A drink mix of the 1970s, a family of flavours and a licence for cans.

Country Time is an American brand of lemonade-flavoured drink mix, sold as a powder to be stirred into water and, under other arrangements, as a ready-to-drink beverage. Its present owner is Kraft Heinz, whose website in October 2026 lists Country Time lemonade, pink lemonade and strawberry lemonade powdered mixes, a group of zero-sugar mixes and ready-to-drink pouches under the brand.

The mix dates from the middle of the 1970s. English Wikipedia says Country Time lemonade flavour drink mix was introduced in 1975 by General Foods, the American packaged-food company. A brand page published by the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, archived by the Wayback Machine in June 2011, also gives 1975 for the first Country Time Lemonade Drink Mix, but credits it to Kraft Foods and, in a separate history paragraph on the same page, says the brand had been available as a powder mix since 1976.

The flavours widened over the following decades. English Wikipedia lists pink, raspberry and strawberry lemonade among the additions. The Dr Pepper Snapple Group page gives dates for several of them as they reached its own ready-to-drink range: Country Time Pink Lemonade was added in several markets in 1995; Country Time Iced Tea with Lemon followed in early 2003; Strawberry Lemonade arrived in May 2004; and a Light Lemonade was added in March 2005.

The canned and bottled drink came about through a licence. English Wikipedia says that in 1981 A&W acquired a licence to make the bottled and canned ready-to-drink product from General Foods, then the owner. The Dr Pepper Snapple Group page says A&W Beverages took the licence in 1981 and that Country Time Lemonade first reached the market in cans and bottles in 1982, while the powder stayed with the brand owner. The same page says Cadbury Beverages acquired A&W Brands, including Country Time, in 1993, and that in 2011 the licence formed part of the Plano, Texas, business that published the page.

General Foods, Kraft, Kraft Heinz and a soda maker.

Ownership of the mix followed the history of its parent. English Wikipedia says that in 1989 General Foods merged with Kraft Foods, which put Country Time under Kraft ownership. The brand then sat alongside other Kraft powdered drinks, including Kool-Aid and Crystal Light, and the three were later marketed together in at least one partnership.

That partnership was with a maker of home carbonation machines. Reuters, in a report carried by the Chicago Tribune on 18 July 2012, said SodaStream already had a deal with Kraft Foods that let it sell Crystal Light and Country Time drinks, and that the two companies had first partnered in January of that year to make Kraft’s branded flavours available for SodaStream’s soda makers. The July announcement extended the deal to Kool-Aid. Doug Weekes, Kraft Foods’ vice president for beverages, said in the statement quoted by Reuters that the company was pleased with the early success of Crystal Light and Country Time with SodaStream users.

The present owner took shape three years later. BBC News reported on 25 March 2015 that Heinz was to merge with Kraft Foods Group, in a deal engineered by Heinz’s owners, the Brazilian investment firm 3G Capital and Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. Kraft Heinz has owned Country Time since that merger was completed in 2015, and the brand appears among the company’s drink-mix products on its website in 2026. The brand’s own address, countrytime.com, now forwards to the Kraft Heinz website rather than to a separate brand site.

The company also used the brand for a campaign that reached the news pages. CNN reported on 11 June 2018 that Country Time Lemonade was creating a team, named Legal-Ade, to help pay fines and permit fees for children running lemonade stands across the United States. The article said the initiative would cover stands fined in 2017 or 2018, as well as permits bought that year, and quoted the Legal-Ade website as saying the brand was there to “take a stand for lemonade stands across the nation”. CNN also said Country Time had posted a video on YouTube describing the team’s purpose.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sit on the drinks and dessert shelves of an ordinary grocery store: powdered mixes stirred into a jug of water, fruit drinks sold in bottles and small boxes, and whipped toppings kept in the freezer. Each one turns a simple product into something a shopper can recognise at a glance, and most of that work is done by the container rather than the contents.

A drink-mix brand lives on a canister, a tub or a flat pouch, where the flavour name, a fruit illustration and the number of quarts it makes all compete for space. A juice drink has to read from a refrigerated case or a lunchbox, on a tall bottle or a box with a straw. A frozen topping has a round lid and a tub that is often kept and reused long after it is empty, so its colours stay in a kitchen for years.

Each guide sets out what dated, independent sources record about the brand — who started it, who has owned it since, and how its labels, logos and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own account.

Old-fashioned taste on television, and a wordplay campaign for children’s businesses.

The name sets the tone. “Country Time” points to the countryside and to time gone by rather than to any process or ingredient, and the brand’s earliest television work used the same idea. The Dr Pepper Snapple Group brand page archived in 2011 says the mix’s first television advertisements featured a character called “Grandpa”, described there as “a judge of good old-fashioned taste”. The same page headed that section “Good, Old-Fashioned Taste”.

The flavour range has followed the same plain logic. Each addition recorded by the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, from pink lemonade in 1995 to strawberry lemonade in 2004, kept lemonade at the centre and changed one word on the label. The current Kraft Heinz listings follow that pattern, naming the flavour and then the format, whether a powdered drink mix, a zero-sugar mix or a ready-to-drink pouch.

The 2018 campaign showed how far a name can carry. Legal-Ade took the last syllable of lemonade and turned it into a promise of legal help, and CNN described the initiative as arriving after reports of children’s stands being shut down for lack of permits, including a stand run by two brothers in Denver the week before. The campaign’s website, as quoted by CNN, opened with a twist on a familiar saying about life giving you lemons. The campaign tied the brand to the sidewalk lemonade stand rather than to its own canister.

The brand also travelled into formats it does not make itself. The ready-to-drink cans and bottles of 1982 were produced under licence, as English Wikipedia and the Dr Pepper Snapple Group page both record, and the 2012 SodaStream agreement reported by Reuters put Country Time flavours into syrups for home carbonation machines. Each time the Country Time name and its lemonade promise moved onto a new container while the powder remained with the brand owner.

For a design guide, Country Time shows how a nostalgic name, a grandfatherly spokesman and a single flavour idea can carry a powdered drink through licences, owners and formats while keeping the same homely register. Compare it with Kool-Aid, a fellow Kraft Heinz drink mix, and Crystal Light, introduced by General Foods a few years later. For this guide we use lemon yellow, porch green, picket cream and pink lemonade with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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