Neil C. Ward, Clayton J. Howell and an orange drink with pulp in it.

Crush is an American brand of fruit-flavoured carbonated soft drinks that began as an orange soda, Orange Crush, and is owned today by Keurig Dr Pepper. Its early name carried a person. Print magazine, in an article by the animator and collector J. J. Sedelmaier published on 21 May 2012, said the drink was created by a chemist, Neil C. Ward, and was originally called “Ward’s Orange Crush”.

Sedelmaier wrote that Ward co-founded the company in 1911 with Clayton J. Howell, and English Wikipedia also gives 1911, saying Howell was the president and founder of the Orange-Crush Company and incorporated it with Ward. The brand’s own website, in a version archived in October 2011, used the line “Orange Refreshment Since 1916” and said that in 1916 Howell partnered with Ward to create the Orange Crush Company. A 1956 newspaper item quoted by the packaging-design blog BoxVox also said the drink was introduced in 1916.

The company’s account describes Ward as a beverage and extract chemist who worked out the blend of ingredients behind the formula, and it says soft drinks of the period often carried the surname of their creator, which is why Ward’s name went on the label. Sedelmaier wrote that actual orange pulp was part of the original formula, that it was used until around 1930, and that it was eventually dropped. A 1917 letter from Howell on Crush stationery, reproduced in his article, carries the founders’ names on its masthead.

Orange was soon joined by other fruits. The archived company site says lemon and lime versions followed the orange, that grape, cherry and pineapple were added by the late 1960s, and that tropical punch and peach came in the 1990s. A 1921 advertisement for Orange and Lemon Crush illustrated by Norman Rockwell is reproduced in the Print article. By the 1960s the company was trading as Crush International; Sedelmaier recalled that Evanston, Illinois, served as one of its headquarters in that decade, and the Made in Chicago Museum catalogues a 1960s Orange Crush pack made by Crush International, Inc. / Orange Crush Company of Evanston.

Procter & Gamble, Cadbury Schweppes, Dr Pepper Snapple and Keurig Dr Pepper.

Crush International left independent hands in 1980. The Washington Post reported on 3 December 1982 that Procter & Gamble, the Cincinnati consumer-products company, had acquired Crush International, maker of Crush, Hires root beer and a citrus drink called Sun-drop, in 1980. The Post said the Crush and Hires flavours were licensed by P&G to independent bottlers, and that P&G planned to buy a Coca-Cola bottler in Kentucky so that it could learn the bottling end of the business. That bottler, the paper noted, handled Sunkist orange soda and A&W root beer, direct competitors of Crush and Hires.

P&G kept the business for the rest of the decade. The International Directory of Company Histories (St. James Press, volume 49, 2003) says that in 1989 Cadbury Schweppes continued its pursuit of the American soft-drink market by acquiring Crush International from Procter & Gamble.

Outside the United States the rights moved again. The Baltimore Sun reported on 12 December 1998 that the Coca-Cola Company had agreed to buy Cadbury Schweppes’ beverage brands outside the United States, naming Canada Dry, Dr Pepper and Crush in more than 120 countries, as Cadbury concentrated on candy and its American soda business. The International Directory says Cadbury Schweppes sold its non-US soft-drink holdings to Coca-Cola in mid-1999.

In the United States, the business followed Cadbury’s drinks arm. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on 21 August 2008 that Dr Pepper Snapple Group, spun off from Cadbury Schweppes earlier that year, had signed an agreement for Pepsi Bottling Group to make and distribute Crush across much of its American territory; the paper said Pepsi Bottling Group already distributed Crush in Canada. A press release from PepsiAmericas and Dr Pepper Snapple Group dated 18 September 2008 announced a second licensing agreement to widen Crush distribution in PepsiAmericas’ territories, covering flavours such as orange, diet orange, grape and strawberry. Dr Pepper Snapple Group merged with Keurig Green Mountain to form Keurig Dr Pepper, a deal its press release of 29 June 2018 said was expected to close on 9 July that year. Keurig Dr Pepper has owned Crush since that merger.

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.

The Krinkly bottle, an amber version, a 1955 redesign and a 1947 poster in Chile.

For much of its history the brand was identified as much by its glass as by its name. The packaging-design blog BoxVox, published by the agency Beach Branding & Package Design, said in an article by Randy Ladacer dated 21 February 2014 that the company promoted its bottle as the “Krinkly” bottle, and that the design was patented in 1920 by Neil C. Ward and the corporation’s secretary, Eric Scudder. Ladacer quoted a 1929 article in Sales Management saying that bottlers given a Crush franchise had to agree to use that container and no other, and that a picture of it appeared in every Orange Crush advertisement. A 1924 newspaper advertisement quoted in the same piece told buyers to look for the name Orange-Crush blown into the glass.

Sedelmaier’s Print article traced the bottle through the collector’s eye. He described a ribbed bottle marked as patented on 20 July 1920, a basic design that continued with various labels until 1955, versions in green glass, and brown bottles with embossed lettering and a cartoon character called “Crushy”, who was redrawn over the years and took a larger role on a 1940s bottle. He also showed a 1929 black glass bottle with paper labels. BoxVox quoted a 1956 newspaper item saying that the amber bottle was introduced in 1937, following the pattern of the clear bottle but with a bright orange decoration added.

The ribbing ended in the 1950s. According to BoxVox, the Krinkly bottle was dropped in 1955 in favour of a “Big New Bottle” designed by the industrial designer Jim Nash, and it was also Nash who designed a new Orange Crush logo with inline typography. The 1956 item quoted by Ladacer said the new crystal bottle carried a redesigned treatment of the trademark used in all Orange Crush advertising. Nash wrote in Broadcasting in November 1957 that a package should have a strong mark that identifies it even when television reception is poor. Sedelmaier described the 1955 shape as a “Mae West” bottle and said it served as the trademark bottle into the 1990s.

The brand also travelled. Memoria Chilena, the digital library of the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, holds an Orange Crush advertisement headed “del naranjal a la botella” (from the orange grove to the bottle), printed in the magazine Estanquero on 5 July 1947.

For a design guide, Crush shows how a container can work as a trademark: a ribbed bottle that franchise bottlers had to use, a colour of glass, and later a logo with a line drawn through its letters. Compare it with Sun Drop, sold alongside it by Crush International and Procter & Gamble, and Dr Pepper, its stablemate at Keurig Dr Pepper. For this guide we use crush orange, Krinkly amber, leaf green and pulp cream with an inline sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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