A roadside stand in California’s Central Valley.

A&W began as a drink sold at a roadside stand. Roy W. Allen opened a root beer stand in Lodi, California, in June 1919, according to the International Directory of Company Histories (St. James Press, 1999), which says he had bought the recipe from a pharmacist he met at a soda fountain while arranging a hotel deal in Tucson, Arizona. English Wikipedia also gives Lodi and 1919, and says the formula was bought from a pharmacist.

The stand was dressed as an old saloon, with a bar and barstools, the Directory says, and it links Allen’s early trade to Prohibition, which the Volstead Act of 1919 enforced: soldiers back from France, it says, came to the stand for a drink that stood in for beer.

Growth came quickly. By the summer of 1920 Allen had a second stand in Stockton, the Directory says, and he took a partner, Frank Wright, one of his employees, to open outlets around Sacramento. The drink was named A&W Root Beer after the two men’s initials. English Wikipedia dates the partnership and the A&W name to 1922; the Directory places new outlets in Houston in 1922 and Allen’s purchase of Wright’s share in 1924, when, it says, Allen registered the “A&W Root Beer” name and the A&W logo with the US Patent and Trademark Office.

From the start, the root beer and the stands were one business. Allen sold franchises, and his contracts, the Directory says, set the design and floor plan of each drive-in, the design and weight of the mugs, and the mixture of the brew. Franchisees bought concentrated root beer syrup from Allen, English Wikipedia says, and some chose to sell food as well. The “tray boys” who carried root beer out to customers in their cars were modelled on the bellhops of hotels, according to the Directory.

From drive-ins to the grocery shelf.

The war years were hard on the stands. Sugar and extract were rationed during the Second World War, the Directory says, and many outlets closed; after 1945, with GI loans easy to obtain, new ones opened. In 1950 Allen sold the business to Gene Hurtz, a Nebraska businessman, who incorporated it as the A&W Root Beer Company. English Wikipedia says A&W reached Canada in 1956.

Ownership then passed through several corporate hands. In 1963 Hurtz sold the company to the J. Hungerford Smith Company, which had made Allen’s root beer concentrate — since 1919, according to the Directory, or since 1921, according to English Wikipedia. The United Fruit Company bought Hungerford in 1966, and in 1970 United Fruit merged with AMK Corporation to form United Brands.

The bottled drink belongs to that era. United Brands began bottling A&W Root Beer for retail stores in the early 1970s, the Directory says, introduced Sugar Free A&W Root Beer in 1974, and formed a separate subsidiary to sell the root beer apart from the restaurants. English Wikipedia names that unit A&W Distributing Co., formed in 1971, and says the drinks were tested in Phoenix, Tucson and San Diego before going national.

From then on, the drink and the restaurants went separate ways. In 1978 United Brands set up A&W Restaurants, Inc. to run the franchises; it sold the restaurants to the developer A. Alfred Taubman in 1982 and, in 1983, sold the beverage business to a group of investors that formed A&W Brands, Inc., according to the Directory. English Wikipedia names Castle & Cooke as the leader of that group, and says Hicks & Haas and the company’s management bought A&W in 1986.

A&W Brands widened the range. It introduced A&W Cream Soda and A&W Diet Cream Soda in 1986, and in 1987 reformulated the sugar-free root beer as Diet A&W, the Directory says. It also bought two older soft-drink names: Squirt, the grapefruit soda, in 1986 and Vernors, the Detroit ginger ale, in 1987, English Wikipedia says.

Design and documentation.

A soft drink rarely meets its buyer as a single object. The same name has to work on a can, on a glass bottle, on a plastic bottle, on a cardboard carton and on the front of a fountain machine in a restaurant or a cinema, often at very different sizes and under very different light.

That is why a soda brand’s identity tends to live in a few portable pieces rather than in one fixed layout: a wordmark that can be printed around a curved surface, a colour that can be recognised across a store aisle, and a flavour cue that tells the drinker what is inside before the lid comes off. Bottles and cans also change over time as packaging technology moves on, so a brand’s look is often a record of several decades of redrawn labels.

Each guide in this group asks the same plain questions: who started the drink, who owns it now, how its labels and cans have changed, and which parts of its story rest on independent dated reporting rather than on the company’s own account.

A drink and a restaurant chain that went separate ways.

In 1993 A&W Brands was sold to the British confectionery and drinks group Cadbury Schweppes, the Directory says; English Wikipedia dates its folding into Cadbury Beverages to October 1993. In 1996, the Directory says, Cadbury Schweppes bought Dr Pepper/Seven-Up, Inc. of Plano, Texas, merged it with A&W Brands and moved A&W to Texas. Cadbury spun off its US drinks business as Dr Pepper Snapple Group in 2008, English Wikipedia says, and in July 2018 Dr Pepper Snapple combined with Keurig Green Mountain as Keurig Dr Pepper, whose shares began trading on 10 July 2018 and which kept head offices in Burlington, Massachusetts, and Plano, Texas, BeverageDaily reported.

Today the soda and the restaurants are separate businesses. English Wikipedia says Keurig Dr Pepper owns the rights to the A&W brand outside Canada and licenses it to the US restaurant chain, A&W Restaurants, and that the root beer is distributed in the US by various bottlers. In Canada, it says, A&W Food Services of Canada, independent of both Keurig Dr Pepper and the US chain, runs the restaurants and markets the root beer, with retail products bottled and distributed by the Coca-Cola Company.

Its advertising has long leaned on the mug. English Wikipedia says a 1978 campaign, “Now New York Has Everything,” marked the root beer’s arrival in the New York area, at a time when it was advertised elsewhere with the “frosty mug taste” line, and that the line returned in the fall of 1992 alongside new packaging. The Great Root Bear, a costumed mascot introduced in the 1970s, became the face of a long-running Canadian campaign for the restaurants, set to a tuba-driven jingle, it says. Later additions to the range include A&W Float in 2008, A&W TEN in 2013 and, from November 2020, A&W Zero Sugar, the new name for Diet A&W.

For a design guide, A&W shows how a name built from two partners’ initials has stayed on one drink through more than a century of changing owners. Compare Dr Pepper, the Texas soda that joined A&W under Cadbury Schweppes in 1996, and Vernors, the Detroit ginger ale A&W Brands bought in 1987. For this guide we use root-beer brown, orange and cream with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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