A textile worker turns to mineral water.

Ben Shaws is a soft-drink brand from Huddersfield, the West Yorkshire wool town on the edge of the Pennines. Its own history, published on the brand’s website while it was owned by Cott Beverages, begins in 1871, when Ben Shaw left his job in the town’s textile industry and set up a business bottling and selling natural mineral water drawn from the nearby Pennine hills. According to that account, the business did well enough that he soon added traditional soft drinks, made in a purpose-built factory.

The website’s history is a scrapbook of local memories rather than a company record, and it says so: Cott added a note that it had “taken care to find and uncover the history of Ben Shaws” but accepted no liability for its accuracy. It describes Ben Shaw delivering his drinks with Shire horses — it names four of them, Bonny, Blossom, Cherry and Dick — to corner shops, stores and licensed premises around Yorkshire. Later, the site says, a Ben Shaws “pop van” toured neighbourhoods once a week, and the drinks came in returnable glass bottles that earned children pocket money when the empties went back.

The same pages recall the Willow Lane factory, where, the site says, staff listened to the BBC’s Music While You Work at their machines each morning, and Ben Shaw’s grandchildren were paid to watch bottles leave the line and check them for specks of dirt before they were boxed.

The water side of the business lasted into this century. English Wikipedia says Pennine Spring, a mineral water established in 1871, was produced by Ben Shaws of Huddersfield until Britvic bought the brand and the Huddersfield factory in 2004; its Britvic article, citing a report from November 2004, describes the purchase as Britvic buying the “water division” of its rival Ben Shaw. Wikipedia says Britvic later closed the Huddersfield plant and dropped the Pennine Spring brand.

The can, the chip shop and the pop van.

The brand’s proudest claim concerns packaging. Ben Shaws says that in 1959 it became the first company in Europe to can soft drinks, and that it advertised the achievement in the local Huddersfield paper; the claim is the company’s own. In 2010 it marked the 50th anniversary of that first can with a relaunch in Huddersfield town centre, where, the website says, an old-fashioned horse and cart delivered drinks to shoppers to launch a range presented as “new, yet historical.”

The core flavours on the website at the time were four: Cream Soda, Bitter Shandy, Dandelion & Burdock and Cloudy Lemonade. Dandelion and burdock is the brand’s best-known line; English Wikipedia’s list of soft-drink flavours cites Ben Shaws as one of the popular brands of a drink it describes as a British favourite since the Middle Ages.

The pack design of that period was deliberately nostalgic. The website says a 2010 packaging redesign was handled by The Individual Agency, a Huddersfield design studio, which set out to bring the brand’s heritage onto the packs using archived photographs, and that the designs won a “best packaging” award at the Cream Yorkshire awards. The same agency is credited in the website’s footer. Earlier packs, the site says, had gone through many looks over the years.

Marketing leaned on memory too. The website’s tagline was “Refreshing your memories,” its drinks were “the taste you never forget,” and 2011 was promoted as the brand’s 140th anniversary, with birthday events around the country. In the same year it ran a public search for the nation’s favourite family fish-and-chip shop and supplied point-of-sale material to chippies. The site also recalled a “Miss Ben Shaws” contest from the era of Miss World.

British soft drinks and their owners.

The seven brands in this group are all soft-drink names from Australia, Britain and the United States: Kirks, Solo, Passiona, Bickford’s, Ben Shaws, Fever-Tree and Shasta. Australian, British and American 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 family firm to a bottler’s brand.

Ben Shaws has spent the past two decades as a brand inside larger bottling groups. The Cott-era website says Cott Beverages — which it described as the world’s largest maker of retailer-brand soft drinks — bought Ben Shaws in 2005, and pledged to keep its family character. Cott, a Canadian-founded company, presented Ben Shaws on that site as part of a new portfolio of value brands, alongside its main business of making supermarkets’ own-label drinks in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Mexico. In 2013 the Ben Shaws blog carried Cott’s announcement that it had bought Calypso Soft Drinks, another British maker.

The next change came in January 2018, when Refresco, the Rotterdam-based bottler, completed its purchase of Cott’s carbonated soft drink and juice bottling businesses, including its UK business units, according to English Wikipedia; in 2020 Cott renamed itself Primo Water Corporation. By late 2019, archived copies of the Ben Shaws website show the copyright line had changed from Cott Beverages to Refresco, with the same four drinks and the same heritage pages. The site had gone offline by the following year.

The brand name is written Ben Shaws, without an apostrophe, on its own website, while the founder is Ben Shaw. For a design guide, Ben Shaws shows how a regional soft drink can live on its own history — horses, pop vans, returnable bottles and an early can — long after the family business has gone. Compare Bundaberg, another brewed-drinks name built on a home town, and Fever-Tree, a British mixer brand of the 2000s. For this guide we use a burdock red, cream and brown with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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