| Crush | |
| Type: | Soft drink |
| Manufacturer: | Keurig Dr Pepper |
| Distributor: | PepsiCo (United States and Canada) The Coca-Cola Company (Syria and Lebanon) Compañía de Cervecerías Unidas (Chile) |
| Related: | Fanta, Nehi, Orange Slice, Sunkist, Mirinda |
Crush is a brand of carbonated soft drinks owned and marketed internationally by Keurig Dr Pepper, originally created as an orange soda, Orange Crush. Crush competes with Coca-Cola's Fanta. It was created in 1911 by beverage and extract chemist Neil C. Ward. Most flavors of Crush are caffeine-free.
In 1911, Clayton J. Howel, president and founder of the Orange Crush Company, partnered with Neil C. Ward and incorporated the company. Ward made the recipe for Orange Crush. Howel was not new to the soft drink business, having earlier introduced Howel's Orange Julep. Soft drinks of the time often carried the surname of the inventor along with the product name. Howel sold the rights to use his name in conjunction with his first brand; therefore, Ward was given the honours: Crush was first premiered as Ward's Orange Crush.[1] Originally, Orange Crush included orange pulp in the bottles, giving it a "fresh squeezed" illusion, even though the pulp was added rather than remaining from squeezed oranges. Pulp has not been in the bottles for decades.
Crush was purchased by Procter & Gamble in 1980 (with the exception of the Canadian rights, which were purchased in 1984). Procter & Gamble only manufactured "bottler's base", which was a concentrate consisting of flavour and colour. One milliliter of bottler's base was combined with syrup and carbonated water to create a 12-ounce bottle of Crush. In 1989, Cadbury Schweppes acquired Crush USA from Procter & Gamble Co. Cadbury Schweppes spun off its United States beverage business as Dr Pepper Snapple Group (predecessor of Keurig Dr Pepper) in 2008.
Bottles were originally ribbed, and were made of brown glass at one point.[2] Initially, Orange Crush came in the ribbed or "Krinkly", clear glass bottle. The brown (amber) glass bottle was introduced in 1937, and is known as the "Krinkly Brown" bottle. The bottle design changed again in 1955, leaving the amber glass and "krinkles" behind. This bottle was called "the Big New Bottle" and was intended to give the product a larger and more "graceful" look. [3]
The Crush brand and trademark are currently owned by Keurig Dr Pepper of Frisco, Texas. Crush is also popular in Canada, where it is distributed by a subsidiary of Canada Dry Motts. It is distributed by various Pepsi bottlers, the biggest being the Pepsi Bottling Group United States.
Other countries where Crush is sold are Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Syria, Uruguay and at one time Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Bolivia. In Chile, Crush has been distributed by Compañía de Cervecerías Unidas since the 1940s.[4] In contrast, in some countries of Latin America the Crush brand is distributed by The Coca-Cola Company, using the same colours and bottles as Fanta.
Several flavours (Orange, Diet Orange, Grape, Strawberry, Pineapple) are available at most stores throughout North America; others, however, are distributed only within small markets. Pineapple Crush, Birch Beer Crush, and Lime Crush for instance, are found in both cans and single serving bottles in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador and in Fort McMurray, Alberta. From 2009, changes in bottling rights allowed many of these regional flavours to be distributed by the Pepsi Bottling Group in a majority of their territory in the United States, and for PepsiAmerica to distribute Crush in most of its territory.[5]