The Cola Conquest/Soda Spectrum Blog

The Schmidt Museum closes, and we remember a magical visit with Jan Schmidt in 2009

2011-08-19T00:41:00.007-04:00

August 19, 2011 - If you've been following along in the pages of the Cola Conquest magazine and the Soda Spectrum magazine, you know that the Schmidt family has decided to close the museum and will be auctioning their collection off over the next few years.

In honor of this monumental event, I'm reprinting the story I wrote for Issue #5 of the Cola Conquest magazine about the Schmidt family and my trip to the Schmidt Museum of Coca-Cola Memorabilia back in 2009. Enjoy!

Coca-Cola Dreams... at the Schmidt Museum of Coca-Cola Memorabilia
By Blair Matthews

For Coca-Cola collectors, the Schmidt Museum of Coca-Cola Memorabilia is 32,000 sq. ft. filled with historical wonders. The largest private Coca-Cola collection in the world, it represents a lifetime of dedication to a company by a family who has seen ups and downs in an industry unlike any other. Building an enormous and priceless collection of memorabilia certainly wasn’t the intention when Bill and Jan Schmidt began their journey with The Coca-Cola Company more than 40 years ago. In fact, their collection started out the same way most collections do... with a single piece.

For most of the years that they were associated with The Coca-Cola Company collecting was secondary to bottling Coke at their Elizabethtown Coca-Cola plant.

The Early Days
The history of Coca-Cola and the Schmidt family goes back to 1901 when Bill Schmidt’s grandfather began bottling in Louisville, Kentucky, one of only five plants that had been granted bottling rights at that time.

As it turned out, the territory served by the Louisville plant was too large to service and it was eventually split in the 1920s, with one son going to establish a plant in Shelbyville, Kentucky, and Bill’s father Luke was sent to run a plant in Elizabethtown.
When Bill was just 13-years-old, his father passed away. While the other two sons were planning to absorb operations of the Elizabethtown Coca-Cola bottling plant, Luke’s wife Irene stepped in and took over its management instead.

In those days, says Jan Schmidt, it was unheard of for a woman to be in that position of authority. “She ran that plant all through World War II which was quite a feat because of Fort Knox. There was a mandate that any soldier (at Fort Knox) was to be supplied with Coca-Cola. So she had to bottle night and day to supply the troops of Fort Knox.”

And in a time when sugar and supplies were being rationed Irene was being granted extra sugar and syrup to keep up with demand.

While Irene kept things going with the Elizabethtown plant, Bill was growing up; he finished high school, went on to attend MIT and learned to fly. That skill landed him in the Airforce as a pilot in the Korean War for nearly 5 years.

It was during a 13-couple blind date in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in November 1953 that Bill and Jan first met. They were married 4 months later. At the end of his term in the Airforce, Bill and his new bride returned to Elizabethtown along with their young son.
Admittedly, Jan says, as a big city girl (she had previously lived in Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles) moving to the small town of Elizabethtown was a shock.

She recalls one of her first days in Elizabethtown when she pushed the baby buggy down to the local market and asked for artichokes; no one knew what she was talking about. Then, at the drugstore she asked for The New Yorker magazine and was met with a look of confusion.

She wheeled the buggy back home as fast as she could. Bill, who would come home for lunch since their house was right across the street from the plant, was greeted by his wife in tears. “I said, ‘nobody’s going to like me and it’s such a small town if they don’t like me there’s nowhere to go’.”

Eventually she learned that even though she was in a small town where everyone knew her, she realized it was a very friendly place to live, work, and raise their children; and people genuinely cared.

Building a brand
When Bill took over as president at the Elizabethtown plant there were 35 employees, the machinery was worn out, wages were extremely low and moral even lower. There was much work for Bill to do at the time. The first thing he did was expand the plant.

“He told me when we married, ‘you know Jan, my father left me a Coca-Cola plant and it’s doing well. I could play a lot of golf, but I feel I owe it to my father to make more of what he left me just as my father did with the plant his father left him’.”
Bill added onto the plant, he hired more people, he raised wages, and just when things were going well, he did something that made their situation even better.

He decided he wanted to add a canning line.

For a plant the size of the one in Elizabethtown, implementing a canning line in those days was virtually unheard of. The expense alone could be crippling if it didn’t succeed. At that time, there were only three independent Coca-Cola bottling plants in the U.S. with can lines - Los Angeles, New York, and Norfolk.

“Bill called American Can Company and he said, ‘my name is Bill Schmidt, I live in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and I want to put in a can line.’ The man on the other end of the phone said, ‘absolutely Mr. Schmidt we will send some people down to talk to you next week,” Jan says.

When he hung up, everyone in the office at American Can Company ran and got an Atlas since they’d never heard of Elizabethtown, Kentucky.

When they saw where it was and the size of the town they figured he was out of his mind.

Nevertheless, they came down to Elizabethtown and met with the Schmidts. True to his word, Bill pursued it and had it installed. “Some of it - the conveyor - was second hand... we really did it on the cheap, as cheap as you can, but can lines are very expensive. We went very heavily into debt to build the business,” she says.

“The night that the can line became operational - it was maybe 1:00 am when they were going to roll off that first can. I remember looking around and here were all our drivers and they’d all come in because they wanted to load their trucks the minute those cans came off... they were so excited.”

Because the Elizabethtown Coca-Cola bottling company was only the fourth plant to put Coke in cans, they were servicing a huge area including Texas, Michigan, and many points in between.

They quickly outgrew their little red brick plant and Bill, who might have become an architect had he not gone into the family business, designed the new plant himself. He hired an engineer to make sure that his plans were feasible.

By the time the new plant was complete Jan was working with Bill in the office. When their boys were in school full time she worked alongside her husband doing public relations and eventually worked her way up to become vice-president.

Being the business-savy entrepreneurs that they were, Bill and Jan saw the wisdom of branching out into the trucking business. Afterall, they were trucking Coca-Cola to towns and cities in a number of U.S. states. It didn’t make sense from a financial standpoint to have those trucks coming back empty. So Cardinal Carriers was born.

And when various factories in the Elizabethtown territory were looking for a vending company to bring food into their lunch rooms, the Schmidts started up Vendomat vending company. The logic was that if another vending company was hired there was a possibility that they might bring Pepsi on board as the brand they offered rather than Coca-Cola. Having a vending company allowed the Coke in Elizabethtown to keep flowing in key areas.

Getting bitten by the collecting bug
The first incarnation of the Schmidt Coca-Cola Museum was a shelf in Bill’s office at the bottling plant. They’d been to visit a collegue who had a few older Coca-Cola pieces on display and it seemed like a novel idea.

Bill and Jan decided to fly to Indianna for the first-ever antique advertising show, thinking they might find a few things to fill their modest shelf. When they got there they were amazed at the number of items that Coca-Cola had put their name on.

“The collecting bug bit,” Jan says. “It’s a disease. When it bites you, there’s no hope for you. The next day we got into our station wagon and drove back to Indianapolis and bought everything we could afford. That was the beginning of our collection.”

In 1977 a call from a collector in Georgia asking if he and his group of a dozen or so Coca-Cola collectors could come up and see the Schmidt’s collection prompted Bill to build a room above the packaging area in the plant to display their items.
Bill, like most other Coca-Cola bottlers at that time, had always encouraged people to be able to come into the plant to see how the product was made. At the Elizabethtown plant, visitors could walk along a balcony and watch the bottling line in action and then continue on into the museum room.

When the time came for the visit from the Georgia collectors the group of a dozen had grown to nearly 100 instead.

In the meantime, the single room was overflowing to the point that it took up two rooms and some items had to be stored.

Bill and Jan started going to auctions to add to their collection and then as people started to become more aware that they were serious collectors, people started calling them with pieces they were selling. “If there was a significant auction going on somewhere in the country we would go to it. The thing is, as we collected, at first we collected things that were pretty or attractive to look at. But then we discovered that these artifacts were telling us the history of this country while Coca-Cola was evolving. Then we began looking for things that would fill in the historical gaps,” Jan says.

Pieces from the Depression era, things from World War I & II were artifacts that were of particular interest as Coca-Cola was becoming more popular.

As they attended auctions around the country they began to get a reputation that they’d bid as high as it took to get a particular item. Jan says many times, that just wasn’t the case. “We knew what we thought it was worth to us to buy and if it went beyond that we didn’t buy it. People would be bidding against us and they thought we would just keep going until we bought it, and we would not have. If we would have gone to a certain point where we felt it wasn’t worth it, we would have quit. But people didn’t seem to know that so they would drop out. That was unfortunate because we felt a little badly.”

The One That Got Away
Visitors might tour through the Schmidt Museum now and wonder if they own one of every vintage piece that was ever made. Schmidt says that’s not so. She tells the story of the Boudoir Clock.

A woman in Virginia sent the Schmidts a photograph of some old Coca-Cola trays that she wanted to sell. In the photograph were trays that they neither wanted or needed - by that point they already had a complete set of vintage trays. “In the background of the photo was this little Coca-Cola clock, and Bill and I got our magnifying glasses out and I said, ‘my golly Bill, we’ve never seen that before’. He said, ‘We need to go to Virginia’.”

As luck would have it, they were already scheduled to attend a bottlers meeting in Washington D.C. After the meeting they rented a car and drove down to Virginia to see the mysterious clock. “The first thing we saw when we pulled up in front of this little bitty house - and there’s nothing wrong with little bitty if it’s neat and clean - but the first thing we saw was a collection of, as we say in the south, commodes, on the front lawn. And the house went downhill from there,” Jan remembers. The woman had somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 cats roaming around inside the house.

“She had laid out these Coca-Cola trays, and of course we knew we didn’t want those trays. Back on a table was this absolutely incredible clock with a girl in a blue dress, and we knew immediately it was from the 1800s and we were just blown away,” she says. They very casually looked at the trays and then Jan brought up the Coca-Cola clock in the corner. The woman nonchalantly picked it up and plunked it down for them to see, as both Jan and Bill cringed at how she was handling it.
Bill told the woman that he thought the clock was kind of interesting and that it would fill a spot in their collection, an understatement of the year, Jan says. The woman thought for a moment, then asked them what they’d give her for it.
“Bill named a very fair price - my husband was the most straight-arrow man in the world - her eyes just lit up because she had no idea. But he was not the kind of man who would say ‘I’ll give you $50 for it’ - he was not the kind of man that could do that.”
Then the woman realized she might just be sitting on a gold mine.

Jan says the woman got this cunning look on her face and suggested that she put it up for bids - and asked Bill what his next offer would be. He asked her for a piece of paper and a pencil; he wrote down a price on the paper, folded it up, and handed it back to the woman. “He wrote down the exact same price,” Jan says. “Of course, we didn’t get the clock.”

Years later, the Schmidts bought a significant Coca-Cola collection from a man who lived in Washington State. In that collection was an almost identical clock... everything was the same except the woman’s dress was a different color. “I know it’s out there somewhere. Someone may have it and not even know what they have.”

Jan says that although they didn’t get the clock they had gone to see in Virginia, they never regretted walking away from a potential gem for their collection. “That’s just the way Bill was. He offered her a fair price, she owned it, if she didn’t want to sell it for that then so be it.”

But when you lose some pieces, you gain others unexpectedly.

The Schmidts received a letter from someone in Quincy, Illinois, who had a 1914 tin Betty Girl. They sent a photograph of the ‘Betty’ that was in really good shape, along with their asking price. “They were so far off, it was just a pitiful little amount, it just wasn’t right. Bill wrote back and he said, ‘I would like to buy it, but quite frankly I could not send you that amount of money because it’s worth much more than that.’ So he wrote a check for a very fair amount for that tin Betty. We didn’t hear from them again, and then this crate arrived. In it was the tin Betty and a cardboard sign that they also had and they said, ‘You’ve been so honest with us we want to give you this’.”

As it turned out, the cardboard sign was worth much more than the Betty.

Embroiled in a battle
In the early 1980s, The Coca-Cola Company decided they didn’t like the fact that their bottlers were so independent, Jan says. The company tried several times over the years to take over the bottlers and the bottlers, being very independent, had worked hard to build their business and were proudly entrenched in their communities.

“All of a sudden they switched from a sugar-based syrup to a high fructose corn syrup,” Jan says. “That cost way less than the sugar syrup but they raised the price of the syrup to the bottlers because they were trying to weed them out. That wasn’t fair, that wasn’t right. According to the contract, you paid on a sliding scale for your syrup - as sugar prices went up you paid more for your syrup and the bottlers were very willing to do that. But to pay more for a syrup that was never going to slide up and also was so much less to produce, it was shocking to the bottlers. It was the way the company was going to try to squeeze out the smaller bottlers.”

Bill was on the Board of Governors of the Coca-Cola Bottlers Association for nearly 40 years and was well-respected among his bottling peers. A fellow bottler wrote to Bill asking for his opinion on what the company was trying to do to them. Bill quickly found himself as the spokesperson of a group of bottlers that were of the same mindset, and eventually, he and several other bottlers met with the high brass, including president Don Keogh, at the company’s headquarters in Atlanta, to voice their concerns.

The meeting did not go well.

The three men pleaded with company executives to listen to the bottlers’ concerns, to understand their problems, to see what the changes were doing to them, and to find a compromise that could satisfy everyone involved.

“They just looked at us and said, ‘no’. And Bill said, ‘I really don’t want to say this, but I am authorized to say this... in that case, we may have to go to court’. That was the hardest thing for my husband to say because he grew up in the business. Coca-Cola was in his blood. To turn against the company was something that was so hard for him,” Jan says.

A class action suit was filed and 70 other Coca-Cola bottlers joined the crusade. But along the way, The Coca-Cola Company started buying out some of those bottlers in the lawsuit. “It was horrendous. A bottler called Bill one night, we had known him for so long, and he was crying. He said, ‘Bill, I believe in everything we’re trying to do, but I can’t afford it. They’ve offered me more money than I knew existed. I’m going to sell’. All of these bottlers were families, it was in their hearts and in their blood... and (the court battle) was terribly expensive.”

The expenses mounted quickly. Since the lawsuit was filed in Delaware, the bottlers had to have legal representation from Delaware. The Schmidts, who were now at the heart of the process, rented a dreary little apartment there so that they could be available for court dates and appearances.

At first things were seemingly going their way; the judge found in their favor at a number of points along the way.
As the litigation dragged on, The Coca-Cola Company introduced diet Coke to their portfolio. Suddenly the bottlers had another bone of contention: there was no high fructose corn syrup in diet Coke and thus it wasn’t contained in the bottlers’ contract. Coca-Cola was seemingly able to charge its bottlers whatever price it set for the syrup to produce it.

Jan says it was a perfect addition to their lawsuit because it illustrated nicely the point they were trying to prove.

Closing arguments finally came for the trial; the end - either way - was coming. As both sides awaited the verdict something strange happened. Judge Schwartz mysteriously disappeared, citing an undisclosed illness.

Four or five months later, a new judge (Judge Joseph J. Farnan, Jr.) was assigned the case. “I will never forget walking in, sitting down, and here is this new judge who says, ‘well I don’t know anything about Coca-Cola. We’re going to have to start over.’ I got up quietly, walked into the Ladies’ room and balled my eyes out.”

Judge Schwartz eventually returned to the bench, but not to oversee the Coca-Cola case.

Finally the end came, 11 years after the trial had begun, and the judge awarded the bottlers $1 in damages and he found totally in favor of The Coca-Cola Company.

The bottlers appealed the decision in appellate court but they lost.

“That took a great deal out of Bill because he had to be constantly standing up and fighting against people he had known since he was a child. He didn’t want to do anything that would make The Coca-Cola Company look bad even though they were being bad. His loyalty was such to the brand itself.”

When Bill and Jan were first married, there were over 1,250 independent bottlers in the United States. Today there are slightly more than 100 left.

Despite years of fighting against the company that they helped build, both Bill and Jan still adored the brand itself. “It was two separate things for sure,” Jan says. “We were never bitter. I felt that Bill and I had spent 11 years fighting a battle that was David and Goliath. We knew that there was a huge chance that we wouldn’t be able to succeed against the company, but it was the right thing to do. Here in the South they have a saying about the Civil War and that is ‘The South stood up when it should have shut up’. And people have told us that, but I don’t believe that, Bill didn’t believe that, and the bottlers who hung in there with us didn’t believe that either - and I’m real proud of all of it. My only regret is that we drew a line, and then had to fight across that line.”

Ultimately, the Schmidt family sold the Elizabethtown Coca-Cola bottling franchise in 1999, citing outrageous demands from the company on the bottler. They did, however, include a provision in the sale stating no employee from the Elizabethtown bottling plant would lose their job.

Selling the Coca-Cola franchise was a heart-breaking decision for the Schmidts.

“Being a Coca-Cola bottler had a very special something about it that was not like being four generations of selling automobiles or something like that. There was just something about it because it was so engrained in the community; scoreboards, the logo was everywhere. Now the schools make you pay to put in a Coke machine. Before they would beg you for a Coke machine because they make huge profits from it. And then all the food police people coming along going to tax soft drinks... nobody ever said that Coca-Cola was a food, nobody ever said it did anything for you except give you a moment of pleasure. That’s the way it was marketed and that’s the way it is. During the Depression it cost 5 cents; it was one small pleasure you could afford to buy for yourself. It was a luxury. It wasn’t shoes, it wasn’t food, it was a little 5 cent luxury at the end of the week you could find a nickel and buy a Coke. It was something that was not a neccesity and that made you feel like a real person again.”

The Schmidt family kept the bottling plant itself, at first bottling private label sodas. Soon after, they sold the plant to the Cott Corporation, a private-label giant in the soft drink market. Time passed, and Cott, Jan says, ran their operations and the bottling plant into the ground. It was a shell of what Bill had once designed it to be.

“We had a big Koi pond in the lobby (of the bottling plant) and Cott people called us one day and they said, ‘do you want to buy your fish?’ The fish were a symbol to us because when Bill was building the plant, the whole thing in our minds was when we put the koi in the pond we know that plant will be finished,” Jan says.

The koi eventually found a home at the Nashville Zoo.

The museum closes - temporarily
Not long before the sale of the Elizabethtown franchise, the rules for allowing the public into a bottling facility were changed by the State for health and safety reasons, which spelled the end of tours through the Schmidt’s museum display in their plant.
This did not sit well with Coca-Cola collectors who were eager to visit the Schmidt’s still-growing collection, so two years later, a deal was struck with the Elizabethtown Tourism Bureau to have a small portion of their artifacts on display there as a temporary setup. It wasn’t long before Bill and Jan decided that they’d build a separate building dedicated solely to house their collection, but it was an ambitious project that took 5 years to realize.

Around that same time Bill’s health began to fail as the project was beginning to take shape. Fortunately, he was able to see the finished museum before he passed away in 2007.

Currently the museum has about one-third of their total collection available for viewing. The rest is stored, some of it too fragile even to see the constant light of day.

These days the sheer mass of artifacts they’ve acquired over the years still surprises Jan. “When we were building this building and then when we began putting the artifacts out Bill and I would come in late at night when there wasn’t anybody here and we’d walk along and he’d look at me and he’d put his arm around me and say, ‘what in the world were we thinking about?’ If we’d had any idea of the scope of this, I’m sure we would have said, ‘we don’t the time or the money to do that, let’s just take care of the shelves.’ Of course we never regretted doing it. Ever.”

The most interesting and valuable pieces found a place among the many displays throughout the museum.
One piece that always grabs the attention of collectors is the mechanical Coca-Cola clown from Texas. “He’s from the 30s. When we bought him we had to have him shipped home by air. He was going to come in a cargo plane but they discovered when they got him to the airport, crated up, that he wouldn’t fit (through the cargo doors). They had to uncrate him, wrap him up in bubble wrap and put him in sideways. He had a hard time getting here but he’s here, and so is his dog.”

Picking a favorite
Of all the Coca-Cola artifacts that they’ve collected over the years, Jan says, if she had to pick a favorite, it would be the festoons.

Festoons, for those unfamiliar, were cardboard signs that were made to hang on the tops of back bars of soda fountains.

Jan points to a festoon listed in Petretti’s Coca-Cola Collectibles Price Guide (12th Edition) that hangs in the Schmidt Museum. “When we drove back up to Indianapolis that second day we bought three of these for $25 each. We gave one to our cousin (the bottler in Shelbyville) and we kept two,” she says. Petretti currently lists the value for that festoon in question at over $8,000.

“Almost always when the phone calls would come in about items that people wanted to sell, they would be put through to my desk. A man called and he had this particular festoon; from the minute he described it I knew how rare it must be. I knew The Coca-Cola Company had one, but we certainly had not and I had never seen one other than in Atlanta. Always, if something came to me by telephone that I thought we would like to have I would say, ‘well let me call you back’, and then I would talk to Bill about it. But this was so rare, I thought if I don’t say ‘yes’ right now, then we’ll lose it - I just knew it. So I told him ‘yes’.

“I went into Bill’s office and I said, ‘for the first time I bought something significant and I haven’t even asked you what you think.’ He sort of leaned back and then he got this smile - because he knew it was a done deal - I described it to him and he said, ‘YES, that’s good, that’s really good!’”

And when the Schmidts added pieces to their collection they always went to auctions together and travelled together; rarely did they go off in search of pieces separately. “We always did everything together, and it worked. We had a very close marriage, he was very special and he thought I was very special; we were very lucky to have each other.”

Admittedly, Jan says since Bill’s passing two years ago, her life has changed dramatically. “I found it difficult to come out here for a long time because everything I see, I remember when we bought it. I remember a story behind it, and of course sometimes we went on wild goose chases. A man called us one time and described a calendar to us and oh my gosh, it’s really old and it’s really rare... Bill asked him questions about it that would make sure that it was what he said it was. We decided to go and take a look at it and if it was what we thought it was we would buy it. We drove about 300 miles and it was a calendar that we ourselves had put out as a reproduction calendar - it said ‘reproduction’ on it, but he was so sure it was old. So you know, it didn’t always work out.”

“We’re very proud of what we have and we’re very proud of our collection - it’s the finest and largest privately owned collection in the world,” she says. “We have quite a few things that (The Coca-Cola Company) doesn’t even have in their collection.”

As for the museum adding more vintage pieces to their collection, Jan says they’re not actively looking. “Nothing really really rare has come our way. I think to add more at this point would be a little bit greedy,” she says with a smile.

Perhaps there is a cure for ‘the sickness’ afterall.

Then again, when she agrees that you don’t generally hear about old Coca-Cola pieces being unearthed in attics or basements anymore, she says, with a touch of hope in her voice, “But you never know.”

Coca-Cola Convention 2010

2010-07-08T00:00:00.002-04:00

If you've never been to a National Coca-Cola Collectors Club Convention, you need to see it to believe it. In the past I've tried to explain 'room-hopping' to non-collectors and they look at me like I'm crazy.

Room-hopping is a unique bit of Coca-Cola collecting to experience. Here's how it works: you set up your Coca-Cola 'stuff' to sell in your hotel room. You prop the door open and hang out something to alert other collectors that your room is open. People casually walk in and out of open rooms, buy (hopefully) and chat with each other. I've met some of the nicest people while room-hopping.

Right now, I'm sitting here typing this blog entry from a hotel room in Milwaukee, WI, site of the 2010 Coca-Cola Collectors Club Convention. Today's activities were fast and furious all over the place. We had seminars this afternoon, and the silent auction for a couple of hours brought people out of the woodwork. Earlier I dropped in to listen to a 'first time attendees' seminar hosted by longtime collectors Ron Antonio and Elizabeth Wright.

Even though this is my third National Convention, I thought it might be a good idea to see things through the eyes of a first-timer, since I, too, was once in that same position. Ironically, this was my first 'first-timer' seminar - and I still learned lots.

This week I haven't bought too much... yet. But there's still another full day to find some new treasures. Something neat that I picked up was a test-market re-sealable Coca-Cola can ($5). Another cool little piece of Coca-Cola history to add to my Coke bathroom.

Lots more to pass along to you, but for now, it's off to bed. Thursday is my last full day here in Milwaukee and it promises to be busy with Ron's "What's It Worth" seminar where he pulls items from the upcoming Friday Live Auction and the crowd has the chance to guess what each item will go for at auction. Thursday night is Chapter Night, with various regional chapters gathering for their own little get-together.

I'll post again soon, and remember - if you couldn't make it to this year's National Convention, next year it's back in Atlanta. Make your plans now, you won't regret it!

New Coke's 25th Anniversary

2010-04-23T15:32:00.006-04:00

Today, April 23, 2010, there are lots of people connected to Coca-Cola that are writing about the 25th Anniversary of New Coke. These days there's a whole generation of kids and young adults that completely missed that controversial time in Coca-Cola's history - they also missed out on tasting New Coke for themselves. Five years ago, I wrote a lengthy feature story to commemorate the 20th Anniversary of New Coke for the magazine. I think the story still holds up well - so I'm including it below. And hey, if you're coming to the party late, you really SHOULD check out The Cola Conquest magazine... trust me, if you're a Coke collector, this is the magazine for you.

Coca-Cola's Big Mistake Twenty (five) Years Later...
By Blair Matthews
On the night of April 22, 1985, somewhere near Purchase, NY, Roger Enrico, president of Pepsi-Cola USA, was smiling. And who could blame him? He was about to declare victory in the longest running war in cola history - a knock-down, dragout affair between two companies the likes of which the world had never seen before. Little did Enrico know that what was starting out as a victory over big red rival Coca-Cola was about to snowball into a summer-long soap opera epic. He probably had butterflies in his stomach much the same as Coca-Cola CEO Roberto Goizueta and president Don Keough but for very different reasons.

When morning dawned on April 23rd, it was an average Tuesday in every way possible. But the world was about to learn that the fate of their favorite cola, with the most well-known trademark on Earth, was destined for the most drastic change in its nearly 100 year history. And no one was ready.

For several years prior, Pepsi-Cola had been slowly closing the marketshare gap between the two cola giants and as the Pepsi Taste Challenge had indicated, people seemingly wanted a slightly sweeter cola with less bite than Coke had. No matter how much The Coca-Cola Co. spent on advertising, no matter what they did... the gap with their biggest rival was closing fast - something drastic had to be done.

According to a New York Times report, Coca-Cola came upon the new formula while developing Diet Coke, which was introduced in 1982. With Coca-Cola executives mindful of their slipping market share, they began their own taste tests using Coca-Cola and several new variations. In testing a number of taste formulas, the company found one that stood out. When it was put in a Coke can and compared side by side with the old formula in blind taste tests, the new product was chosen by consumers 62 percent to 39 percent.

Over the Christmas holidays in 1984, top Coke executives including Goizueta, Keough, Brian Dyson and Ike Herbert decided unanimously to change the Coke formula just shy of its 99th anniversary.

While the new formula was being finalized, a set of commercials for the brand re-launch were being filmed with actors unaware they were pitching a new formula.

The brand re-launch was kept top secret - even Coca-Cola bottlers and the majority of Coke employees weren't told of the impending reformulation until the day before the infamous New York press conference. For bottlers who knew all too well the lagging sales numbers, the reformulation was welcome news. Goizueta and Keough received a standing ovation from bottlers as Goizueta proclaimed to them in a private gathering, “Now we're back in the ballgame.” The euphoric feeling was short-lived.

Ironically, the meeting with bottlers on April 22 was held in the Woodruff Arts Center, named after Coca-Cola 'boss' Robert Woodruff, who had dedicated most of his life to the company and promoting the original formula. Woodruff passed away only a month before the reformulation announcement.

The Press Conference Heard Around the World

April 23, 1985 is one of those days in history that Coke drinkers remember well. It ranks up there with other world events where you always remember where you were and what you were doing when you heard the news. If Goizueta had taken a moment to open up the morning paper that day before heading to Lincoln Center to make his earth-shattering announcement, he might have been fuming. Since word had leaked out several days before the formula change press conference, Roger Enrico took out a full page ad in major newspapers across the United States the day of the Coke press conference, declaring that the Cola Wars were over - Pepsi had won. To celebrate their victory, Enrico declared that Friday, April 26, 1985 would be a company-wide holiday for Pepsi employees.

It's hard to say what Goizueta thought of his rival's cocky newspaper announcement - he probably figured it was only a matter of time before the 'new' formula Coke made people forget they'd ever heard of Pepsi. Afterall, Goizueta himself said that New Coke was the surest move ever made.

Goizueta and Keough walked onto a stage at Lincoln Center for a press conference with 700 journalists and film crews - along with satellite feeds to media in Atlanta, Houston and Los Angeles. The world was watching.

The lights dimmed and a montage of Coca-Cola feel-good moments were shown - shots of Americana with Coke imagery... the Grand Canyon, the Statue of Liberty, wheat fields, Eisenhower and JFK, and Families. When the commercials were finally over, the lights returned and Goizueta took to the podium. “The best has been made even better,” he announced, reading from his prepared notes. “Some may choose to call this the single boldest marketing move in the history of the packaged goods business. We simply call it the surest move ever made. Simply stated, we have a new formula for Coke.”

When the floor was finally opened up to questions from the press, they were anything but kind.

“Are you 100 percent certain that this won't bomb?” a St. Louis reporter questioned.

Another journalist asked Goizueta to describe the new taste. At first he stumbled, then found the words he was searching for. 'I would say it is smoother, uh, uh, rounder, yet, uh, yet bolder... a more harmonious flavor,' Goizueta responded.

When asked if the company was changing the formula in response to the Pepsi Challenge, Goizueta lost his composure. 'Oh gosh no,' he said. 'The Pepsi Challenge? When did that happen?'

Question after question was pelted towards Goizueta and Keough.

A final question was asked that left a bitter taste in the confident C.E.O.'s mouth, asking whether diet Coke might be reformulated, 'assuming that this is a success'.

“No. And I didn't assume that this is a success. It is a success,' Goizueta snapped.

And just like that, the press conference was over.

The early publicity that New Coke received was mixed - but largely favorable. More than 80 percent of the U.S. population was aware of the new formula within days of the announcement.

The Coca-Cola Company took to the streets of Atlanta for its huge sampling campaign. In New York, workers who were renovating the Statue of Liberty were the first in New York to get cans of New Coke.

Coke spared no expense with red and white balloons, fireworks, New Coke samples, and airplanes dragging advertising banners through the skies. It was pagentry at its grandest.

But it didn't take long for the public to react to the formula change and it was perhaps the biggest collective rejection in the history of consumerism.

Soonafter, Coke loyalists asserted their dislike for New Coke in ways you had to see to believe.

Dan Lauck, a television journalist from San Antonio drank nothing but six-and-a-half ounce bottles of Coke - at a rate of 15 per day. He regularly skipped breakfast and lunch just so he could continue to drink Coke while managing his weight. He hated New Coke, and he knew he'd never switch. When he heard the news about New Coke, he immediately went out and bought 110 cases of the original.

Members of the press, mindful of the public's obvious dislike for New Coke, ran their own taste tests, surveys and public opinion polls. The results were obvious by the endless stories printed in the month of May as the media reported the bad taste that folks were left with.

Houston Astrodome crowds booed New Coke commercials on the stadium's giant video screen. Novelty songs were written about when 'Coke WAS it'. And yes, even Coca-Cola delivery drivers were assaulted.

Mark Pendergrast, author of the popular book For God, Country & Coca-Cola doesn't recall a lot of personal memories of April 23, 1985 - at the time, he rarely drank Coca-Cola and New Coke certainly wasn't an issue that affected him much at the time. But in researching and writing his history book about The Coca-Cola Company years later, he had a unique perspective, unjaded by a formula change that insensed cola connoisseurs across North America.

“It was amazing that everyone was having this gigantic nervous breakdown about it. When I researched and wrote the book I interviewed a bunch of people for whom it did mean everything.”

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, America had lost its identity, Pendergrast says. From Watergate and Vietnam, to high inflation and very rapid change in the country. It caused a loss of confidence by the American public.

“All kinds of things were changing under our feet,' he says. 'Coca-Cola was really a symbol of something that was seemingly solid and it represented something that wasn't changing. So when they changed it, it really hit people where they hurt because of the slide of our culture into disfunction. People were looking back nostalgically on a time which certainly had its problems but where we seemed to be more together as a country.”

Marketing experts suggested that the company's original studies and taste tests had missed one very key aspect - they had failed to take into account the world's loyalty to the 99-year-old drink and their emotional attachment to it. Studies had focused on taste alone rather than brand preference. And when taste testers blindly chose New Coke over original Coke, they were never told that New Coke would ultimately replace the original.

Admittedly, it was a mistake but in some folks' minds, it was a national disaster.

And then there were the angry calls and letters that the Coca-Cola Company's head office was flooded with.

In early May, it was about 1,000 calls a day to the 1-800-COKE consumer hotline. By June it was 8,000 calls a day.

Richard Mix, one of the leading authorities on Coke bottle collecting, and resides just outside Atlanta, came close to working for the Coke call center that same spring.

“In 1985 I was in college at The University of Georgia. When The Coca-Cola Company introduced New Coke in April I was applying for summer internships at numerous companies. The day after I accepted an internship at Rockwell I got a call from Coke offering a summer job in the consumer product information center. They had to expand the call center due to the major increase in consumer calls. After much consideration, I decided to stay with my commitment and work at Rockwell,” he says.

Mix often wonders what would have happened career-wise had the call from Coke come a day earlier.

How to sell the world a New Coke?

Bill Baver worked for The Coca-Cola Company for some 37 years on the delivery route and then in the pre-mix area of the company. Fortunately, he retired nearly a full year before the introduction of New Coke in '85 and avoided the consumer backlash.

The reaction of the introduction of New Coke in 1985 by consumers certainly didn't come as a shock to Baver. 'Because we've been living on it since we were weaned,” he points out. “I might have been bitter in 1985 because I wasn't happy with my pension - I probably drank more whiskey than Coke at that time anyway,” Baver jokes.

Though he doesn't envy the salesforce that had to go out and try to sell New Coke to a dissatisfied public, Baver has no doubts about how he would have done it. “I would still be going out there and telling you it's the best damn drink in the world. I'm just that type of guy. I'd swear that it's the best thing there is and nothing's different although we know there is.”

But some Coke drinkers weren't content with any explanation or sales pitch.

In Marietta, Georgia, a Coca-Cola delivery man was assaulted by a woman with an umbrella while he stocked a grocery store shelf with New Coke. “You bastard,” she yelled, “you ruined it - it tastes like shit!” When a nearby Pepsi driver snickered at the scene, she blasted him as well. “You stay out of it! This is family business. Yours is worse than shit!”

The Company Conceeds Defeat:

June sales of New Coke dropped off the map. To make matters worse, a 57-year-old Seattle man, Gay Mullins, founded a group he called the Old Cola Drinkers of America. Together with his supporters, he garnered significant media attention by publically dumping New Coke down the sewer while the media filmed his every move. Mullins also filed a class-action lawsuit against Coca-Cola to force the company to return to the original formula. It was thrown out of court.

Nearly 40,000 letters of protest piled up at Coke's head office in Atlanta.

It was finally becoming clear to Coca-Cola what must be done.

On July 11, less than 3 months after the introduction of New Coke, the Company acknowledged they had made a major miscalculation. Once again Goizueta and Keough faced the press to announce the return of Coca-Cola Classic.

“There is a twist to this story which will please every humanist and will probably keep Harvard professors puzzled for years,” said Keough at the press conference. “The simple fact is that all the time and money and skill poured into consumer research on the new Coca-Cola could not measure or reveal the deep and abiding emotional attachment to original Coca-Cola felt by so many people.

“The passion for original Coca-Cola - and that is the word for it, passion - was something that caught us by surprise... It is a wonderful American mystery, a lovely American enigma, and you cannot measure it any more than you can measure love, pride, or patriotism.

“Some critics will say Coca-Cola made a marketing mistake. Some cynics will say we planned the whole thing. The truth is we are not that dumb and we are not that smart.”

As the press conference came to a close, Keough presented Gay Mullins with the first case of Coca-Cola Classic.

Suddenly, it was a love-fest for Coca-Cola, with newspapers across North America splashing the news across front pages everywhere. Letters and calls continued to come in from consumers, but this time they were messages of delight, relief, and thanks.

For Coke aficionados, all was right with the world again.

For nearly a year afterwards, both Cokes co-existed side by side. But confusion in the marketplace about how to sell both simultaneously, a lack of shelf space, and a shrinking market share of New Coke helped it disappear from most North American markets.

All told, the New Coke fiasco cost The Coca-Cola Company $4-million to research and develop. After a few dismal months in 1985, the cola giant roared back with the help of a grateful American public. The marketing blunder of epic proportions had inadvertently taken its misguided company to the top once more.

Pendergrast says he has often thought about what other products, if they had changed the flavor of the product, would have caused such an incredible uproar. “I can't think of a branded product that that would be true of.”

The Happy Accident Remembered:

In 1995, The Coca-Cola Company held a celebration honoring New Coke's 10th Anniversary. Roberto Goizuetta addressed Coke employees at the event saying, “We set out to change the dynamics of sugar colas in the United States, and we did exactly that - albeit not in the way we had planned. But the most significant result of ‘new Coke’ - by far,” Goizueta said, “was that it sent an incredibly powerful signal ... a signal that we really were ready to do whatever was necessary to build value for the owners of our business.”

Two years later, Goizueta succumbed to cancer - but the company forged ahead without their longtime leader. Goizueta drank New Coke right up until his death, insisting it was still the best tasting cola the world over, no matter what the consumer said.

Pendergrast says that if the company is smart, they'll hold a similar celebration to mark the 20th Anniversary of New Coke as they did for the 10th Anniversary. “They should make a big deal of it because the moral of it was perfect for the company as Don Keough said at the time - anything that gets all this attention and gets our favorite customers rushing back to thank us is a pretty good thing."

What if New Coke Hadn't Happened?

With nostalgic memories of Coca-Cola being ressurected as 'Coca-Cola Classic' in July of 1985, it begs the question - what if New Coke had never happened? What if it had all been just a dream? And what if the company had introduced New Coke in 2005 instead of in 1985 - what would the reaction have been?

Pendergrast doesn't think it would have caused nearly the commotion today as it did 20 years ago. “I doubt that you would have as much of a reaction. I hope I'm wrong - maybe I'm just jaded. I think it would cause an uproar, but maybe not as much."

And with the company's many brand extensions taking over coolers around the world with Vanilla Coke, Coca-Cola With Lime, Cherry Coke, C2, and others on the horizon, is there a chance of a Coca-Cola reformulation ever happening again?

“Never say never," Pendergrast says. “But I doubt they will ever attempt it again in our lifetime. If they did, they would probably have enough brains to keep the old one and just offer the new one as a line extension. If they had offered New Coke as an alternative but have kept the old one, I don't think they would have had such a problem."

On the otherhand, if The Coca-Cola Company hadn't reverted back to Coca-Cola Classic in the summer of 1985 and stayed with New Coke, Pendergrast believes the beverage landscape would look much different than it does today. “I think Pepsi would be the dominant soft drink in the country today by far. I think it would have been a total disaster."

Baver disagrees. “I don't feel that Pepsi could have overtaken Coke because we had the other products. Sprite killed 7UP, it hurt them badly. We had Fanta, Tab and Diet Coke, at that point in time there's no way Pepsi could have surpassed Coke I don't think."

These days, when Pendergrast hears the words 'New Coke', he immediately thinks of Bill Cosby appearing in commercials “trying to make it all better," Pendergrast jokes.

“It's a wonderful quintisentially American love story, and a crazy story. The moral of it is that people are capable of getting excited about the stupidest things but it's also quite touching. I like that sort of story. I hope that we are capable of being just as excited nowadays, 20 years on, as we were then. But I don't know."

New Coke (Coke II) faded from most U.S. markets by the early 1990s. In Chicago, however, sales of Coke II remained strong and continued to flourish for years; it was finally shelved in 2002.

Coca-Cola thoughts, post-Vancouver Olympics

2010-03-04T09:28:00.002-05:00

In some ways, it seems like the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games was all just a dream... a 2-week dream that went by much too fast for this Olympic aficionado. Between watching constant television coverage on CTV here in Canada, and tracking down Olympic Coca-Cola cans, bottles, flags and pins, it's all a blur. There were some great moments at these Games by athletes around the world. It never ceases to amaze me the level at which these Olympians compete. They dedicate their lives to the short time it takes to win or lose.

Coca-Cola came through once again and raised the bar for collectors. We were treated to several different common Olympic aluminum bottles, cans, a number of Coke pins, and even some exclusive venue-only Coca-Cola aluminum bottles. I was fortunate enough to have one of the special edition bottles given to me by friends of my parents who were spectators in Vancouver. And let me tell you - these bottles were not easy to get. Available only at the Coca-Cola Olympic pavilion, the bottle was given to you when you entered (cap removed) to drink. If you turned the empty bottle back in to their special recycling program they'd hand you a special light-up Coke bottle. Very cool stuff.

With all the eBay selling, pin trading, and general craziness of these Olympic Games, I got so wrapped up in selling things, I kept almost nothing for myself. So I ended up buying one of the iCoke Vancouver 2010 baseball caps on eBay that I had sold two of a month earlier. And when I discovered I had sold a set of 3 Olympic pins that had been offered by Petro Canada stores here in Ontario, I went back in this week and was disappointed to find the Olympic display of the drinking glasses was gone. At Petro Canada gas convenience stores, they had four different Olympic glasses (not Coca-Cola) - and the deal was if you bought a glass for $3.99 and two 591mL bottles of any Coke product, you'd get ONE special edition Olympic Coca-Cola pin.

At one time, I had 2 sets of three that I quickly sold.

So the day after the closing ceremonies, I went into my local Petro Canada store, hoping to grab a set of 3 pins before they were gone; I was too late - all the glasses had been sold and the pins were gone. When I asked the manager if he had any pins left, he shook his head. He must have sensed my disappointment though, when he asked me, "Would you take a loose one or does it have to be in the package?"

I wasn't sure what he was getting at.

"No no... a loose one would be fine," I answered. And with that he unclipped the Coca-Cola Olympic pin from the lapel of his shirt and handed it to me, no purchase required, no strings attached.

It's great when businesses go over and above the call of duty and provide extra customer service. That particular manager didn't know me, I had never stopped in at that Petro Canada location before, and yet the manager went that little extra step where he wasn't required. I didn't think that mentality even existed much anymore.

Lots of fabulous Coca-Cola collecting info coming up in our next Cola Conquest print edition. If you're not a subscriber, you really SHOULD be! Visit our website for more details. Thanks for reading, and happy collecting!

Coca-Cola Continues Olympic Tradition in Vancouver

2010-02-22T21:12:00.003-05:00

For the past 7 years, Vancouver has been in the back of the minds of Canadian Coca-Cola collectors. Would there be commemorative Coca-Cola packaging for the 2010 Winter Olympics? In the past, Canada has always been lagging far behind other countries when it comes to Coca-Cola collectibles.

But sometimes less is more.

It's been obviously since this past Fall that Coca-Cola would be every bit as dedicated to promoting its Olympic branding as it has been at past Olympic Games, and collectors, such as myself, are thrilled.

In the current edition of The Cola Conquest magazine, Phil Mooney talks about how Coca-Cola pin trading and pin collecting has become a major Olympic activity for collectors. For Vancouver, there have been dozens of unique Coca-Cola pins that have been snatched up by collectors - some early Olympic 2010 Coke pins have been circulating for nearly a year already.

The pin offers that immediately come to my mind are the Canadian pins that feature Coca-Cola in a unique Canadian expression of patriotism - showing the maple leaf and Olympic logo. Movie theatres SilverCity and Cineplex offered an Olympic combo at their concession stands that included a large popcorn, large fountain drink, candy, and a special Coca-Cola Olympic pin for $13.00. Right now, in the heart of the Olympic Games, I spotted this pin on eBay going for around $10-$15.

By far the most popular pins are the daily Coca-Cola pins - a different Coke pin for each day of the Olympic Games. In today's mail I got my first ever Coca-Cola Olympic 'Day' pin - I opted to buy Day 1 that features the Olympic logo, the Coca-Cola polar bear carrying the Olympic Torch, and of course, the Coke logo. It's a fabulous little pin that quickly sold out from the official Vancouver 2010 Olympic website, where many Coca-Cola Olympic collectibles have been made available for sale.

With technology the way that it is now in 2010, it's easy to get the Olympic Coca-Cola merchandise that you want if you get it when it first goes on sale - and it's easy to take the technology for granted. In 1996 when Atlanta hosted the Olympics in Coca-Cola's own backyard, imagine what the collecting landscape might have been like if Coke collectibles could have been acquired as easily as pins are for Vancouver 2010. In '96 eBay was just finding its footing and the Internet in general wasn't nearly commonplace like it is today.

Older collectors these days will likely soon be telling stories about how hard it was to get a single Olympic pin.... "you had to attend the Games live and line up for hours and hours just to get your hands on a Coke pin," they'll say. Whereas now, with the click of a mouse, you can order something from the Vancouver 2010 Olympics that will show up at your door before the Games are even over.

But that's not to say that EVERYTHING Coca-Cola is easily attainable. Showing up just this week are two limited release aluminum Coca-Cola bottles from the Olympic Pavillion in Vancouver. For these two bottles, you really DO have to be there to get them, at least for a reasonable price. Sure, you can click over to eBay and get one for your collection, but it'll cost you $50 or more. The die-hard Olympic Coke fans won't bat an eye shelling out that kind of cash... but you never know - I might find a way to get one yet, without having to finance the purchase.

So what will these Coca-Cola collectibles be worth down the road? It's hard to say, but something tells me that once Canada's first Olympics in 22 years is in the history books and the pins, bottles, cans, coins and signs have disappeared from retailers, the rare items will still fetch a nice little price; the common things like cans and common bottles will retain a modest value.

I'll be back again with another blog on the day of the Closing Ceremonies, so be sure to pop back for a visit. Over in the pages of the Cola Conquest print edition, in Issue #7, I'll have a full recap of Olympic memorabilia, more photos, and much MUCH more for Coca-Cola collectors. I hope you'll subscribe to our print edition today!

Toronto Bottle Show 2008

2008-04-13T18:21:00.004-04:00

I'm just back from the 2008 Toronto Bottle Show & Sale held each year at the Humber College Campus in Etobicoke, Ontario. I've been going to this yearly sale for at least the last 6 years or so (more if you count the locations where they used to hold it before Humber College). It's gone through some growing pains - sometimes a particular year will be better than ones in the past. I would say that this year the show was average with a few nice pieces here and there - nothing spectacular but definitely worth the two hour drive for me. Lots and lots of photos and stories from the Toronto Bottle Show coming up in Issue #47 of our Soda Spectrum Series print edition, so make sure you get your copy when it comes out in June.

I'm sure you're all dying to know what the editor of a magazine dedicated to soda pop collecting buys for his personal collection at a sale like this. Well, it's not an ultra rare Coca-Cola piece for thousands; it's not a hundred dollar mint Canadian off-brand bottle, no. Today I picked up an old beat up Canadian 'Canada Dry' can - with rust, holes in the side of it, left for dead in someone's garage or attic... for $1.

A dollar.

Why would I do such a thing? Well it's simple. This can was initially produced to celebrate the opening of Thunder Run at Canada's Wonderland. Actually, it was released as a way to bring people to the sneak preview at Wonderland between June 1-14, 1986. To receive the $6 off your Wonderland admission ticket you had to bring the empty can to the front gate.

This can interests me a great deal because Coca-Cola used this same coupon method with a yearly promotion in the 1990s. If memory serves, they did it for at least two years. But never before have I seen a Canada Dry can with an earlier promotion. It fascinates me to find something like this, especially since the ride is nearly 22 years old, which obviously makes the can that old too. As I mentioned, the can is not in great shape - so if I ever find the same can in better shape, I'll likely replace it on my shelf here in the office. Until then, this beat up old can will sit on display and I'll be just as proud to show it off as my other more 'collectible' pieces.

It's a piece of Canadian history - for a Toronto theme park that has changed ownership numerous times over the past 25 years. For me, I love collectibles that have a story attached to them - how I got them, where I found them, and what they mean to me. Some of my favorites pieces are ones that cost $1 but have a $100 story to tell.

A 'Not Quite Spring' Roadtrip

2008-03-22T22:12:00.013-04:00

Though it's officially Spring here in Ontario, it sure doesn't feel like it. So when I woke up this morning to a bright sunny day - no blowing snow, freezing rain, or ice pellets - I knew a roadtrip to my favorite soda store in Whitby (2 hours away from me) was in order. I've written about Soda Pop Central in the past, but I always find new and unique soda pops there every time I visit.

Owner Dave Repol has done wonders for raising awareness of the goodness of sodas in glass bottles. At his shop, you'll find hundreds of sodas from around the world... and nearly all of it is in glass bottles.

Among the rows of sodas for sale is Dave's vast collection of Vernors memorabilia on display, mostly vintage pieces he's accrued on eBay and from other collectors. The walls are covered with Vernors vintage advertising and Hires ads as well. It makes for a really nostalgic visit for collectors and an important introduction for young soda drinkers. The beverage industry is long and storied, and Soda Pop Central is a fabulous place to learn that there's more to it than the newest offerings from Coca-Cola and Pepsi.

My favorites are Sparky's rootbeer, Dr Pepper directly from Texas (with the pure cane sugar), and Coca-Cola Light (diet Coke) from Mexico... all in glass bottles, of course. I always pick up a few bottles of my favorite sodas when I'm there, but I also make a point to pick up the new sodas that Dave brings in that I haven't tried before.

New this time around was: 'Looks Like Orange Tastes Like Grape' (obviously a soda that appears orange but actually tastes like grape - what a weird concept); Ramune Melon Flavored soda, imported from Japan (and has a marble that rolls around inside the neck of the bottle); Frostop premium root beer and Frostop Vanilla Caramel were new additions, and extremely tasty.

Also new to the line-up at Soda Pop Central is an entire line of Crush sodas in glass. I've seen grape, strawberry and peach before, but this was a first for me to find Pineapple, and Tropical Fruit Punch in longneck glass bottles. And so my soda discoveries continue.

I left Soda Pop Central today with a case of 24 mixed bottles and one extra bottle of Sparky's right out of their cooler for the road. Unfortunately, I drank the whole bottle before I made it out of the parking lot. Oh well, such is life.

Visit Soda Pop Central at: http://www.sodapopcentral.com (1001 Burns Street East #4, Whitby, Ontario) or contact Dave at 1-800-977-3765.

Everything Old is New Again

2007-09-01T15:31:00.000-04:00

Right now I'm sipping a bottle of Fanta red tangerine, just new to the Canadian market earlier in August. Fanta hasn't been seen around these parts since the 1980s when Fanta orange was a staple in the Canadian Coca-Cola portfolio. Twenty years later Fanta has re-surfaced in Canada with flavors: Grape, Red Tangerine, Cream Soda and Wildberry. It's ironic that the orange is no where to be seen since it was the flavor that first brought the brand to its popularity here two decades ago.

Fanta was originally conceived in Germany in 1940 and was purchased by the Coca-Cola Company in 1960. Now, nearly 50 years later, Coca-Cola has upwards of 70 different flavors of Fanta in 180 countries. Many Fanta flavors are only available in very specific overseas areas with varieties such as Fanta Shokata, Fanta Funky Orange, Lactic White Grape, Beetroot and Red Emotion.

It's hard to say if Fanta will find success here in the Canadian market - the beverage landscape in 2007 is much different than it was 20 years ago. There are so many variations and spin-off products, especially by Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Earlier this summer, Pepsi found some success with its new Lipton Brisk Green tea with Apple soda. And while Coca-Cola packaging for 'Black Cherry Vanilla Coke' still screams "NEW" across it, it's obvious that BCV (which hasn't been new for nearly a year) just isn't catching on. 7Up's Lemon Squeeze started out strong in May and June, but by July was discontinued and has all but disappeared from store shelves here in Ontario.

And so the revolving door sodas continue.

Will Fanta be the latest coming and going? Coke would have you believe it's yet another extension of Fanta's worldwide success, but I'm skeptical that it'll be around a year from now.

Summer Offerings and a Bad Omen?

2007-08-26T12:07:00.001-04:00

It's been an interesting summer around these parts. Coca-Cola in Canada brought the 'Coke Side of Life' out in full force with lots of Canadian advertising and a very cool commemorative can. The can is absolutely everywhere and in all types of packaging. It's most definitely the coolest commemorative can that we've seen here in years.

Pepsi, on the otherhand, has also made some waves in the commemorative can world. Their Canadian cans have some cool symbols on them, similar to that of the US cans with different areas of life and technology promoted. I still have to dig up some info on whether or not the Canadian cans will have a number of different designs on them or if the CDN version will have a more limited release. More on that to come shortly.

The other day when I was in the grocery store, I was carrying around a 12 pack of diet Coke cans by the indented handle on the top of case. Suddenly, the end split open and all 12 cans spilled out onto the floor, rolling in every direction. It was slightly embarassing as a couple of grocery store employees hurried over to help me collect the cans and return them to the box, which I was still holding in my hand by the handle. It was one of those slow motion moments where every person in the store was looking squarely at me. Thankfully, none of the cans blew up or leaked - but most of them ended up dented. Hopefully that experience wasn't an omen of things to come... I love my diet Coke dearly and would never want to be told I couldn't have it. :)

I'll be popping in here periodically to write some brief ramblings and very shortly will give you an update on what's coming up in our Fall 2007 edition of The Soda Spectrum Series, due out in October.

The Merging of the Minds - SPD name gone, Soda Spectrum Series replaces it...

2007-08-08T21:28:00.001-04:00

It's been a long time since I last put fingers to keyboard and pounded out a blog entry here on the magazine's website.

If you're just dropping by after an absence, you'll notice something has changed... we've dropped the 'Soda Pop Dreams' name in favor of the Soda Spectrum Series. Basically, they've merged and become a bigger and better magazine.

The reasons are simple: having separate Soda Spectrum magazines for Coca-Cola collectors, Pepsi collectors, and Coke bottle collectors really gave Soda Pop Dreams Magazine a beating in the subscription numbers. Plus, creating 3 'everything Pepsi', 3 'everything Coca-Cola' and 3 Coke bottle Soda Spectrum editions in a year was brutal on my schedule.

And since I do enjoy sleep from time to time, I made the decision with a heavy heart to merge all of them together, make a much bigger edition each time, and hopefully satisfy everyone's individual collecting niche.

What this means to you: if you were buying individual copies of the Soda Spectrum Series before (either of our 3 various editions for Pepsi collectors, everything Coca-Cola or Coke bottle collectors), you'll still find loads of information in EVERY SINGLE EDITION of the new Soda Spectrum Series.

There are sections in EVERY edition of the new magazine for those three collecting groups as well as a huge section for 'off-brand' and 'old brand' collectors.

If you were a subscriber of Soda Pop Dreams Magazine, nothing will change for you - you'll still receive your copy of the magazine, but instead of having the old Soda Pop Dreams name, it's called The Soda Spectrum Series.

Soda Pop Dreams name out... Soda Spectrum Series name IN.

I hope I've explained the magazine to your satisfaction. If you have any questions or concerns about your subscription or the magazine in general, by all means, please drop me a line - that's what I'm here for.

Thanks so much for your time, and happy collecting!

It's a Green Christmas With Big Red...

2006-12-23T16:35:00.000-05:00

Last year at this time, I was critical of The Coca-Cola Company for their holiday packaging and I praised Pepsi for their Christmas efforts; this year, it's the exact opposite. To celebrate the 75th Anniversary of the Sundblom Santa Claus advertising images, Coca-Cola brought out some wonderfully festive Santa and Christmas packaging - point-of-sale material, ornaments, trays, 2L bottles and cans, and even a commemorative 8 oz. wrapped bottle with the Coke Santa image. It was a welcome change from the Coca-Cola polar bears and seals of the 2005 campaign.

I had a great opportunity this year to write about the Coca-Cola Christmas 2006 campaign in the pages of the Christmas edition of the Soda Spectrum Series, but a few things came out after the magazine was being printed and thus I couldn't include them. The first is a great little deal I found at Zeller's department stores here in Ontario. For one week only, when you bought any Coca-Cola licensed item (tray, plate, or various tin trinkets) you would get a FREE 75th Anniversary Coca-Cola Christmas ornament. Now granted, the ornament (shaped like a bottle cap) was only priced at a few dollars - but it was a nice tip of the hat to the 75th Sundblom Santa and gave some much-needed publicity to the special anniversary. I picked up a great 75th Sundblom metal tray and then the free ornament. I'm sure that neither will be worth anything in the future, but since the tray only cost $9.99, it's hardly an investment that is deserving of a monetary return.

The other Coca-Cola tidbit that I discovered near the end of November was a promotion that Blockbuster Canada was (and still is) running. For $14.99 you could rent two new releases and get two packages of microwave popcorn, two 500mL bottles of Coca-Cola and ONE holligraphic plastic Coke cup (three different cups in the set). In the beginning, there was a different cup available each week for three weeks... now, several days before Christmas, Blockbuster is also selling the leftover cups for $1.99 each.

These cups are great - and quite strong (not like the regular flimsy commemorative plastic cups you usually see). Plus the holligraphic wrap around each cup gives is a 3-D appearance. Our Blockbuster location here in town didn't have too many left, so if you're a Coke collector, you might want to drop in to your local store sooner than later.

And finally... I'm guilty of the same mistake I wrote about a while back when I scolded people for publishing blogs but never writing in them or updating them. So, to rectify this omission, I'm back at it here as the year comes to a close. This past year has been a great year for Soda Pop Dreams Magazine and the Soda Spectrum Series - probably the greatest ever. If you're a regular reader of our print editions, this is not news to you. We published 8 editions of the Soda Spectrum Series and 4 Soda Pop Dreams! Plus, I somehow found time to jump into the world of podcasting with four podcast episodes with various guests related to soda collecting. It was a ton of fun, and 2007 is going to be even better with 9 Soda Spectrums and 4 SPD editions.

OK, that's all for now. From my family to yours, I wish you all a very happy and healthy Christmas and New Year. Take care, and Happy Collecting!

Welcome to 'The Coke Side of Life'...

2006-04-11T21:17:00.000-04:00

Things are not all rosy and blissful these days at The Coca-Cola Company. Consumption is down, the cola market is flat, and Pepsi has been kicking Coke's butt in sales. Is it a case of Coke making errors and Pepsi doing everything right? I tend to think it's more of a cautious strategic business plan that Pepsi is using lately... but now Coke is trying to get back in the game with a new feel-good campaign called 'The Coke Side of Life'.

These days, there are so many commercials - we're bombarded with them on hundreds of channels. Is there an ad out there that will stand the test of time and be remembered for decades to come - like the Coca-Cola 'Mean Joe Green' commercial? Or what about the Michael Jackson Pepsi spots from the 1980s? Coke and Pepsi have struggled for years to come up with that next 'hit' commercial that gets people flocking to their local beverage aisle to pick up a case of their favorite brand... or better still, convert a Coke drinker to Pepsi or vice-versa. Pepsi has come much closer than Coke in recent years to creating that memorable commercial 'spot' with their Britney Spears 'Joy of Pepsi' campaign. Memorable, yes.... and Coca-Cola had... don't remember? Me either.

So now Coca-Cola is banking on 'The Coke Side of Life' to bring its billion dollar empire back into the top-of-mind-awareness of cola consumers. Initially there are 15 commercial spots hitting the airwaves. Some are brillant, and a few are just plain weird. My favorite is titled: "Fountain Pour". I'd nickname it: "Sip Stealing". You might have seen it already: a guy fills up his cup at the Coca-Cola fountain, takes a quick sip, then fills it back up again without being noticed. The other one that made me smile is titled "Ringtone". It's cute, sharp, and definitely gets the message across.

Will these new spots do what they're designed to do? Only you, as cola consumers, can answer that question.

Jones Soda Feels the Love...

2006-02-13T21:36:00.000-05:00

Oh boy, there's love in the air these days!! It's Valentine's Day and that means overpriced flowers, stale chocolates, card stores that see dollar signs... and Love Potion soda pop??!!??

Enter Jones Soda.

I've written in the past about Jones Soda's innovative marketing approach with their Thanksgiving sodas (Turkey & Gravy flavor) and their Hot Wheels flavor pack from a while back. Now, they're spreading a little bit of love in the soda world with their Love Potion #6 Valentine Jones pack.

This limited edition comes with two bottles of Love Potion #6 Jones Soda, a flavored lip balm (which my wife has already removed from the box lol), a Jones Soda CD featuring Sony BMG artists, and Jones Soda love coupons. My favorite coupons are the "Overlord of the Remote Control", and "1 Magical Argument Ender". Both of these coupons are worth the $9.99 purchase price that Jones has tagged this special pack.

As a company, Jones Soda has seemingly put the right people in the right places... shares of Jones have been steadily increasing, brand awareness has grown, and more folks are sipping on some tasty sodas. And for good reason.

Pick up one of the Limited Edition Jones Soda Valentine's Day packs at: http://www.jonessoda.com - and run with the little guy.

Those who think young say 'Pepsi Please'!

2006-02-02T22:11:00.000-05:00

My sister and her family live in Wiarton, Ontario (Canada) - home of Wiarton Willie. The big news of the day up there today (Groundhog Day) is that Wiarton Willie didn't see his shadow, so we're due for an early spring. Personally, I think Coca-Cola and Pepsi are missing the boat here in terms of a promotional opportunity. Can't you just picture the cartoon image of Wiarton Willie plastered across a Coke can? Or how about a commemorative 8 oz. glass Coke bottle celebrating Wiarton Willie's yearly prediction? Hey, I think we're onto something here now...

So the unthinkable has happened... there are more Pepsi products in our household right now than there are Coke. That ranks right up there with pigs flying, the end of the world, and the Toronto Maple Leafs winning the Stanley Cup. Sorry, cheap shot for Ivan and Bob (father-in-law).

But seriously - everywhere I look right now, there are Pepsi cans. The reason is, of course, because PepsiCo. Canada has released two very prominent promotions within days of each other. First, the SuperBowl 2-can Pepsi set (1 Pepsi and 1 Diet Pepsi). These cans are similar to the US promotion, except that our cans here have both english and french and the scripting is slightly different.

The other is a much larger undertaking. Once the smoke clears from this weekend's SuperBowl, the Wayne Gretzky 'Greatest Moments' promotion kicks into high gear. Pepsi's association with Gretzky means a lot this year, at least as far as can collecting goes. There are 6 regular Pepsi cans and 6 Diet Pepsi cans on the horizon due to hit stores between now and the end of February. My office is a sea of blue with cans #1 and #2 stacked up all over the place - and I don't even drink Pepsi. I'm working on making 6 complete sets, so the blue is likely to continue, at least for a few more weeks. And hey, if you're a Pepsi collector, you'll want to check out the special edition 'everything Pepsi' Soda Spectrum Series magazine.

I'll be back here in a few days to chat about Jones Soda's Valentine's Day 2006 series, so check back soon!

A diet Coke to fall in love with...

2006-01-21T16:28:00.000-05:00

It's been a busy January for me so far - today I'm preparing the mailing for the print edition of Soda Pop Dreams Magazine, and over the next week or two, I'll be putting the finishing touches on our first 'everything Pepsi' Soda Spectrum Series magazine (also a print publication). So far, the Pepsi mag has been a blast since it's the first time I've done a magazine dedicated solely to Pepsi collectors. Some very unique collectibles, that's for sure. Tons of fun and some excellent articles - be sure to check it out!

Erin and I just bought our first house this week and you know what that means - yep - my very own office/soda collectibles room in the basement!! That also means that the boxes of memorabilia that have been hidden in our storage unit will also be brought out too. Lots of cans, bottles, and old soda signs will happily find a new home in, um, our new home. :)

No doubt the pic at the top of this page made you say 'ewwww'. Most of you know my obsession with diet Coke (we'll refer to it as the 'DC' here)... I LOVE diet Coke, diet Coke with Lime, but despise diet Coke with Lemon (now defunct), and I'm definitely not a fan of 'DC' with Splenda. But how about mixing my two favorites - DC and............. bacon. Now THERE'S a winning flavor combination.

Take care, happy collecting, and we'll chat with you in the pages of our print editions.

Big Cola Smooch From Marilyn Monroe

2006-01-04T18:45:00.000-05:00

Beverage currently consuming: Diet Pepsi from 10 oz. glass bottle

Apparently Mentor, Ohio is a hotbed of activity for Marilyn Monroe fans... and we all know that she loved Coca-Cola. Oh, you didn't know? Me either. But an eBay seller has the goods on Marilyn's cola preference and he has a 1950s Vendo 110 Coke machine to prove it.

This 5-day eBay auction has so far grabbed 19 bids with a current high bid of $859.00 US funds (below the reserve price with only 4 hours left to go).

Here's a description from the listing: "Her lip imprint is still on the machine. I know it is hard to believe and NO I do not have the matching potato chip with her resemblance. Just look at the top right corner of the machine. Her lip print is still visible after all of these years. Now I do not have a picture of Marilyn Monroe kissing the machine, but I can tell it is her lip print..."

Very clever, but hardly the kind of thing that will draw attention to the auction and help the machine sell. But, considering the counter on the page is at 820 (and eBay logs auction searches based on keywords in their titles), I could be wrong. So if it's not an authentic Marilyn Monroe pair of lip marks adorning this Coke machine, whose is it?

Liquid Cereal, Soda Pop Style...

2005-12-30T17:46:00.000-05:00

My all-time favorite snack isn't chips, popcorn or ho-hos. Though I enjoy crackers and cheese, I live for sugary cereal right out of the box (consumed in front of the television, sans milk). For the most part, it doesn't much matter what kind it is: Fruit Loops, Corn Pops, Count Chocula... and the king of cereal snacking - Cookie Crisp. Now, there's a new soda hitting the US market that combines my two biggest loves - cereal and soda pop. Oh god, could life get any better?

Created by the fine folks at Brain Twist, there are 4 flavors: Apple & Cinnamon, Fruit, Peanut Butter, and Chocolate. Obviously, the first two flavors are take-offs of Apple Jacks and Fruit Loops respectively. The Peanut Butter, I wouldn't hazard a guess... but according to the ingredients, the last two flavors pack the biggest fatty punch - 170 calories per can (versus the Apple and Fruit versions with 160 calories). My wife says that's not a terrible amount, but only if that's all you have. What - I can't sample all four versions in one sitting? Where's the adventure in limiting the consumption to just a single can.

I can't personally comment on what it tastes like, since as a canuck, we're not likely to find it around here (sigh). But according to the BevNet, "the consistency of the product literally feels like finely ground cereal that is smooth, not mushy. Put all this together and you have something that, although lightly sweet in comparison, is definitely remniscent of a children's breakfast cereal."

Sounds like an absolute winner to me.

Have a Happy New Year, and we'll see you in the pages of our print editions.

Merry [Cola] Christmas 2005!

2005-12-21T15:16:00.000-05:00

I've received a number of e-mails from soda collectors over the past few weeks complaining about the quality of the Christmas packaging this year for Coca-Cola and Pepsi. So here's my two cents worth: I love Pepsi's "holiday" packaging this year with the snowman and snow-covered house. The graphics are almost cartoonish, but they're staying neutral as they have for years. It's cute, but not flowery. Pepsi may have decided not to go to the trouble and expense of bottling 'Holiday Spice' for 2005, but it's obvious they've been concentrating their efforts in the right places lately.

On the otherhand, Coca-Cola has ditched the Haddon Sundblom Santa Claus on its Christmas packaging for the first time in a gazillion years (that's a long time). I'm not an expert on all the reasons why, and I haven't been told by Coca-Cola that they removed Santa for a specific reason this particular year. The company is still sending out the Coca-Cola Christmas Caravan tour this year - and to my knowledge the trucks featuring Santa Claus haven't been painted over with images of penguins and polar bears... yet.

What do polar bears and penguins have to do with Christmas? I have no idea. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I don't think their holiday commercial with the polar bears drinking Coke will jump-start sales or send the masses on a Coca-Cola buying spree.

It's not a conspiracy against collectors to remove the Santa image from packaging this year... in fact, Santa Claus DOES appear on Coke bottles in the UK and the U.S. World of Coca-Cola commemorative Christmas bottles. And in many Coca-Cola grocery store displays, the Haddon Santa is still prominently featured as a life-sized cutout. So don't write off the big guy just yet.

OK, that's all for now. From my family to yours, here's wishing you a Very Merry [Cola] Christmas and a Happy [Soda] New Year.

See you in the pages of our print editions.

Christmas Sodas... and a Road Trip

2005-12-14T20:46:00.000-05:00

There's only 12 days left until Christmas 2005 and I can't wait! And yes, my Christmas shopping is completely finished too! This December has been an excellent time for Playing With Words Specialty Publications (that'd be my publishing company) due mostly to the addition of our special 'everything Coca-Cola' Christmas edition. We're on target to selling out in record time!

Last weekend, I took a 2 hour roadtrip down to Whitby, Ontario to Soda Pop Central for their one of their "soda sippin' Saturday" events. This time it was a very cherry experience with more than 20 different cherry flavored sodas to sample at their shop. It always amazes me when I stop in at Soda Pop Central - their inventory of sodas in glass bottles is always growing. The newest additions are Mexican Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola Light and Mexican Pepsi in 355mL glass bottles. Sodas from Mexico are a real throw-back to a simpler soda time and a nod to the history of the beverage industry. Plus, they're pretty great sodas. I'm officially addicted to Coca-Cola Light in the glass bottle.

Probably the most interesting thing to me about the Mexican sodas is that even though these bottles are imported into Canada from Mexico, they are priced significantly lower in Canada than they are in Mexico where they were originally bottled. On the crown bottlecap of the Coca-Cola Light is printed: "$3.00 Coca-Cola Light". I paid $1.75 CDN for a single bottle. Even that may seem like a lot of money to spend on a single bottle of pop, but I'd gladly hand it over without a second thought.

If you're ever in the Whitby area, make sure to drop in at Soda Pop Central (1001 Burns St. E. #4) where you'll be amazed at their selection of sodas: Orange Crush (and Grape & Strawberry), Kickapoo Joy Juice, Pop Shoppe, Faygo, 7UP, Mountain Dew, A&W Rootbeer, Stewart's, Bubble-Up, Sun Drop, and hundreds more - all in glass bottles the way soda pop was meant to be consumed.

Those of you in Canadian Coca-Cola collectors have probably already seen this as well, but I thought I'd point it out: Petro Canada gas stations (at least in Ontario) are offering a great little promotion for collectors. When you buy two 2L bottles of Coke or diet Coke, you can get a FREE Coca-Cola Christmas tree ornament. There are four different designs available but take note... if you're on the lookout for these, you could have a hard time finding all four. Last week I was in London, Ontario and had to stop at three different Petro Canada locations before I found one that had any left. The one pictured here is the ornament I chose - and it now joins our other ornaments, even though my wife thinks it's a bit too big for the Christmas tree.

Thanks for reading, and check back here later in the week - I'll be writing about the Christmas packaging of lots of sodas this year.

It's Beginning to Look A Lot Like (Cola) Christmas...

2005-12-08T16:15:00.000-05:00

Currently drinking: diet Coke, 8 oz. glass bottle

Depending on your geographic area, you might have as much snow outside your window as I do. Instead of listing at the top of my blog the beverage I'm currently consuming while writing this, maybe I should publish how much snow we currently have. Here in Muskoka, we have near a foot of snow and -4 C (25 F). For Christmas this year, Erin is buying me snowpants and an awesome winter hat (since she thinks if I have the proper winter attire I might actually go outside). When I asked her if I could sew a Coca-Cola patch on them somewhere she just rolled her eyes. Is that a no?

Are you in the Christmas spirit yet? If not, our special 'everything Coca-Cola' Christmas edition will help! It's a magazine for Coca-Cola collectors dedicated to the Christmas collecting season - and available only for the month of December!

Yesterday I was at the grocery store and when I turned the corner into the beverage aisle, the Pepsi delivery man was pulling a skid of product. I stopped him and asked a direct question: "Why didn't Pepsi bring out Holiday Spice this year?" The man looked a little surprised (probably because he wouldn't have expected anyone to remember it). "That was a special edition just for last year, unfortunately," he replied. Am I the only one who didn't think Holiday Spice was a wretched sauce? Served warm, it was rather delightful.

Speaking of warm sodas, while regular Coke and Pepsi served hot might not float your boat, over the holidays, try these and see what you think: hot Dr Pepper or hot Vernors Ginger Ale. I've had both, and admittedly, they hit the spot.

Anyway, back to the grocery store aisle. As I turned my head from my conversation with the PBG guy, who should appear coming down the opposite end of the aisle? Yep, that's right - Mr. Coca-Cola delivery man. It was like a scene right out of some cola wars commercial. I looked at the Coke man and said, "Now you guys behave - no fighting." The Pepsi guy smirked; the Coke man didn't acknowledge my comment. Sort of a reflection on the whole cola wars situation in which Pepsi has always embraced and Coca-Cola claims not to exist.

But how long will Coca-Cola be on top of the cola mountain? Sources say the two cola giants are once again struggling for the top spot in the cola wars. It's hard to believe, but Pepsi has been slowing and silently clawing its way back to the top. Not that the cola market is growing by leaps and bounds, mind you. While the market for sugar colas is shrinking, Pepsi is stealing a bigger piece of the proverbial pie than it has for years.

And Coca-Cola knows that it's every bit as true as analyists are forecasting.

In 2006, The Coca-Cola Company will debut an aggressive marketing campaign that starts with a new global slogan: "Welcome to the Coke side of life" which will replace its current "Real" tagline. I like it... but will it be enough to turn things around for Big Red? In 2005, Coke shares were down 17 percent VS. Pepsi's gain of 12 percent.

I guess this means I haven't been drinking ENOUGH diet Coke. So it's time for me to take one for the team... but I must confess, some Pepsi Lime and Pepsi Vanilla products have been sneaking into our fridge lately.

Thanks for reading, and I'll chat with you again in the pages of our print editions.

A Thanksgiving Soda Feast - in a bottle?

2005-11-24T18:27:00.000-05:00

It's Thanksgiving Day in the US today - and boy, is my mouth watering at the thought of downing some "Corn on the Cob" soda and topping it off with some liquid "Smoked Salmon Paté" ..... MMMMmmmmmmmm. The what now?

Never heard of Jones Soda? Shame on you... it's hip, it's cool, it's different - and I don't even have any kids to tell me so. I've followed the beverage landscape long enough to know - this is the stuff that the media eats up - or drinks up, at least.

Jones Soda has been around for a number of years - you may or may not have seen their more traditional flavored sodas in your local beverage cooler with flavors like Vanilla Cola, Fufu Berry, Green Apple, and Strawberry Lime just to name a few. But every once in a while, they come up with something that makes you take a second look (and third, and fourth).

It all started with the Hotwheels Pack in 2003. Jones Soda brought out a bottle with a Hotwheels car on it - and packaged along with the bottle was a Hotwheels dinky car based on their orange Jones Soda RV. It was an instant hit with collectors and beverage connoisseurs alike. Then Jones took the ball and ran with it when they concocted their first version of 'Turkey and Gravy' soda for Thanksgiving 2003.

Now the Thanksgiving soda smorgasbord has exploded with two different Jones Soda holiday packs to whet your taste buds with sodas you never knew you always wanted. "Turkey & Gravy" is back, but you'll also now be able to enjoy Broccoli Casserole, Wild Herb Stuffing, Cranberry Sauce, Pumpkin Pie and Pecan Pie. I'm not kidding - how could I make this stuff up?

Don't believe me? Maybe you'll listen to Jones Soda's CEO: “Because of the overwhelming response to our holiday packs in 2004, we saw that there was a real demand for zero-calorie, meal-replacement beverages. This was also an opportunity to provide even more support for children’s charities,” says Peter van Stolk, President and CEO. “This year, we wanted to make the holiday packs more available to our consumers and our partnership with Target helped make this happen.” The company's goal is to raise $100,000 in support of St. Jude, the leader in the research and treatment of childhood cancer and other catastrophic diseases.

Over the past couple of years, Jones Soda has come up with some truly innovative sodas to grab the public's attention. Halloween soda cans, weird and wacky photos on their labels, and when you're not a billion dollar empire, why not strive for the outrageous! I say bravo to Jones Soda for thinking outside of the bottle. Would I try Turkey & Gravy soda ? Definitely! The only question I have is, would you serve Turkey and Gravy soda hot or let it chill and have it as leftovers?

I don't know about you, but I'll definitely be clicking over to eBay and bidding on the special edition "Turkey and Gravy" lip balm that the Jones Soda folks sent out to the media (I think I was conveniently overlooked this year). I guess technically, it was done to entice and help spread the word about the Jones Holiday packs since who in their right mind would buy it; but what could be better than licking your lips and getting a full flavored turkey experience? :0)

See you in the pages of the Soda Pop Dreams print edition, happy collecting, and digest well, dear readers.

A Sugar High for the Sodadood

2005-11-11T17:25:00.000-05:00

This has been quite a week for the Sodadood.

First, I got a box of various US sodas from a trading friend of mine. He was nice enough to send me some of the new diet Coke with Splenda, Barq's French Vanilla, Barq's Floatz, Dr. Wham & Diet Dr. Wham, Mountain Dew Pitch Black II, and Grapico. The one

I was looking most forward to trying was the diet Coke with Splenda, since I live and die by the DC (if there's a Heaven, I don't wanna go there unless they have diet Coke on tap). I was surprised how different DC with Splenda tasted from the 'normal' stuff that I'm used to. To be honest, it tasted NOTHING like diet Coke... so I won't be tripping over to Buffalo to fill up the car with this stuff, that's for sure.

This October, here in Canada we were treated to Mountain Dew Pitch Black (the same formula that was out in the US last year, which we DIDN'T get until this year). So in the US this year was Pitch Black II - I wanted to try both side by side and do a comparison... whoa - PB II is much more sour than I anticipated. No doubt we'll get it next year when those of you in the States get PB III. ;0)

What can I say about Barq's french vanilla.... it was heavenly - and left a happy taste in my mouth (always a sign that the Sodadood likes what he's pouring down his pie-hole). Dr. Wham - a concoction from Pepsi in a very narrow distribution tastes remarkably like Dr Pepper (except WITH the . after Dr). It's got some funky packaging and flashy graphics, no doubt to suck in the youthful generation of which I am no longer a part of.

Grapico? Well, the verdict's still out on this stuff since it's the only thing left from the soda box that I have yet to try.

Just when I was about to muster up the gusto to crack open a bottle of Grapico, what should appear in my mailbox? A box of 'NEW' Pop Shoppe pop, courtesy of the owner of the chain. I've written extensively about Pop Shoppe in the past, but the stuff they sent me this week... oh boy, are these bottles fantastically retro.

If you remember the Pop Shoppe chain from the 1970s, you'll remember the old stubbies with the red/white acl logo. When Brian at the Pop Shoppe brought the chain back last year, his first bottle was a paper label - same familiar logo. But now he's gone back to the drawing board with the bottle design, and it's perfect. A more fitting tribute to the soda of old there will never be. Incidentally, the flavors that I LOVE from Pop Shoppe are: Black Cherry and Pineapple.

And if those two soda events weren't enough, the SODA LIBRARY website is now up and running. We've weeded out some of the earlier bugs in the system and there's a TON of stuff going up there in the next couple of weeks. If you're a fan of old beverages, new beverages, retro sodas, or you're a collector of bottles, cans, signs, etc. - this is the website for you.

OK, that's all for now. Happy Collecting, and I'll chat back to you soon!

A new energy drink for us 'Mother Canuckers'

2005-10-15T12:54:00.000-04:00

The Autumn 2005 print edition of Soda Pop Dreams Magazine went into the mail for subscribers yesterday, so if you're a print edition member (and let's face it, you really need to be), then keep an eye on your mailbox next week.

Today whilst browsing the beverage coolers at a local shop, I spotted a brand new energy drink called: "Canadian Beaver Buzz". That's really what it's called (insert your own joke here). Oh, and it's "dam good"... now you all know that I'm first and foremost a soda pop collector, but with the onslaught of energy drinks that have exploded pretty much everywhere these days, I decided to take da Buzz for a spin and test it out.

I should mention that I haven't tried too many energy drinks, I'm a die-hard diet Coke freak... but this Canadian Beaver Buzz tasted excellent! It's full of all those weird vitamins and supplement stuff like your standard ginseng, taurine (and don't forget the caffeine). And the company clearly supports Canadian athletes, including 2 time National AND World Arm Wrestling Champion in the super heavyweight class, Ryan Espey. Hey, if golf can be a sport, so can arm wrestling.

There is a warning clearly printed on the can for all you naysayers: "Not recommended for children, pregnant or breastfeeding women, or individuals sensitive to caffeine..." Potent stuff this Canadian beverage. Try it, don't try it - it's hardly the anti-Christ that some people have been labelling energy drinks lately. You won't find it in my fridge, but I doubt that in the long run, diet Coke is any healthier for me than this tasty stuff.

Now then.... don't forget - Soda Pop Dreams Magazine is an actual PRINTED MAGAZINE for soda pop collectors and enthusiasts from across North America. We have hundreds of subscribers across the United States and Canada... so join today! And for all you Coke bottle collectors out there, we also have our special edition The Soda Spectrum Series magazine. Check'em out. Now. Please. :0)

OK, that's all for now. See you in the print edition, and Happy Collecting!

Coca-Cola Collectors Club Autumn Sale...

2005-10-02T20:00:00.000-04:00

Beverage Currently Consuming: 'Cheers' grape soda from Mayasia!

OK, so it seems I've been a bit too lazy when it comes to posting a new Blog message. I didn't realize anyone was reading it much until a bunch of e-mails hit my box REMINDING me that I promised to write on a semi-regular basis. So, here I am, back for another dose of all things soda pop.

In the beverage world, lots of news lately. Mountain Dew has brought back 'Pitch Black', that tasty black grape soda that's around just until Halloween. And since it did so well last year in the good ol'e U S of A, the fine folks at PepsiCo have seen fit to try it out here in Canada as well. Jones Soda is doing a special Halloween collection of 'Candy Corn' and 'Caramel Apple'... look for this promotion at Target stores in the US (sorry, none coming for us canuckers this time around).

Special to us here has been a 'special edition' Sour Apple Crush - I wrote about it back in the summer. Well, it seems that Sour Apple Crush has nearly come to an end. I saw it on the weekend at a grocery store clearance sale for $0.59 for a 2 L bottle. Not one to pass up a great soda deal, I brought a bottle home with me.

Yesterday was a great day as it was the annual Autumn Coca-Cola Collectors Club Sale in Schomberg, Ontario... home of the world's largest Inukshuk (and little else, trust me). If you don't know what an Inukshuk is, well, then, I guess you don't watch enough television. Anyway, the Coke sale is the Ontario Chapter's second biggest event of the year (the first being their Brampton Yard Sale held in June each year). There were tables of Coke stuff galore, and yes, there were lots of eager buyers. If you're a Coke-a-holic, this is the sale for you... hundreds of Coca-Cola items both new and old such as: trays, bottles, cans, signs, glasses, furniture, clocks, vintage items from the past, and tons of Coke trinkets. This sale brings folks from all over Ontario (and sometimes even Michigan).

I was a vendor there yesterday selling copies of Soda Pop Dreams Magazine, and The Soda Spectrum Series, and wouldn't you know it... they gave me the booth spot that was smack dab beside the site's Pepsi machine. But, since I'm not one to dwell on my misfortunes, I made the best of the situation - and snapped a candid shot of the Ontario Chapter Coke President buying a Pepsi from said machine when he wasn't looking. Busted. No, it's not a doctored shot. Yes, I am posting it here.

I had the opportunity to chat with a number of fellow collectors... Joe, Bill, Ron, Elizabeth, a fellow vendor next to me whose name escapes me at the moment, and some great buyers who are just now discovering Soda Pop Dreams Magazine and Soda Spectrum Series. And.......... (get ready for gratuituous plug), YOU need to discover these print edition magazines too!! So click on over to Soda Pop Dreams Magazine or The Soda Spectrum right now. Or, at least as soon as you finish reading this Blog posting.

The point to all this rambling is this: the hobby of soda pop collecting is at an all-time high. And many people are just now getting in on the fun. There are tons of Coca-Cola sales and shows all over the US - so check with your local Chapter of the Coca-Cola Collectors Club at: http://www.cocacolaclub.org. Thanks to all who came out to the Schomberg Sale for their business, and for the great cola conversation. Lots more photos from the Schomberg sale coming soon to the Soda Pop Dreams website, so keep an eye out over there.

That's it for now... oh, and before I forget - big shout out to TheBarqsMan for his kind words about my Blog, and for plugging it on his ultra cool Barq's website. Check it out at: http://thebarqsman.com.

Take care, and happy collecting!

Hurricane Katrina being felt everywhere...

2005-09-02T15:58:00.000-04:00

I've been critical lately and walking around in a bad mood because of the gas prices that have spiked here in the past few days. Of course, we all know why - hurricane Katrina is affecting North America in ways we couldn't have imagined just a couple of weeks ago. But one look at the Soda Pop Dreams subscription list made me realize that surging gas prices should be the least of my concern. You see, we have half a dozen subscribers to Soda Pop Dreams Magazine that live in the New Orleans area, and a few in Mississippi - and that's a scary thing to think about.

Being a great distance away from Louisianna and Mississippi, it's easy to overlook what's been going on there. But the constant news reports and pictures tell the story. And with gas prices going through the roof pretty much everywhere, it's finally hitting home that this was no small storm; no average hurricane (if there is indeed such a thing as 'average').

Sure, it'll cost more for us to drive anywhere for the next little while, and produce will cost more at the grocery store. But at least I have a home to come home to. To all those affected by this terrible tragedy, please stay safe; and especially to those handful of New Orleans subscribers who may or may not have lost everything... take care, and be well.

There's one born every minute...

2005-08-15T14:04:00.001-04:00

Sometimes it amazes me how stupid some dealers think their customers really are. I've written in the past about an antique market that is held on Sundays just down the street from me on the main stretch through town. Yesterday I took a leisurely walk to the antique market and by the time I left I was so mad at one dealer I was ready to kick his ass.

Well, not really... but here's the story.

The vendor in question had a few old glass soda bottles, nothing special. Then sitting on the sidewalk was a cardboard case that held a bunch of older Canadian 280mL cans. As soon as I picked one up, he rushed right over to me. "Those are 10 oz you know - very rare."

"Yeah," I said, "They don't make'um like that anymore."

Apparently that was this vendor's cue for the sales pitch that followed. "$4 each... there's 24 there, so that would normally be $100 but I'll work you a great price... $80 for them all." I smiled and told him I'd think about it. Really, there was no thinking to be done. These cans certainly aren't scarce in the collecting world. They were some of the Canadian 280mL Coca-Cola 'Cool Cans' from the 1988 promotion (and not even a complete set - only about duplicates of 3 from the series), and a few Christmas Canadian cans thrown in. Most were rusty, some top opened, and absolutely none in mint condition. I started walking away and the vendor continued...

"These cans are so rare you could sell them for $10-$15 each... I could put them on eBay and they'd be gone tomorrow. You could buy them from me for $80 and make a couple hundred dollars profit," he claimed. This was where the conversation turned ugly.

"They're not worth $15 each, or $10 each," I replied, annoyed. "They're not even worth $4 each. I'd maybe give you $5 for the entire case of 24 in the condition that your cans are in. Actually, you'd probably get more money if you carted them over to Quebec and cashed in your 5 cent deposit on each."

"I'm telling you," he persisted. "these things are rare as rare can be. You just don't know the true value."

I just shook my head in disbelief. "Actually, I do know the true value and it's vendors like you that give our hobby a black eye. How long have you been carting these cans around? They're almost 20 years old and lemme tell you, yours aren't getting more valuable with time."

But, my words just rolled off him with more customers walking by his booth. Our conversation was over, and it was obvious he couldn't care less about what I was saying since I wasn't going to be a paying customer. I continued through the rest of the market where I saw a gorgeous Orange Crush tin sign (that belonged to a completely separate vendor), vintage, for $1,800. Personally, I wouldn't pay that kind of money for that particular item, but it certainly looked authentic and the seller came over and seemed knowledgeable about it, its vintage & age, and where it came from. Two different vendors - like night and day at the same market.

So here's my nickel's worth of free advice to my fellow collectors out there, whether you're a subscriber of Soda Pop Dreams Magazine or not. Don't get suckered in by vendors who are only out to make a buck. Do your research, especially if what you're looking at is a big ticket item. Fortunately, this vendor was only trying to get $4 per Coke can - but he just as easily could have been peddling fake Coca-Cola Calendars from the 1920s, or $1,000 reproduction bottles and passing them off as vintage originals. You just never know. And please - if you run across a vendor who is obviously uneducated or trying to put one over on you, don't support him by buying any of his merchandise.

There are many reputable sellers out there - and there may be a sucker born every minute, but let's try not to fall prey to the occasional shady vendor.

A Rainbow of Flavors at Soda Pop Central

2005-08-06T19:53:00.000-04:00

Right now, I'm enjoying my first taste of Hank's Premium Highland Berry Soda from a glass bottle. It's like nothing I've had before, but I do tend to say that after I try ANYTHING I haven't had before from Soda Pop Central.

For those of you who read the print edition of Soda Pop Dreams, you know all about Soda Pop Central in Whitby, Ontario. This shop, owned by soda pop guru Dave Repol, is a dream come true for soda pop connoisseurs. Imagine walking into a shop that carries hundreds of soda brands from across North America in a rainbow of varieties - and they're all in glass bottles, many with the old crown caps. This, dear readers, is what you'll find at Soda Pop Central.

As luck would have it, my wife Erin was flying to Calgary yesterday so I gave her a ride to her friend's house near Whitby. Of course, knowing in the back of my mind that Soda Pop Central was just a hop skip and a jump from there, I gladly made the 2 hour trip. Not only did I get to see her off as she leaves for a 2 week trip, I also got to stock up on some rare and fantastic gourmet sodas that will be long gone by the time she gets back.

This time around, I bought: Rat Bastard root beer; Gordon's Blueberries & Cream; High Mountain Huckleberry; Gray's Raspberry Cream Soda; Whoopie Citrus Smash; Henry Weinhard's Oranges & Cream; Filbert's Old Time Quality Peach; Jeff's Chocolate Soda (Amazing New York Egg Cream); Hank's Premium Highland Berry; Milligan's root beer, and a few bottles of Sparky's root beer (in my opinion, the best root beer on the planet). The idea was to get these gourmet sodas as a treat since they don't exactly sell for the same price as your run-of-the-mill Coke or Pepsi beverage. But so far today, I've taken care of a bottle of Sparky's, the Jeff's Chocolate Soda, and by the time I'm finished writing this column, the Hank's will be just an aftertaste as well.

For those of you who DON'T read Soda Pop Dreams Magazine (but let's face it, you really should), here's the scoop on Soda Pop Central. Dave Repol has a winemaking business and a while ago, he started stocking Vernors Ginger Ale in glass bottles. It wasn't long before people were buying it up by the caseload. Dave tapped into this nostalgic market of sodas in glass bottles, and now he stocks hundreds of brands from across North America including old favorites like The Pop Shoppe, Vernors, A&W in brown glass, Kick-A-Poo Joy Juice, Nehi, Faygo, Red Rock, Bubble Up, Moxie, Frostie, and a slew of others. And if you're a soda pop collector, you'll also appreciate Dave's hefty collection of Vernors memorabilia on display in the shop (cans, bottles, signs, advertising, clocks, and more)!

If you're out and about cruising the web and you come across their website (http://www.sodapopcentral.com), it really doesn't do the store justice. If you're ever in the Toronto area (in Ontario), drive a bit further to Whitby and drop in at Soda Pop Central. It's a soda pop dream that you'll keep coming back to.

For more information on Soda Pop Dreams Magazine, check out: http://www.sodapopdreams.org.

Which drink best describes YOU?

2005-07-27T21:50:00.000-04:00

I'm a firm believer that beverages are the key to the meaning of life. They're also pretty freakin' cool.

Most of you know my interest (obsession) with soda pop collecting - cans, bottles, signs, trinkets, old Pop Shoppe memorabilia, blah blah blah. I've also recently discovered the world of gourmet beverages. It seems there are more and more specialty and retro sodas finding their way out of obscurity and back into North American beverage coolers. Take The Pop Shoppe, for example. Up until 6 months ago, it was a pleasantly retro sugar-water filled to the crown cap with nostalgia so thick you couldn't sip it with a straw. You could mention Pop Shoppe to pretty much anyone around 25+ and they had some memory of it from the late 70s and early 80s. And now, Pop Shoppe is back as a gourmet 'feel good' soda - out of the dirty red plastic cases and into sleek longneck glass bottles, doing away (at least for the moment) with the familiar 70s 'stubby'.

Other more mainstream brands are also getting in on the 'special edition' craze. Cadbury Beverages recently got in on the action with the limited edition release of Sour Apple Crush, available only in Canada. (Thanks to Sam for posing in the photo here with the new Crush variety!)

And I'm not an energy drink connoisseur by any means, but when I saw 'spaz juice' when I was out and about today, I just had to have it. Seriously - this is an energy drink filled with taurine, caffeine, and inositol - if I wasn't a spaz before, I darn sure will be after I down this stuff. The tagline says it all: "All the energy you need to annoy everybody else".

And my most recent find that made me giggle out loud like a school girl: "Yellow Snow Lemonade". I didn't even look at how much it cost, and I don't care how it tastes - I snatched it up, grinning from ear to ear all the way to the cash register.

Yes - I'm a marketer's dream. I also know what I like, and the soda I drink somehow defines me as a person. This doesn't bother me in the least because I know that I'll always prefer Diet Coke over Diet Pepsi... and despite my knowledge of the beverage landscape, I can easily be influenced to purchase a new soda based solely on the name or the packaging. Kind of the same effect as the flashing lights and warm colours of Las Vegas. That's why I don't gamble. Or maybe that's why I SHOULD gamble... Hmmm.

But I digress.

So whether you drink tea, coffee, beer, wine, water or soda pop (I'd certainly endorse the last choice for obvious reasons), the brands you choose and the substance contained in those cans and bottles is what ultimately makes the world go 'round - it defines you as a consumer (at least that's what the big cola companies would LIKE you to believe). Don't believe me? Next time you're out, have a look at the number of soda machines on your route... many also sell water and juice, but if it's Dasani it's Coca-Cola you're supporting; if it's Aquafina, you're drinking Pepsi's concoction.

And as for putting something 'fun' on the market, I'm kicking this idea around: Put a heavily carbonated citrus drink into a clear bottle and call it "Get Gas" or "Pass Gas". If people would buy Yellow Snow or Spaz Juice, I'm willing to bet they'd drink da gas.

School's out, but Class with Mr. Matthews is in...

2005-07-22T19:53:00.000-04:00

These are the kind of days when I love my job. Tomorrow could be different, but for one day - at least - I'll revel in my chosen profession. Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to be the guest speaker for a "Writer's Craft" summer school class at Rosseau Lake College. The class wasn't large by any means (only three students, as it turns out)... but it made for an easy discussion group and an informal visit.

I've been in the journalism/publishing profession for nearly 10 years. When I was in high school I took an English Writing course and it changed the path I was on and helped me turn in the direction I ended up taking. So when the chance came up to give a little bit back to some kids - most of which don't really know what they want to do after high school - I volunteered to speak.

And as much as I hate public speaking of any kind, I did it willingly and gladly.

My first question to these three - Brent, Ceilidh, and Stephanie - was why they chose to take writer's craft. One wants to work in economics and wants to excel in the writing aspect of that field. One isn't really sure what she wants to do... and the other one, well, he needed an english credit. Certainly all very valid reasons for trying their hands at writing. In fact, some of the best writers nowadays never intended on being employed by the written word.

I talked for a while about how I got into publishing right out of college. I went from my work-term at a local publishing house directly to my first publication "Freeze Frame" only a couple of weeks after I finished there. It was a crash course in layout, design, magazine publishing, and small business. I folded Freeze Frame (twice), started and ended 'Internet This Minute' and 'The Wrestling Ringsider' in short order. Then I took on the Canadian Klaxon and started Soda Pop Dreams Magazine - both of which I'm still doing, nearly 9 years later. These days I seem to be working on two or three publications at any one time; and I love all of it.

When we finally got to the topic of the editorials they're working on for the class, they were all as current and varied as you could imagine. Brent was writing about the NHL Lockout - certainly a timely issue that has effected millions of fans and is still being felt across North America where economics are concerned.

Stephanie was working on the issue of how the Harry Potter books have influenced more people to read... specifically children. So true - and to relate that further to economics, business, and the hobby that is near and dear to my heart, I also pointed out that Harry Potter is big business whether it be the movies, the franchise, or the publishing industry. Case in point: Coca-Cola's working agreement with Harry Potter and the last movies. As one story goes, Coke bused out employees from their head office to spend a day in area schools reading to school kids. Public service, yes... but positive PR - for sure.

Ceilidh was the passionate one in the group. She's been writing and researching about human embryonic stem cell research. Way over my head, but when she talks about the research it's easy to see why she should pursue a career in writing - in one form or another. Not exactly the typical teenage topic, but definitely one that has monumental purpose in life, whether you agree with her arguments or not.

We chatted about how I got started collecting soda pop memorabilia (my office is filled with it), how to go about submitting feature stories to editors, and even how to formulate the right kind of argument in an opinion piece.

In the end, I hope Brent, Ceilidh and Stephanie got something out of the hour. I know I did. Will I toss my own passions aside and pursue a teaching career? Not a chance.

Town of Rosseau Not 'Short' on Charisma

2005-07-10T13:13:00.000-04:00

Sometimes the best soda pop memorabilia can be found in the most unexpected places.

Here in our tiny village of Rosseau, Ontario (population 400), we're right in the very heart of cottage country. And during the winter, spring and fall months, you could shoot a canon down the main picturesque street and not hit a single soul. But in the summer, the town swells with tourists, motorcyclists, and boaters who make Rosseau their main hub.

And we have a few celebrities that vacation in Rosseau as well - though for the most part, you'd never know it, since their huge luxury cottages are well-hidden off obscure sideroads. The odd time, we have a brush with these famous people, and sometimes never know it.

Last year, Kate Hudson dropped in to the Rosseau General Store and asked one of the girls behind the counter (my neighbour) who worked there to help her buy the contents to make lemon pie. Of course, as Goldie Hawn's daughter, she was staying at the family cottage.

And here's my own story: a few days ago I was at our small post office with my wife Erin. While I was at the counter filling out a customs form for my outgoing package, a man came in and stood behind us. Faye, the postmaster, found the gentleman his stack of mail and greeted him by asking: "How was your winter Mr. Short?" - he responded with a soft-spoken "fine, thank-you," as he reached over my shoulder for his mail.

As soon as he left, Erin said to Faye - "That was Martin Short, wasn't it."

"Yep," she replied. "The nicest man you'll ever meet."

I looked up from my form, dumbfounded. I went out to the door and sure enough, there he was wearing sunglasses and blending in with every other Muskoka tourist. He didn't drive a flashy car, or behave like a star. There was no entourage, no demands from a famous movie star. Just a man on vacation who came to pickup his mail.

And somehow our tiny village didn't seem so small or insignificant anymore.

But I digress. Back to soda pop. Every Sunday this summer, the Rosseau Antique Market is being held at the antique shop about a block down from our house. Vendors from around the area gather and set up tables outside the shop and sell their wares. There are many treasures (some of which I'd classify as junk), furniture, trinkets, and lots of stuff that needs to be dusted. That's the first thing my mom would notice.

The thing that I always hope for at any of these outdoor markets is finding some old soda pop memorabilia. This market never disappoints. This afternoon I came across some great items: a Coca-Cola ice pick for $10; a Coca-Cola mirror made into a clock; a few Pepsi tin reproduction signs for $8 each; some Wishing Well 300mL glass bottles; a Coca-Cola cooler for $125; and a bunch of different wooden crates like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Dr Pepper. Some great stuff that helps put soda pop memorabilia to the front of people's minds - the way it should be!

The Rosseau Antique Market runs every Sunday this summer (until 4 pm each week). If you're ever up in the Muskoka area of Ontario, drop by - it's a great way to spend a leisurely Sunday afternoon. And who knows - you may catch a glimpse of a famous person and not even know it!

Summer Reading Coming Up!

2005-06-30T17:12:00.000-04:00

Here in Ontario, Canada, we're experiencing record highs and a heat wave that just won't let up! Right now here in Muskoka it's 29 degrees (82 F) and very humid. Lately I've seemingly had a can of diet Coke surgically attached to my right hand wherever I go. The bottom line is, with these high summer temperatures gripping many of us here in North America, we're all in need of some indoor a/c summer reading. Enter Soda Pop Dreams...

This year's Summer 2005 edition of Soda Pop Dreams is our biggest edition ever! With the nice weather now upon us, many summer bottle, memorabilia and collectible shows/sales are now in full swing - and we've been out and about getting some great photos for the magazine.

In our neck of the woods, The Pop Shoppe has been making headlines all over the place in The National Post, The Hamilton Spectator, and even Maclean's Magazine. Owner Brian Alger has been working overtime in the promotions and publicity department as he strives to bring Pop Shoppe back to its former national glory. They've got billboards up in the Toronto area and a 1970's-era VW event bus painted with the Pop Shoppe logo that will be making the rounds this summer. Click on over to The Pop Shoppe's new website to see where it's available in your area, and view a few of the recent newspaper stories (and a couple of them also have quotes from yours truly in them about Pop Shoppe's history). http://www.thepopshoppe.com

Here's a first - the other day in the grocery store I put back a 2L bottle of Diet Coke with Lime and instead picked up a 2L of Lime Pepsi.... just out on store shelves that same day. I should have left it on the shelf. For what it's worth, I don't like Coca-Cola with Lime either - Diet Coke with Lime is awesome... but as far as I'm concerned, both Coke and Pepsi should either take their regular lime concoctions back to the drawing board, or drop them completely. Just my nickel's worth of free advice.

Lots of great articles and columns coming up in our Summer 2005 edition of Soda Pop Dreams Magazine, so I hope you'll consider subscribing to the magazine (or just buy a single copy edition via PayPal at our website if you're not sure if you'd like to subscribe for a year or not). Thanks for your time, happy collecting, and stay cool.

May the FORCE be with me...

2005-05-29T11:34:00.000-04:00

I haven't always been the biggest fan of Star Wars. There, I said it.

When I was growing up in the 70's and 80's, a few of my friends were Star Wars freaks and had every piece of Star Wars memorablia, toys, and action figures that hit the streets. My parents took me to see Return of the Jedi at the Drive-In one time, and when the box set of the Trilogy was released on VHS my buddy Chris bought it and we had a Star Wars marathon.

Well, I'm back on the bandwagon thanks to Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and a guy by the name of Duncan Jenkins. (And truth be told, I had to go out last week and rent Episode I and II to catch up with the saga.)

Duncan is the subject of one of the stories in the upcoming Summer 2005 edition of Soda Pop Dreams. That particular story is dedicated to soda collectibles released to commemorate the Star Wars movies over the years. It's not just a Pepsi story either - Coca-Cola, Mountain Dew, 7UP, and Red Bull have also released their fair share of Star Wars promotional signage and collectibles as well.

So where does Duncan fit in? He's got a collection of more than 50,000 Star Wars items in his house - most of them food-related packaging. So when it came time to find a source for the story, Duncan was the natural choice and let me tell you, it's a great story with a number of excellent photos of rare and foreign soda Star Wars memorabilia that you probably won't find elsewhere.

Living in Rosseau, it's a bit more of a roadtrip to get to a decent movie theater. We have a theater about 30 minutes away, but it's one straight outta the 70's, retro seats and tiny screen to boot. So yesterday afternoon, I sucked it up and drove an hour to Orillia to the new Galaxy theater (with stadium seating, booming surround sound, and all the high tech stuff) to finally see Star Wars Episode III. It was all that it was hyped up to be, and then some... I loved every minute of it! Not that George Lucas needs any more money stuffed into his pocket, but I highly recommend seeing Episode III the way it was meant to be seen - on the big screen. If you're not a fan of this genre, after seeing this film, you will be.

See you next week, Happy Collecting, and may the force be with you.

Mac Geeks Converge for Toronto Store Opening...

2005-05-21T22:46:00.000-04:00

It seems some people will do anything for a free t-shirt - myself included. And today I was made painfully aware that I'm a macintosh geek. But let me tell you... I'm not alone.

This morning was the opening of the Apple Store in Toronto's Yorkdale Mall - the first of its kind in Canada. Basically it's a macintosh corporate store with the full line of mac products (all the ibooks, G5s, ipods, videocameras and software). The reason this is so unique is because up to this point, you could either order Apple products online via their website or visit an authorized mac store. Few stores carry much in the way of selection, but will gladly order products/software/memory for you. The new corporate concept means that you show up and have the opportunity to try the products before you buy.

When I heard last week about the grand opening today, I was so excited about this Apple Store concept since I now use mac exclusively to produce all of my magazines and the websites that go along with them. These days, I live about 2 hours north of Toronto, but I got up at the crack of dawn and made my way through cottage country and arrived at Yorkdale at about 9:20 (ten minutes before the store was to open). I figured there might be a bit of line, since Apple was giving away a free 'Yorkdale Apple' t-shirt to the first 1500 people to visit the store. I certainly wasn't prepared for the mob that had gathered to worship the Apple brand.

According to one rather weary security guard, the crowd of nearly 1,000 had started arriving at the mall the night before to secure their place in line. One guy had been there camped out since Tuesday (five days before the scheduled opening). I was awestruck. At first, I decided against waiting for 4 hours in line just for a 10 minute glance at some mac products that I wasn't going to buy anyway (I just got a new machine back in January)... I called my wife to tell her the bad news - that every mac geek in Toronto had come out of the woodwork to catch a glimpse of the new Apple Store. Her response: "Every mac geek in Toronto, and you - the mac geek of Rosseau". Ouch.

Is it really true... are we mac addicts really computer geeks in disguise? After watching the herds of folks in line at the mall earlier today, it's safe to say that some aren't disguising their 'geekness' very well. Some are downright blatant about it.

After I sat in the car for a while, I decided that I had driven for 2 hours and wasn't going to return home with nothing to show for my day. So, I waited in line with the rest of the commoners.... I had a few conversations about macs, the new Tiger OS (which I now have), and the brand in general. I sipped a bottle of diet Coke in the heat (yes, the line from the mall stretched all the way outside and around the corner) and waited for nearly 3 hours to get into the store.

At one point a guy approached the mob and asked, "Is this the line for Star Wars?" To which one rowdy mac fan yelled, "Star Wars.... what the hell is that?" That stirred a wave of laughter from the crowd because for as much hype as the Star Wars movie has been getting lately, it's almost a relief to be obsessing over something else for a change this week.

And so I got my free t-shirt (very cool shirt by the way), bought some RAM for the emac, and got a brief lesson on the new OS 10.4 Tiger. Lots of cool trinkets and gadgets at the new Apple Store, some of which I hope to add to the Playing With Words arsenal this Fall - so keep an eye on the Soda Pop Dreams Magazine website for some new innovations and technologies being implemented, courtesy of the Apple Store.

See ya, and Happy Collecting!

Soda Pop Dreams Goes Hollywood... maybe.

2005-05-16T00:34:00.000-04:00

In the not-too-distant-future, Soda Pop Dreams Magazine may be going Hollywood. First off, I'm working on a story at the moment dedicated to Pepsi-related Star Wars memorabilia in honor of the summer's biggest blockbuster in years, Star Wars Episode III. Pepsi's affiliation with Episode I-III has produced some fantastic cross-promotion items (of interest to both Star Wars fanatics and Pepsi collectors). Signs, bottles, cans, P.O.S. displays, and so much more. Since this is the final movie in the saga, it's only fitting that we pay homage to Pepsi and Star Wars for our upcoming Summer 2005 print edition. Currently on eBay, there are more than 500 Pepsi Star Wars items up for bids. And that, folks, is only the beginning.

Hollywood continues: last week I got a call from a production manager in Vancouver, British Columbia. He's in the process of compiling props to appear in a movie that's starting production next week. The movie takes place, in part, in a fictional beverage company called 'Alpine Beverage'. He came across the Soda Pop Dreams Magazine website and figured that since we are dedicated exclusively to the beverage industry and soda pop collecting, that the magazine would be perfect for props... in background shots of the beverage company office, that sort of thing. So, while nothing is set in stone (we'll probably end up on the cutting room floor), copies of Soda Pop Dreams and The Soda Spectrum Series are now on their way to Vancouver to debut as 'movie props'.

Oh yeah, the movie is called "RV" and did I mention... it stars Robin Williams. 'Nuff said.

Coke Are It...

2005-04-23T00:28:00.000-04:00

Do you ever feel like you've reached the end of the information superhighway? Sometimes when I'm surfing around looking for collector sites for Coca-Cola bottles or cans all I come up with are sites that haven't been updated for 5 years or countless links and sites that just don't work. The Net is clogged with a zillion of them. I figure sooner or later I'll be searching Google and a great big graphic with a 'Do Not Enter' symbol will suddenly flash on the screen indicating that I've reached the end of the road - there's nothing to do but turn back from whence I came.

And then I discovered the world of blogging. Reading a person's blog, no matter what the topic, is a bit surreal. And the best ones are the blogs that are written to no one in particular. It's a bit like peeking into someone's diary or reading their personal mail. But I digress.

Today was a weird day... I was interviewed by a reporter from the National Post (Sarah Lazarovic) about the return of The Pop Shoppe to the Canadian market, and the rich history that it had in the 1970s and early 80s. She found it a bit ironic that I never drank soda pop as a kid (my parents never kept pop in the house and we were rarely aloud to have it), but now I have a large collection of Coca-Cola and Pop Shoppe stuff... and I drink Diet Coke like it's water. The story she's working on about Pop Shoppe will appear in the Saturday section of the N.P. in a couple of weeks, so keep an eye out for that.

The other day I took a stroll through the beverage section in Wal-Mart and also my local grocery store as I do every so often. A few things surprised me. First, at Wal-Mart, 2L bottles of most Coke products were $1.69 but a 2L bottle of Diet Coke with Lime was $2.29. Huh? What's up with that?

Meanwhile over at Sobey's, the Star Wars Pepsi promotion is gearing up (minus the commemorative cans this time around) and for once, Pepsi has beat Coke to the punch in something: the release of the 355mL plastic bottles. Of course, my first question would be - what's the point? You can buy a case of 8 355mL plastic bottles for the same price as a 12 pack of 355mL tins. Does this make logical sense to anyone? If it does, maybe you can explain it to me since I'm obviously a little slow. Apparently Coke understands it totally since a press release crossed my desk last week promoting THEIR new 355mL mini bottles that will be available here in Canada shortly.

Issue #37 of Soda Pop Dreams (print edition) is already shaping up to be one of our best. A few stories already submitted about some old bottling companies, a story about returnable glass bottles (with great photos), and some tidbits about RC Cola, what Bill Gates' beverage of choice is, a Pepsi glass bottling line that's throwing the towel in, and so much more!! For those of you in the Toronto area, I'll be at the annual Ontario Chapter of the Coca-Cola Collectors Club Yard Sale on Sunday, June 12th - admission is free and there will be tons of Coke memorabilia there for sale. Look for a write-up and photos about this event also coming up in Issue #37 of Soda Pop Dreams (http://www.sodapopdreams.org).

That's it for now. Take care, visit our site often, and Happy Collecting!

The Cola Wars... all is fair in love and soft drinks.

2005-04-19T23:39:00.000-04:00

It seems there's just no down time for this editor/publisher these days. I finished the latest edition of The Soda Spectrum Series (for Coke bottle collectors) - http://www.sodaspectrum.com (shameless plug), then it was on to Soda Pop Dreams Magazine and the New Coke feature; in 10 days, I hope to have our new soda can publication finished and ready for the printer (yes, an ENTIRE MAGAZINE dedicated to soda can collectors). Then I get to change gears for a few weeks and work on some non-soda pop magazine stuff before starting the next cycle. Whew!!

I live in the very small town of Rosseau, Ontario (population 400). The other night when I walked down to the post office I happened to glance over at the General Store where two soda machines sit - one Coke, one Pepsi. They both face the road, spaced evenly... with both of them lit up it looked like a scene right out of a cola commercial. It got me to thinking about the Cola Wars.

Have you ever noticed that Coke and Pepsi seem to be ever-closely neck and neck in the beverage cooler? One can't sneeze without the other offering a tissue. Case and point: _________ with Lime. First it was Diet Coke with Lime, then more recently Coca-Cola with Lime. Now, Pepsi is following suit with its own Lime Pepsi concoction. A couple of years ago we had the introduction of Vanilla Coke, then came Pepsi Vanilla. Diet Coke, Diet Pepsi; Cherry Coke, Wild Cherry Pepsi; Coca-Cola C2, Pepsi Edge; tomato, tomAAto. My question, gentle readers, is when is enough, well, enough? At what point is there just no more space in the beverage cooler for these extension brands to exist? I have a feeling we're more likely to see more coolers added to convenience and grocery stores than we are to see the Cola Wars reduced to the almighty Coca-Cola and Pepsi anchor brand colas. And why not? If it gets more people drinking X-brand then why not add more extensions. Personally, I'm banking on Diet Chocolate Fudge Coke or Bubblegum Pepsi. Don't laugh - it could very well happen in my lifetime!!

It's just sad that stores will have to resort to adding entire new wings just to accomodate the ever-expanding beverage aisle. Thank God I'm a card-carrying Diet Coke man... otherwise I'd be just another confused consumer.

New Coke's 20th Anniversary

2005-04-06T16:40:00.000-04:00

Coming up in a few weeks is the 20th Anniversary of the introduction of New Coke. My God, has it really been that long already? 1985 was a very different time than nowadays. There was no internet, styles and tastes were different, and people knew what they liked. And didn't like.

I just finished the feature story for the upcoming edition of Soda Pop Dreams Magazine (print edition), dedicated to the New Coke 20th Anniversary, and I was amazed at how different the recollections of New Coke were by our readers. Many different perspectives (from bottlers, advertisers, grocery store clerks, consumers, etc.). If YOU remember New Coke, do me a favor and post a comment at the bottom of this blog...

I had a chance to talk to a couple of great sources. First, there was Mark Pendergrast, author of "For God, Country, and Coca-Cola". What a great source! Mark's book about the history of Coca-Cola has an entire chapter devoted to the New Coke disaster, and it was certainly interesting to hear his thoughts 20 years later. The other source I spoke with was Bill Baver, a former Coca-Cola employee who retired a year before New Coke was launched. Bill is certainly an outspoken and colorful character and his recollections and thoughts are pure gold.

Probably my personal favorite 'story' of New Coke was the one where the Coca-Cola deliveryman was stocking New Coke on a grocery store shelf in May 1985. An elderly woman approached and assaulted him with her umbrella. "You bastard," she yelled, "you ruined it - it tastes like shit!" When a nearby Pepsi driver snickered at the scene, she blasted him as well. "You stay out of it! This is family business," she scolded. "Yours is worse than shit!"

While most of the world was seemingly have a nervous breakdown about New Coke being launched and the old Coke disappearing, it didn't personally affect me much at the time. I was 12-years-old when New Coke came out and we weren’t allowed to drink pop much back then. But when I delivered on my paper route, I always stopped at the corner store and drank a pop and remember seeing the “NEW” silver banner across Coke cans – I think it was totally lost on me at the time. How ironic it is that now soda pop and its history is the majority of what I write about.

If you're not a subscriber of Soda Pop Dreams Magazine, now's a great time to join us (or, if you'd rather just buy Issue #36 for the New Coke stuff, there's a link on our website to do just that).

Thanks for reading this week's blog.... for those of you subscribers out there, I hope you enjoy the New Coke feature story in the upcoming edition (due to go into the mail April 13th). See ya, and Happy Collecting!

Bookstores, and pet peevish things...

2005-02-13T12:08:00.000-05:00

This is my first posting in my Blog - I think it'll be therapeutic for me. First off, I should tell you that I'm a small press publisher living in the booming metropolis of Rosseau, Ontario (population 400). We're right in the heart of Muskoka (Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell's cottage is 10 minutes down the road from our town). I look at being a publisher, not as a job, but as a way of life. It's getting nice lump-sum paychecks that have to last for two months; it's being overjoyed when an order for $7.95 comes my way (because that means someone is reading a magazine I produced). It's working on holiday weekends, Christmas Day (sometimes), and often while many people are sleeping, I'm still up researching. It's loving my job and hating my job... sometimes in equal measure.

I collect Coca-Cola commemorative 8 oz. bottles and Pop Shoppe memorabilia. I love my eMac, my Toyota Echo Hatchback, diet Coke, Fruit Loops, WWE wrestling, McDonald's, and I'm married to an amazing girl who is just as stubborn and strong-willed as I am. It makes for some challenging confrontations. :0)

Before I had my own publishing company, I once complained to a magazine editor that a check he had written to me for a freelance story had bounced; he said that the publishing industry was tough and if i didn't believe him, I should try it. I did - and he was right. But fortunately, nobody does what I do, the way that I do it. And I love that about myself. And even when things seem bleak... when a magazine I projected to perform just doesn't get there or when money I thought I was getting doesn't show up - I never give up. Because I know that somehow, someday, the time and dedication I've put in will reward me in ways I haven't even imagined yet.

I've met a lot of very interesting people in my publishing journey - and at least one pesky ad rep that will remain nameless that I'd rather forget. I've had the chance to meet face to face with Sarah Polley (actress from "Go" and "My Life Without Me"), Lex Luger (a rather beefcake-like professional wrestler), and countless local personalities and politicians. More recently, I've met many people from the soda pop collecting world (to me, they are the most interesting people I can think of). And I've logged some 350,000 km on my car(s) over the past 10 years chasing - and keeping - my dream.

That, in a nutshell, is me. Whew.

Now then... on to my pet peeves, which is the reason for this particular Blog in the first place.

Tonight my wife and I drove to Barrie (a rather large city with two large malls and a ton of places to shop). We make this shopping trip about once a month just for something to do. Anyway, we dropped in at Chapters bookstore. (Chapters, for those of you following along at home is like Borders or some of those huge department store-like bookstores.) Being a publisher, I love to just spend an hour going through the magazine racks. I don't read the magazines - I check them out to see what's new, which magazines are still around, things like that. I'm always amazed with the scope that magazines cover. It's true that these days, there's a magazine for EVERYONE. I just saw "Black Men" magazine today for the first time. I guess I'm not really surprised (well, maybe a little bit). Other magazines like "Teen Girl", "Fit Pregnancy", and others now seem to fill every demographic and niche imagineable.

Shameless plug - I publish:
Soda Pop Dreams Magazine - http://www.sodapopdreams.org
The Soda Spectrum Series - http://www.pww.on.ca/spectrum.htm
Everything 80s Magazine - http://www.80smagazine.com

Sorry, just had to slip those in there :) - my point is, there are literally thousands of magazines out there. It always inspires me on trips to Chapters. My mom has, for years, worried that magazines are on their way to extinction. I think that nothing could be further from the truth. The magazine industry may be more cut-throat than it used to be, but the market as a whole has never been more plentiful. The problem is, when people forget they're in a bookstore and not a library.

Which brings me to my issue with Chapters. Who the hell decided to put comfy chairs and ass-pleasing carpeting in these mega bookstores? Whoever it was, it'd like five minutes with him/her alone in a room so I can beat them over the head with a copy of Chicken Soup for the Entrepreneurial Idiot. Today I saw a woman sitting in Chapters with a huge stack of books on one side of her and a stack of magazines on the otherside. Last time I checked, it didn't say "Chapters Public Library" on the sign out front of the store. In another corner, a teenager all of about 16 was flipping through a magazine, snapping her gum - subscription cards strewn around her as she folded back the spine. Another woman was sitting on the floor with a big pad of paper scribbling things down, taking more books off the shelf and thumbing through them - and then there was more note taking. She was doing research. I thought I was going to be sick to my stomach just watching her.

Sometimes I feel like I'm on the outside looking in... my magazines do very well being sold by subscription or single-copy sales from our website. They are not on newsstands in Canada or the U.S. (because bookstores take 40% of the cover price to sell them, and distributors take another 20%) - and I don't mind telling you, I'm not terribly sad about that now.

When I go to Chapters I always leave having purchased at least a few magazines. Today I bought two magazines, a book, a calendar, and a greeting card. Most people there didn't even buy a coffee. As a publisher, I hate people that abuse the system. Unless your last name is "Rowling" or "Black" most authors/publishers don't make a gazillion dollars in our industry. They have to fight for every dollar that comes their way.

And just as I was about to lay the smackdown on that "researching" woman in Chapters, my wife reminded me that Chapters doesn't exactly discourage people from doing that. Otherwise they wouldn't provide comfortable chairs and they'd have a loitering rule in place. I hate it when my wife is right. So do I blame the Chapters organization for allowing it, or should I blame the cheap lazy bastards who can't be bothered to buy something that they're obviously interested in reading?

Here's a tip for all those would-be bookstore book-hoggers. There's this new invention - it's called a library card.

That's all for now. Thanks for visiting my Blog; come back soon when I promise not to bitch and moan so much. ;0)