A confectioner’s shop, fizzy drinks and a family name.

Franklin & Sons is a British brand of tonic waters, mixers and soft drinks owned by Global Brands, an independent drinks company. Its owner says the name goes back to 1886. In the account on the brand’s own site, the brothers Frederick, Albert and George Franklin began bottling mineral waters and making flavoured sodas that year from a confectionery shop in Rickmansworth, on the north-western edge of London, after Frederick had travelled in the United States and noticed, in cities such as Chicago and Buffalo, that Americans drank very different things from the English. The Dutch importer De Monnik Dranken, introducing the brand in 2023, repeated the story and set it in the time of the temperance movement.

The company’s timeline goes on to say that the business took the name Franklin & Sons around 1890, as a new generation arrived, and that this period also saw the first Franklin & Sons bottles. Ginger beer, it says, became the best seller in the early 1900s, and Albert built a system of returnable bottles to keep up with demand. Cherryade, limeade and cream soda followed in the 1930s, according to the same account.

The family business did not survive into the modern market. The brand’s timeline says Franklin & Sons ceased trading in 1989, after nearly a century and for more than twenty-five years the name was out of use.

It came back in 2015. Global Brands says it acquired the brand that year and relaunched it in London. The Chesterfield business news site Destination Chesterfield reported in February 2017 that the brand had re-entered distribution in 2015 and been launched to global markets in October 2015.

Embossed glass, spring water and a Victorian accent.

The revived range was built around the bar. The Scottish licensed-trade paper SLTN reported in January 2016 that the firm had launched a four-strong range of premium mixers: Natural Indian Tonic Water, Original Ginger Ale, Sicilian Lemon Tonic and Natural Light Tonic Water, sold in 200ml embossed glass bottles. The paper listed Staffordshire spring water, root ginger extract, Sicilian lemon and cinchona bark extract from Ecuador among the ingredients, and quoted Simon Green, then marketing director at Global Brands, describing Franklin & Sons as “a brand rooted in its Victorian heritage” and London as the brand’s home city.

The founding date is part of the brand’s own copy, and the owner leans on it. The brand marked its 140th anniversary in 2026, Global Brands said, with a bartender competition themed on bridging the 1880s and the present.

Flavour has been the main way the range has grown. The Drinks Business reported in November 2016 on a premium lemonade aimed at drinkers of vodka. In April 2019 The Morning Advertiser reported a four-strong Flavour Collection of tonic waters, among them Rosemary Tonic Water with Black Olive and Rhubarb Tonic Water with Hibiscus, and quoted the brand’s marketing director, Jen Draper. The range now runs from tonics and mixers to sodas, soft drinks and pre-mixed cans, according to the brand’s site, which states that the drinks are produced in England.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all mixer and alcohol-free names: Canada Dry, Q Mixers, Thomas Henry, Franklin & Sons, London Essence, Double Dutch and Clausthaler. Mixer and alcohol-free brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from small companies that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a cocktail bar.

A mixer or alcohol-free brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the promise it makes, 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 labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A revived name inside an independent drinks company.

The owner is a family-run business. Global Brands was founded by Steve Perez in 1997, according to company text published by De Monnik Dranken in 2023, and its portfolio includes the ready-to-drink brands VK and Hooch alongside Franklin & Sons, according to the company’s site. SLTN quoted Perez as chairman in March 2017, when the brand entered its 30th international market, with new listings in the United Arab Emirates, Norway, Colombia and the Seychelles; Destination Chesterfield reported the same year that the company had invested in a new warehouse in Chesterfield to store the growing range. When the trade title Just Drinks featured Global Brands in its 2024 Excellence Awards, it described Franklin & Sons as the company’s flagship.

Export has shaped the brand’s recent years. From 1 September 2023 De Monnik Dranken, a family wholesaler in Oldenzaal, took on exclusive import and distribution in the Netherlands. In the United States, Global Brands announced distribution partnerships in 2025 with Sheehan Family Companies, covering Massachusetts, Wisconsin and New York, and with Empire Distributors in Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia and Colorado; Keith Beattie, its international sales director, said the deals gave the brand a platform with scale. At home, the brand has run a bartender competition, Flavour in Motion, since 2024, with its 2026 final held in London.

The name needs a little care online. Franklin & Sons is a common shop and trade name, and several unrelated businesses use it; the drinks brand’s own site is franklinandsons.co.uk.

For a design guide, Franklin & Sons shows how a revived family name, a founding date and embossed glass can give a young mixer range the voice of a Victorian soda maker. Compare Fever-Tree, the London mixer brand that made tonic a premium category, and Double Dutch, the London mixer brand. For this guide we use Victorian navy, antique gold and label ivory with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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