named it Dr. Pepper possibly after Dr. Charles Pepper, a former employer of Morrison's in Virginia.  Morrison then sold the formula to Robert S. Lazenby.

     Lazenby, also a beverage chemist, had founded the Circle "A" Bottling Company in 1884 to bottle his invention, Circle A Ginger Ale.  He added Dr. Pepper's Phos-Ferrates to the line as early as 1885 and incorporated the firm as the Artesian Manufacturing & Bottling Works in 1891 with Lazenby and Morrison among the original eight stockholders.  Early on, the words, Phos-Ferrates, were dropped and the product became known simply as Dr. Pepper.  The corporation renamed the firm The Dr. Pepper Company in 1902 to reflect the growing sales and popularity of the drink.  The Artesian Manufacturing & Bottling Company, however, remained the parent company.  The original corporation declared bankruptcy in 1923, and new financial backers reincorporated the Dr. Pepper Company under Colorado law in Dallas, Texas.  In 1940, the corporation disbanded Circle A Ginger Ale to concentrate on Dr. Pepper exclusively.

     Dr. Pepper has had several distinctive changes in trademarks.  Around  1905, the term, "Phos-Ferrates" was dropped in favor of a Dr. Pepper logo with a tail sweeping back from the final "r" enclosing the words, King of Beverages.  The company changed the lettering style in 1913 and included the words, Liquid Sunshine.  Following the 1923 reorganization, Dr. Pepper bottles were standardized for the first time and replaced the old slogans with "Good for Life" in the tail.  Four years later (1926), the company added the venerable 10-2-4 clock.  During World War II, Dr. Pepper was advertised as a good between-meal snack, using expressions such as the "liquid bite" or "Drink a bite to eat at 10, 2 and 4 o'clock."  A major change appeared in 1950 with the use of slanted block (italicized) letters which involved dropping the period after the "r" in Dr.  The company introduced bounce letters (the third "p" was "bounced" up slightly) in 1958 and later changed to a broader-based italicized typestyle.

     In 1981, Dr Pepper branched out with the purchase of the soft drink division of Welch Foods Company including the popular Welch's Grape Juice.  The acquisition of the Canada Dry Corporation followed in 1982.  A final, major uniting occurred in 1988 when Dr Pepper and Seven Up merged to form Dr Pepper/Seven-Up Companies, Inc.  The final purchase occurred in 1995 when Cadbury Beverages acquired Dr Pepper/Seven-Up.

The Uncola:  Seven-Up
     Charles L. Grigg, founder of Seven-Up, became involved in the beverage industry as a salesman for Vess Jones at Whistle and Vess Beverages, Incorporated, in St. Louis, Missouri.  While under the employment of Jones, Grigg developed the orange drink he called Whistle.  After leaving Jones in 1919, Grigg invented another orange drink, Howdy, and joined with Edmund G. Ridgeway in 1920 to form the Howdy Company. 

     The new company thrived through Prohibition and introduced another new soft drink at the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929.  Despite the catchy names used by Grigg in his early inventions, he chose to call his new drink Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda.  Seven-Up's historian stated that "Grigg wisely changed the name before significant damage was done.  The drink next became 7UP Lithiated Lemon-Lime and then, simply, 7UP" (Rodengen 1995:83).  Although the origin of the name is uncertain, Grigg may have been inspired by a cattle brand that consisted of a "7" and a "U."

     With the end of Prohibition in 1933, the company marketed Seven-Up as a hangover cure as well as a drink mixer.  By the mid-1930s, Seven-Up was franchised in Canada.  Charles Grigg died in 1940, and his son, Hamblett C. Grigg took command of the company.  Grigg used patriotic advertisements to carry the product through the wartime sugar rationing.  Seven-Up expanded into the Caribbean and South America in 1948 and soon spread world-wide.  The Uncola promotion, begun in 1967, was one of the company's more inspired advertising ideas. 

     Philip Morris Companies, Inc., instigated a takeover in 1978 and managed the organization until 1986.  At that time, PepsiCo, Inc., bought the international rights to Seven-Up, and an investment group purchased the American holdings.  Two years later (1988), the company merged with Dr Pepper to form the Dr Pepper/Seven-Up Companies, Inc.  Cadbury Beverages acquired the joint companies in 1995.

The Mixers: Canada Dry
     Born of the experiments of chemist John James McLaughlin, the mixtures that would eventually become known as Canada Dry were originally sold in a soda fountain in Toronto.  McLaughlin worked hard to improve the taste of his favorite: McLaughlin's Belfast Style Ginger Ale.  By 1905, he add achieved his desire and renamed his brand Canada Dry Pale Ginger Ale.  His original label contained a map of Canada along with a beaver.  Since the beaver was the symbol of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, officials asked McLaughlin to remove it from his label.  He replaced the animal with his now well-known crown.

     The drink moved into the United States by 1907 and was later a favorite of the Duke of Devonshire, earning Canada Dry the title of "the Champagne of Ginger Ales."  Upon McLaughlin's death in 1914, his brother, Sam, took command of the company and increased U. S. sales.  The company set up a subsidiary, Canada Dry Ginger Ale, Inc. in New York in 1922 and sold the U. S. segment to Parry Dorland Saylor in 1922 for one million dollars. 

     Canada Dry was one of the early bottlers to package its beverages in cans in 1953 and introduced sugar-free drinks the following year.  In 1970, the company removed the outline map of Canada from its label, leaving the longitude and latitude lines.  The company changed hands repeatedly in the 1980s–first to Del Monte Corporation, then to Dr Pepper, and Norton-Simon, Inc.  A final buyer, Cadbury Schweppes, paid $230 million for the organization.