Two Brown graduates, a floating store and a prize-winning peach drink.

Nantucket Nectars is an American brand of juices, juice drinks, lemonades and iced teas, owned today by Keurig Dr Pepper. It began on the island of Nantucket, off Cape Cod in Massachusetts, with two college friends, Tom First and Tom Scott. English Wikipedia says the two met at Brown University in 1985. The International Directory of Company Histories, in a 1998 entry on the company, says that after graduating in 1989 they skipped the job interviews their friends were lining up in New York and headed instead for Nantucket, where both had spent childhood holidays.

They already had a business there. According to the Directory, the pair had spent the previous summer running Allserve, a motorboat that became a floating convenience store after Scott swapped his car with his father for it. From the boat the two delivered food, ice, newspapers and laundry to yachts in Nantucket Harbor, and even pumped out bilge tanks; they also turned an icehouse in the harbor into a general store. Wikipedia describes Allserve in the same way, as a floating store serving the boats in the harbor.

The juice came out of a quiet winter. The Directory says that during the off-season the two worked odd jobs and, for a cooking contest, First tried to recreate a peach drink he had tasted in Spain. His version, made in a blender, won a prize, and the two decided to build a business on it. Wikipedia dates the recreated peach drink to 1989; the Associated Press, reporting in 2002, said Nantucket Nectars was started in 1990, and the Directory gives the company’s incorporation as 1990.

The early product was handmade. The Directory says the founders sold the nectar by the glass from the deck of Allserve, then poured it into recycled wine bottles ordered from a catalogue and capped with a hand press, selling the bottles across the island. Wikipedia adds that they mixed the juice in a blender, pasteurised it and bottled it themselves, and that the name Nantucket Nectars came later. Before long, the Directory says, the drink was being professionally pasteurised and bottled in New York and sold on Martha’s Vineyard and parts of Cape Cod. In the last months of 1990 the founders added peach-orange, lemonade and cranberry-grapefruit flavours.

The next two years were hard, by the Directory’s account: a split with an early bottling contact, a bottler that could not handle hot-filled juice, and long stretches of odd jobs to keep going. Things improved when a bottler in Ohio re-equipped its plant for the drinks, and in 1992 the founders began selling in Washington, D.C. The company, by then called Nantucket Allserve, then found a backer in Michael Egan, the owner of Alamo Rent A Car, who, the Directory says, met the pair while they were cleaning his yacht and took a half-interest in the business.

Cambridge, Ocean Spray, Cadbury Schweppes and Keurig Dr Pepper.

The company soon left the island. The Directory says its offices moved from Nantucket in 1992, initially to Brighton, then to Boston and finally to a former Harvard University fraternity house in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Wikipedia also places the business in Cambridge. In 1994, the Directory says, the founders built their own distribution network and also carried other drinks, among them Arizona iced teas and Clearly Canadian, before giving up the distribution operation and turning to outside services. Wikipedia says that from 1994 they concentrated on making and selling their juices.

By 1997 the drinks were not made on Nantucket. The Directory lists bottling plants used that year in Warwick, Rhode Island; Reading, Pennsylvania; Lakeland, Florida; and Benicia, California. It also records a shipment to the coffee chain Starbucks in September 1997, and a line of herbal blends called Nantucket Super Nectars launched that July. The founders’ growth became teaching material: Wikipedia says Harvard Business School published a case study on the company in 1998, written by Jon Biotti, Joseph Lassiter and William A. Sahlman.

The Associated Press reported on 26 March 2002 that Ocean Spray, the cranberry growers’ cooperative, had bought the company, formally Nantucket Allserve Inc., in 1997, and that it was now selling the Nantucket Nectars brand to the British drinks group Cadbury Schweppes, saying it wanted to focus on its core cranberry business. The AP marked the change with a line of its own: the Juice Guys, it wrote, were becoming the Juice Gents. Wikipedia gives the same sequence, Ocean Spray in 1997 and Cadbury Schweppes in 2002.

Two more owners followed through corporate change rather than sale. English Wikipedia says Dr Pepper Snapple Group was established in 2008 after its separation from Cadbury Schweppes, taking the American drinks business with it, and that Keurig Dr Pepper was formed on 9 July 2018 by the merger of Keurig Green Mountain and Dr Pepper Snapple Group. Keurig Dr Pepper has owned Nantucket Nectars since that merger, and the brand appears on the company’s own brands page as of October 2026, alongside drinks such as Snapple. Wikipedia gives the company’s headquarters as Burlington, Massachusetts, and Frisco, Texas, and says it announced in August 2025 a plan to separate into two U.S.-listed companies, one focused on coffee and one on refreshment beverages.

The founders kept a voice in the brand after the sales. Wikipedia says First and Scott are no longer involved in day-to-day operations but have continued to take on marketing duties and to voice the radio advertisements.

Design and documentation.

Ready-to-drink tea, flavored water, sports drinks and craft soda share a cooler shelf, but their packaging asks different things of a label. A tea can or tall glass bottle is often read from several feet away, so the name, the flavor and a colour cue have to work together at a glance, while the back of the pack carries ingredients, nutrition panels and the legal small print that every drink must show.

Flavored-water and sports-drink bottles tend to lean on colour coding, since a shopper picking one flavor from a long row is often matching a hue rather than reading a word. Craft-soda labels sit at the other end: many use illustration, hand lettering or a story on the bottle to suggest a small maker, even when the brand has since become part of a much larger drinks company.

Each guide in this group looks at who started the brand, who owns it now and how its labels, logos and bottles have been described in dated sources, and it marks plainly where a statement rests only on what the company says about itself. The colours and type shown are our own unofficial interpretation.

A seascape label, a no-ties slogan, purple vans and a cap that told the story.

The founders themselves became the brand’s voice. Wikipedia says that in radio and television campaigns First and Scott often referred to themselves as “The Juice Guys”, and the Associated Press used the same name for them in 2002. The Directory says the two wrote and aired radio spots to build demand, and that one slogan, “We’re Juice Guys. We don’t wear ties to work.”, was also printed on the bottle labels, along with a Nantucket seascape. A follow-up line, “We knew you’d be back”, worked less well, according to the same entry, because listeners found it arrogant.

The bottle carried the island story in a second place. Wikipedia says the drinks were originally sold in glass bottles with caps that featured information about Nantucket Harbor and the history of Nantucket Nectars, the harbor where the founders had run their delivery boat. Today, Wikipedia says, the drinks come in plastic bottles made from recycled plastic, excluding the cap and label.

The colour that ran through the 1990s marketing was purple. The Directory describes the product as purple-capped, and says the company sent purple Winnebagos around the United States to hand out free samples. It also set up purple tents at football games and street fairs near the college campuses of the Boston area, and sold T-shirts bearing the Nantucket Nectars logo. Even the Cambridge office was painted to match: the Directory describes the founders letting their dogs roam the purple-coloured premises of the former fraternity house.

The brand also used places and events. The Directory says the company co-sponsored a basketball tournament in Washington, D.C., took part in Earth Day events in Boston and New York City, organised an annual clothing drive in Boston, and ran a Juice Guys juice bar on Nantucket as a prototype for others it planned to open. The flavours it records for 1997 include Pineapple Orange Banana, Kiwi Berry, Watermelon Strawberry and a half-and-half of iced tea and lemonade.

For a design guide, Nantucket Nectars shows how a founder story, a single cap colour and a place name can work together as an identity: the island on the label, the founders on the radio and purple on everything from the cap to the van. Compare it with Ocean Spray, the cranberry cooperative that owned it from 1997, and Snapple, its stablemate at Keurig Dr Pepper. For this guide we use cap purple, peach nectar and island sand with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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