Vintage soda brands come back to life at Mukilteo business

  • By Jennifer Sasseen For The Herald Business Journal
  • Friday, December 26, 2014 11:36am
  • BusinessMukilteo

Ahh, the sweet taste of yesteryear — a cold soda-pop zinging the senses with a burst of flavor and pure cane sugar without any high-fructose corn syrup.

Brands like Frostie, Cock N Bull, Goody, Nesbitt’s, Lemmy, Jic Jac, O-So and Brownie — all but obsolete a few years ago — have been making a comeback.

Mukilteo-based Orca Beverage Soda Works is dedicated to producing the flavor of these vintage sodas, alchemical mixes of honest ingredients in glass bottles. And it looks like there’s a growing thirst.

Orca Beverage has seen an increase in orders from around the country and further afield like Canada, Indonesia and Australia. The company has gone from producing around 1,000 cases a month of vintage sodas in its early days to many times that today, said owner Mike Bourgeois.

“We do that in a couple of hours now,” he said.

In fact, the business expects to produce as many as 1 million cases of soda this coming year, Bourgeois said.

Bourgeois, 55, started selling the brands out of his car in the late 1980s to mostly small, upscale stores.

Now the beverage company sells to thousands of customers from mom-and-pop specialty stores to the Cost Plus World Market chain and some warehouse Costco stores, including Atlanta, San Diego and Northern California divisions.

The success of Orca Beverage Soda Works, aka Orca Beverage Inc., seems to be a sweet blending of the right man with a vision, the right employees and the right time for retro.

“The distinct imagery of the ’40s and ’50s hearkens back to a time when life was simpler and life was a little easier,” Bourgeois said. “And the imagery is just a feel-good imagery.”

The company’s packaging builds on that, said Jan Tenzler, national sales manager for Orca Beverage.

From bottle labels reminiscent of the painted-on labels of yore, to the design of the retro 10- and 12-pack assortments available seasonally, everything is a careful rendering of yesteryear. The assortment packs are popular gifts, she said.

“Oh my goodness, it’s cheaper than a bottle of wine,” she said. “You go somewhere with this and everybody loves you.”

Bourgeois said his love for all things retro developed while he was growing up and helping to restore old cars in the auto-body repair shop his parents owned in Seattle, but it didn’t merge with the soft-drink industry until his senior year at Seattle University.

His culminating senior project pulled together students from various disciplines to work with “a real-world company” involved in bottling spring water, Bourgeois said.

He got to know local bottlers and the project piqued his interest in the bottling industry.

In 1988, he formed Orca Beverage Inc. and negotiated with local bottlers to produce his first beverage, Orca Sparkling. That’s when he started “to understand about problems and challenges and formulation issues” in business.

More than 50 percent fruit juice, his drink’s pulp content gummed up the works until filters were installed. After that experience, bottlers balked at taking on more jobs for him, prompting Bourgeois to search for a bottling line of his own.

Soon he bought a Pepsi-Cola bottling line that had been written off as a total insurance loss due to flood damage, and rebuilt it.

“We took it all apart,” Bourgeois said, “every nut and bolt, all the bearings, and brought it back to life.”

Besides producing Orca Sparkling for years, his company also dabbled in the energy-drink business at a time when the only competitor was Red Bull, and today produces Dragon Tail energy drinks as a nod to its roots.

Orca Sparkling was discontinued a couple of years ago, though Bourgeois said he wants to bring it back “to keep the old namesake alive.”

The company also produces Krazy Kritter Vitamin Drinks for children, popular at zoos and the only Orca Beverage drink packaged in plastic bottles.

It’s in the vintage-soda field where the company found its true calling, Bourgeois said.

Brands like Spiffy, Lemmy, Mr. Cola, Goody and Jic Jac were no longer being produced at all when Orca Beverage took an interest in them, acquired the trademarks and started researching recipes to come up with the authentic flavors.

Bourgeois estimated his company now owns between 30 and 40 such trademarks.

Production manager Hiro Yokoo, an alchemist of sorts who joined Orca Beverage as a University of Washington intern a few years after Bourgeois started the company, mixes the recipes and adds carbonation for some “tasting and tweaking” until the right mix is reached.

“Lemmy is absolutely the delightful treat I remembered and has not changed,” according to one fan on the company’s Facebook page. “Oh so delicious! Thanks for making it available. It has probably been sixty years since I have enjoyed one.”

Sometimes companies come to Bourgeois and ask him to produce their brand. That’s what happened when Monarch Beverage Company representatives approached Bourgeois about Moxie soda at a trade show in the early 1990s.

Moxie is the oldest mass-produced carbonated beverage in the country.

Founded in 1884 in Massachusetts by Dr. Augustin Thompson of Maine, the drink was originally touted as a “nerve food” guaranteed to cure almost any illness.

The Moxie name made it into the dictionary as a word synonymous with “energy” and “pep,” with its namesake supposedly a favorite drink of President Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s and promoted by baseball slugger Ted Williams in the 1960s.

Popular throughout the country at one time, Moxie’s production diminished for various reasons, including competition from companies like Coca-Cola.

The Monarch Beverage Company was trying to bring it back, producing the beverage through two East Coast bottlers and looking for a bottler on the West Coast. When Bourgeois tasted Moxie, he told the company representatives he didn’t think he could sell the “unusual-tasting” soda.

However, the company continued to pursue it until Bourgeois relented and now Orca Beverage is one of three authorized bottlers of Moxie; local retail outlets include The Root Beer Store in Lynnwood.

While nostalgia is a big part of the initial attraction to Orca Beverage’s vintage sodas, it’s the quality that keeps customers coming back for more, Bourgeois said.

That means pure cane sugar, organic honey, real vanilla and as many other pure ingredients as possible, mixed with water in steel vats, then cooled, carbonated and poured into glass bottles to preserve that old-time flavor.

The company may have reached its highest flavor potential yet with its own line of Americana sodas.

“That is not an old-time brand but it is a retro-looking brand that’s really kind of our flagship brand,” Bourgeois said. “It’s pretty much a culmination of everything we’ve learned about making soda over the years.”

The Americana Honey Cream, created by production manager Yokoo, is “just a phenomenal recipe” and, as cream sodas go, “may be the best in the world,” Bourgeois said.

Cost Plus World Market employee Teresa Menzel, of the company’s Lynnwood store, said it’s her favorite, “a really nice alternative to cream sodas. It’s like you’re eating ice cream.”

Other Americana flavors include black cherry, cherry cola, honey lime ginger, orange cream, root beer and most recently, huckleberry.

New holiday Orca Beverage flavors billed as a “World Market Exclusive” this past holiday season include candy cane, gingerbread, sugar cookie and sugar plum. Orca Beverage created the flavors at World Market’s request, Tenzler said, but “next year, we’ll sell them everywhere.”

Other seasonal flavors include those sold in last fall’s Halloween variety packs: pumpkin spice tonic, werewolf howling ginger beer and wicked apple brew.

Orca Beverage’s portfolio contains more than 100 retro and specialty glass-bottled products. And the list keeps growing, as does the number of customers.

Arlington Hardware and Lumber started carrying Orca Beverage’s vintage sodas just a year or two ago, said longtime employee Gail Moffett.

“It had a big response right from the beginning,” she said, “and it hasn’t stopped.”

Cases of vintage sodas stacked up at the hardware store include Orca Beverage’s O-So Butterscotch Root Beer. Despite its name, the soda is not connected to the town of Oso; it originated in Illinois in 1946.

In fact, every now and then, people call Orca Beverage wondering if there is a connection, Bourgeois said. (Wanting to do something to help following the landslide, but not wanting anyone to think he was taking advantage of a tragic event, he quietly donated cases of the soda to Oso volunteers through The Root Beer Store.) Despite the enthusiasm of Bourgeois’ 16 current employees and a very low turnover rate — he describes them as “a great, self-motivated, highly-intelligent group” — the company is not without challenges.

One of these is a dwindling number of glass-bottle suppliers in this country. Producing glass bottles is a very energy-intensive business, Bourgeois said, “so one by one over the years, they closed.”

The few that are left are dominated by the beer industry, he said, which uses mostly amber bottles. Orca Beverage also uses emerald-green and flint, or clear, bottles.

That leaves Orca Beverage in a tight spot because the company is currently relying on one East Coast manufacturer, yet Bourgeois won’t use anything but glass for his vintage sodas.

“They just don’t belong in cans or plastic,” he said. Determined to stay true to his vision, Bourgeois has had to go overseas to find a second manufacturer.

Space is another challenge for his growing company, Bourgeois said. In the early days, Orca Beverage quickly outgrew its first 3,000-square-foot bottling line and warehouse in Redmond.

Soon it relocated to its current home in a 26,000 square-foot building in Mukilteo, later adding another 10,000 square feet of warehouse space just up the street. Pending city approval, Bourgeois said he plans to build an additional 30,000 square-foot building that would connect the two properties.

The expansion will lead to more jobs for the community, Bourgeois said, but also to more automation as he works on increasing efficiency.

He is proud of the robotic arm he purchased at auction about eight years ago from a Boeing research-and-development department.

It was finally re-programmed and placed on the production line a few months ago, he said, and is particularly useful in filling the labor-intensive vintage-soda variety packs.

The limited supply of refrigerated trucks this time of year is another huge problem for the company. Orca Beverage struggles to fill orders from cold-climate customers because its sodas must be shipped in refrigerated trucks to prevent freezing. Sometimes orders can’t be filled, Tenzler said.

“One of our major issues that we’re dealing with right now is how to move our product around the country,” Bourgeois said. “Especially in the Midwest and the East Coast, which is a growing market for us.”

Regardless of problems, the nature of the vintage-soda industry seems to be a happy one. When she first started at Orca Beverage her two sons were in their teens, Tenzler said, and they all had a lot of fun when she brought sodas home to taste-test. She hears stories from customers who share similar experiences, she said, particularly when there are older members in the crowd.

“We sell smiles and memories,” she said.

Persistence was needed to get the company up and running, Boureois said, and he was lucky that he never had to resort to outside investors; he put his own money into the company and it’s been in the black since the first couple of years. But it’s the employees that really make a business, he said.

“When you get a good group of people together,” Bourgeois said, “a lot of things are possible.”

Talk to us

> Give us your news tips.

> Send us a letter to the editor.

> More Herald contact information.

Support local journalism

If you value local news, make a gift now to support the trusted journalism you get in The Daily Herald. Donations processed in this system are not tax deductible.