History of Dr Pepper Snapple Group

From humble beginnings in Morrison’s Old Corner Drug Store, the company Morrison and Lazenby started has become one of the largest beverage manufacturers in North America. They formed the Artesian Manufacturing & Bottling Company.

Lazenby moved the company from Waco to Dallas in 1923. The company merged with 7-Up became Dr Pepper/Seven UP Inc. on May 19, 1986.

Dr Pepper/Seven UP was purchased by Cadbury Schweppes in March 2, 1995 after the conglomerate became debt-ridden and insolvent. It sold for about US$1.7 billion, plus about US$870 million of Dr Pepper/Seven UP debt.

Cadbury Schweppes emerged in 1969 from the merger of Cadbury plc, a British confectionary and a soft drink company and Schweppes, an international beverage brand.

In 2000, Cadbury Schweppes acquired the Snapple Beverage Group (Snapple).

Three years after acquiring Snapple Cadbury Schweppes combined its four North American beverage companies – Dr Pepper/Seven Up, Snapple, Mott’s and Bebidas Mexico into Cadbury Schweppes Americas Beverages (CSAB).

In May 2008, under the direction of Larry Young, CSAB officially spun off from Cadbury’s confectionary manufacturing division and Dr Pepper brand became part of Dr Pepper Snapple Group, located in Plano Texas.

Dr Pepper Snapple Group, Inc. now is a major beverage company with an integrated business model including brand ownership, bottling, and distribution on nonalcoholic beverages in the United States, Canada and Mexico.
History of Dr Pepper Snapple Group

Quaker Oats: Snapple

Some brands just want to have fun, and from birth Snapple was one of them. Operating from the back of his parents' pickle store in Queens, Arnie Greenberg and his friends Leonard Marsh and Hyman Golden started selling a fresh apple juice called Snapple across New York City in the late 1970s.

At the time, there was no shortage of upstart brands competing for the dollars of young, health-conscious New Yorkers, but Snapple stood out from the rest by virtue of an endearing artlessness.

The labels on its bottles were cluttered and amateurish, and its ads seemed, if possible, even more homemade. In one, tennis star Ivan Lendl garbled the brand name into "Shnahpple." Several others featured a Snapple order-processing clerk named Wendy Kaufman.

Cheerful, zaftig, and blessed with a Noo Yawk accent strong enough to peel paint, Wendy blossomed into a minor celebrity known to her fans as the Snapple Lady.

She chatted on-air with Oprah Winfrey and David Letterman, made appearances at retail stores, and accepted Snapple drinkers' invitations to sleep-overs, bar mitzvahs, and proms. On the radio, the brand grew by sponsoring shockmeisters Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh. Stern was an especially effective spokesperson.

He got to know the founders of the business personally and conveyed to his listeners a genuine and infectious regard for the products and the people behind them.

The brand's distribution channels were as unconventional as its promotions. Initially Snapple had very little supermarket coverage. Instead, it flowed through the so-called cold channel: small distributors serving hundreds of thousands of lunch counters and delis, which sold single-serving refrigerated beverages consumed on the premises.

Small as the individual distributors were, they aggregated into a mighty marketing force. By 1994, Snapple was available across the country, and as distributors added painstakingly cultivated supermarket accounts, sales ballooned to $674 million from just $4 million ten years earlier. Aware that Snapple had grown beyond their limited expertise, Greenberg and his partners cast about for a new owner that could take the brand to the next level. Enter Quaker Oats.
Quaker Oats: Snapple