A cherry flavour, a family and a North Carolina town.

Cheerwine is one of the oldest soft drinks still made in the American South. Its maker, Carolina Beverage Corporation of Salisbury, North Carolina, says L. D. Peeler created it there in 1917, during a sugar shortage, after a flavour salesman from St. Louis sold him a wild-cherry flavouring that blended well with others. The company says the name followed from the drink’s burgundy-red colour and its “cheery disposition.” Despite the name, Cheerwine is a soft drink and contains no alcohol, English Wikipedia notes.

The business grew out of a local bottling company. A 2009 version of the company’s website, preserved by the Internet Archive, said franchises followed in 1923 at the Orange Crush Bottling Co. in Gastonia and at Granite Bottling Works in Granite Falls; with Salisbury, the company called the three towns the “Cheerwine Triangle,” its heartland. The same timeline said that by 1924 Cheerwine was outselling Mint Cola in Salisbury, so the Mint Cola Bottling Co. changed its name to Cheerwine Bottling Co., and that the Cheerwine name was first registered as a trademark in 1926.

The drink has stayed with one family. According to the company, Peeler’s son Clifford Peeler became president in the 1930s and kept the business profitable through the Depression; after the Second World War, franchising took the drink as far as Longview, Texas. Clifford Peeler’s grandsons Cliff and Mark Ritchie joined in the late 1970s. The company’s timeline says Mark Ritchie became president of Carolina Beverage Corporation in 1992, when Cliff Ritchie became president of Cheerwine Bottling, and that Cliff took over Carolina Beverage in 2007; a Bloomberg executive profile cited by English Wikipedia instead dates Cliff Ritchie’s leadership of the parent company to 1992. In 2015 the Salisbury Post described him as president and chief executive of both companies. Cheerwine calls itself “the oldest continuing soft drink run by the same family.”

Three cherries, a splash and a retro script.

Cheerwine’s look has been built on cherries and a deep red. The company says its first bottles carried a paper label, and that by 1920 it had a glass bottle with three cherries and the Cheerwine name moulded into the shoulder. A Cheerwine bottle from about 1920 is held by the North Carolina Museum of History, English Wikipedia notes. The company dates its first vending machine and a switch from a 6-ounce bottle to an 8-ounce “king size” one to the 1950s, and says production moved to its present site in Salisbury in July 1967, with the first run on Independence Day. The first cans and the first television commercial, tagged “Deliciously Different,” followed in the 1960s, and Diet Cheerwine arrived early in the 1970s, according to the company.

The logo has changed several times. In 1987, the company says, Cheerwine dropped an underline from its logo and added a splash graphic, and in 2006 the logo brought back cherries “for the first time since 1920.” In September 2008 the Salisbury Post reported a “restaging” of the brand aimed at younger drinkers, with redesigned packaging and a new retro-style logo based on an early Cheerwine mark. Six years earlier, in October 2002, the trade site BevNET had reported a custom-molded Cheerwine glass bottle unveiled at the InterBev show in Atlanta. For the centenary in 2017 the company issued a Centennial Can Series carrying throwback graphics from its first hundred years. The lettering behind these marks is covered in our separate guide to the Cheerwine font.

Slogans have tracked the brand’s Southern positioning. The company lists “Wildest Cherry Soft Drink” as a 1980s tagline. In April 2011 it launched “Born in the South. Raised in a glass.” with a set of radio commercials, the Salisbury Post reported, and in February 2018 it introduced “Uniquely Southern,” which still heads its website. Cheerwine has also lent its name to other products: Cheerwine ice cream, introduced by the Salisbury-based supermarket chain Food Lion in 2002; a Cheerwine-filled Krispy Kreme doughnut in July 2010, which the Salisbury Post covered; and seasonal drinks including Holiday Punch in 2014 and Cheerwine Kreme in 2016, according to the company.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all soft drinks from different regions of the United States: Cheerwine, Moxie, Faygo, Vernors, Big Red, Ale-8-One and Sun Drop. American regional soft-drink brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A soft-drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a bottle or can, a name and the flavour it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its drinks are actually made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its drinks are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From the Carolinas towards the rest of the country.

For most of its history Cheerwine was a Carolinas drink. That began to change in the 2000s. From April 2005 bottlers in other regions began to carry it, mainly through Pepsi distributors, English Wikipedia says, and in February 2010 The Business Journal of the Triad reported a distribution deal with Pepsi Bottling Ventures. In April 2011 the company announced a plan to be sold nationwide by the drink’s centenary in 2017, the Salisbury Post reported. That October the Winston-Salem Journal reported a partnership with Pepsi Beverages Co. in Atlanta, Florida and Memphis, and said Cheerwine was then available in about 12 percent of the country; the same week the company began selling an “Original 1917 Formula” made with sugar, in glass bottles. In June 2014 the Birmingham bottler Buffalo Rock agreed to make and distribute Cheerwine in Alabama, western Georgia and the Florida Panhandle, AL.com reported. Abroad, the Triad business paper reported a move into Norway in January 2003.

The drink’s reputation travelled further than its trucks. In March 2011 The New York Times’ Diner’s Journal wrote about “the expanding cult of Cheerwine,” and in 2016 Business Insider described it as available from Maryland to Florida but best known in the Carolinas. Its home town now celebrates it every year. Salisbury held a centennial celebration in 2017 that became the annual Cheerwine Festival, hosted by the city; the Salisbury Post reported in May 2025 that that year’s festival may have been the biggest yet, and the company says it draws more than 100,000 people a year. The company added Cheerwine Zero Sugar in 2021, and it still describes its home as Salisbury.

For a design guide, Cheerwine shows how a single colour, a fruit and a home town can carry a family brand for more than a century. Compare Moxie, New England’s own regional soft drink, and Ale-8-One, another family-run regional soda, from Kentucky. For this guide we use burgundy, a cherry red and a cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Cheerwine’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.