A bottler in the French Quarter.

Barq’s began with two brothers in New Orleans. Edward and Gaston Barq founded the Barq Brothers Bottling Co. in the French Quarter in 1890 and turned out a range of soft drinks, among them an orange drink called Orangine, The Times-Picayune reported in 2017. The Coca-Cola Company, which owns the brand today, says Edward Barq studied as a sugar chemist at Tulane University before he moved to Mississippi, and that Barq’s started there as a mixture made in backyard tubs.

In 1897 Edward Barq married Elodie Graugnard, and the couple moved to Biloxi, Mississippi, where he bought the Biloxi Artesian Bottling Works and set up his own company, according to the same 2017 Times-Picayune account, which gives 1898 or 1900 for the debut of the root beer. A lawsuit reported by Claims Journal in October 2010 dates the Biloxi Artesian Bottling Works to 1899 and says that by 1901 Barq was selling a sarsaparilla-based drink called Barq’s in Biloxi. The brand itself counts from 1898: its 2012 packaging carried the line “It’s Good. Since 1898,” according to BevReview, and Coca-Cola marked its 120th anniversary in August 2018.

For years the drink was not sold under the words “root beer.” The Times-Picayune wrote in 2017 that the company avoided them to stay clear of legal trouble with the Hires Root Beer Co., which tried to trademark the term. English Wikipedia adds that the recipe was sarsaparilla-based, with less sugar, more carbonation and less of a foamy head than other root beers of the time.

Two territories, one name.

Barq’s grew as two businesses. Edward Barq gave Jasper “Jesse” Robinson, who lived with the Barq family, the right to use the Barq’s name and formula in most of Louisiana while Barq kept Mississippi, and each company had its own formula, The Times-Picayune reported in 2017. The 2010 report in Claims Journal dates that grant to 1934, excluding Washington Parish, and says that in 1936 Barq dissolved the Biloxi Artesian Bottling Works and created Barq’s Inc. to run the Mississippi business, while a separate company, Barq’s Beverages Inc., was later formed to oversee the Louisiana territory.

New Orleans became the drink’s home market. A Barq’s franchise was set up in the city in the 1930s, and the Barq’s name came to stand for root beer there, The Times-Picayune wrote in 2017, calling a cold longneck bottle of Barq’s the usual partner for a po’boy or a muffuletta in local sandwich shops. Coca-Cola makes the same link in its 2018 anniversary article, which says the drink spread through Gulf Coast sandwich shops around the time the po’boy appeared.

The Mississippi company stayed with the family into a third generation. In 1976, English Wikipedia says, it was bought by John Oudt and John Koerner, who ran a television campaign around the line “Barq’s Got Sparks” and set out to sell the brand nationally — plans complicated, it says, by the Louisiana Barq’s companies still held by Robinson’s heirs. The Louisiana company later merged with the Mississippi one, according to the 2010 report.

The Coca-Cola Company bought Barq’s in 1995, the company says, a date the 2010 Claims Journal report also gives. In the early 1990s the brand had run topical promotions, among them a giveaway of goods bought in the former Soviet Union, which The Times-Picayune pictured in its 2017 retrospective; since 1995, English Wikipedia says, its slogan has been “Barq’s has bite!”, carried in television spots in which a Barq’s salesman, played by Nick Swardson, goes door to door.

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.

“Drink Barq’s. It’s good.”

The brand’s visual signature is a bottle. English Wikipedia says Edward Barq patented a diamond-necked bottle in 1935, and that it carried the slogan “Drink Barq’s. It’s good.” In its 2018 anniversary article, Coca-Cola says glass bottles that imitate the original diamond-neck design are still found along the Gulf Coast. A 1988 can held in The Times-Picayune’s photo archive is captioned as “Barq’s Famous Olde Tyme Root Beer,” with the slogan “It’s good.”

In February 2012 Coca-Cola gave the brand new packaging. Its announcement, quoted by BevReview, described “a completely new look to pay homage to the brand’s Gulf Coast heritage,” with a diamond pattern recalling the drink’s original glass bottle and the line “It’s Good. Since 1898.” BevReview’s Steve Tanner noted that the new label dropped the decorative ribbon and cut back the green sassafras leaves of the old one, along with the ribbon’s “Famous Olde Tyme Root Beer” wording, and that a few limited glass-bottle designs took a more retro look; English Wikipedia also dates the end of the longer name to 2012.

Coca-Cola ties the brand to Gulf Coast food and festivals. In 2018 it called Barq’s the unofficial soft drink of Mardi Gras and said it had commissioned the Louisiana painter Terrance Osborne for paintings about the brand and the region. A dog called Barqy was briefly a mascot and rode a float in the 2007 Krewe of Argus parade, according to a Times-Picayune photo caption. The range includes the root beer and Barq’s Red Crème Soda, known in New Orleans simply as “red drink,” the newspaper says; English Wikipedia says Diet Barq’s Root Beer was renamed Barq’s Zero Sugar in 2022.

For a design guide, Barq’s shows how the shape of an old bottle can become the pattern on a modern label. Compare Coca-Cola, its owner since 1995, and A&W, a root beer that began at a California roadside stand in 1919. For this guide we use a deep red, navy and cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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