Sun Drop wasn’t born in North Carolina, but the citrus-flavored soft drink was perfected – beginning in 1953 – in Gastonia at a bottling company owned by Charles Pinkney “C.P.” Nanney.
The Charlotte metropolitan area continues to this day as a regional hotbed of Sun Drop sales. The beverage is a “trifecta of lemon, lime and orange,” plus it’s loaded with caffeine, according to local resident Chris Crunkleton.
“Sun Drop was the mixer of choice,” he said. “You never went to Myrtle Beach (in South Carolina) without a couple of liters. And if you ran out, you called home to find out who was coming to the beach and have them bring more.”
Charles Edward Lazier of St. Louis, Mo., invented the original formula for Sun Drop in 1928. At the time, he was a salesman for a manufacturing firm owned by his father, John Frederick Lazier, who folks called “Soda Jack.”
Soda Jack’s company was a successful enterprise, specializing in bottling equipment sales and repairs as well as “bottler consumables, including extracts and concentrate in various flavors.”
And that boy, Charles Lazier, could flat-out “sell.” A large-framed lad, Charles formerly worked as a circus strongman and carnival sideshow barker. He was known to promote “cure-all” properties that he believed were present in the company’s liquid products.
Charles (shown above) convinced his father that they needed “to start creating brands rather than
just selling nameless, generic flavors,” according to Joseph T. Lee III, a
beverage industry historian.
“The first specific brand that I have found being registered by J. F. Lazier Manufacturing Co. is the ‘pure orange extract’ named ‘Cinderella Orange’ in 1921 and marketed as ‘The Drink of Fairyland,’” Lee said.
Soon, other flavors joined the Lazier lineup, such as “Peter Pan Strawberry,” “Little Boy Blue Grape” and “Little Red Riding Hood Cherry.”
The Sun Drop product that was invented in 1928 was “the first soda to use orange pulp and the oil of orange peels,” Lee said. It was just one of several flavorful concoctions that Charles Lazier tinkered with throughout the 1920s-1940s.
In 1949, Charles E. Lazier Jr., just in his early 20s, was working as a technician in the company laboratory. He began to “reformulate” the Sun Drop brand, and it was “reintroduced” in 1951 by his father as a “golden citrus cola” at the American Bottlers of Carbonated Beverages Conference in Washington, D.C.
Lazier shared the formula and samples of Sun Drop with his friend C.P. Nanney, who took the concentrate back to his bottling plant in Gastonia.
Nanney tweaked the taste a bit and looked around for a place to test-market the new version, which was known as “Golden Girl Cola.”
“He picked Red Bridges Barbecue Lodge in Shelby, run by his old friend Red Bridges,” wrote David P. Nanney Jr. of Raleigh, a great nephew of C.P. Nanney. “In July 1953, for a promotion of Bridges’ new restaurant on the U.S. Route 74 Bypass, Bridges gave away free barbecue, and C.P. Nanney provided free 7-ounce glasses of Sun Drop.”
“The
new soft drink was a hit. Later that year, Nanney’s Gastonia plant began
bottling it” and distributing the product throughout a broad geographic region,
David Nanney said.
In
effect, Gastonia was a surrogate “headquarters city” for Sun Drop, as home of its
premier bottler, an arrangement that lasted more than 65 years.
The company that C.P. Nanney formed, Choice USA Beverage, announced in 2019 that it had reached an agreement with Independent Beverage Company (IBC) to move all its bottling operations, including Sun Drop, to IBC’s Charlotte facility.
…But the Sun Drop Museum is in Shawano, Wis.
This is where you can learn about all things associated with Sun Drop.
“In the 1970s until the early 1990s, Sun Drop was promoted in the American South by NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt.”
“On Feb. 18, 2001, Earnhardt died as a result of a basilar skull fracture sustained in a last-lap crash during the Daytona 500. He was 49 years old.”
“His son Dale Earnhardt Jr. was also sponsored by Sun Drop, beginning in 1993.
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment