Two founders and a geyser town in the Napa Valley.

Crystal Geyser began in Calistoga, the hot-springs town at the top of California’s Napa Valley. The company gives its founding year as 1977, the date on its own site and in its “Since 1977” trademark, and names the valley as its birthplace. Its founders were Peter Gordon and Leo Soong. In July 2009 the Glenn County Transcript, a Northern California paper, quoted the company’s vice president of manufacturing as saying that the two men had founded it in 1978 and were both still active in the business, Gordon as chairman, president and chief executive and Soong as a senior adviser; the company’s own materials use 1977.

The early product was sparkling water. The company says it was the first to introduce flavoured sparkling water to the United States, and its press materials date that step to 1981. When the Los Angeles Times reported a change of ownership in January 1991, it listed the range as natural sparkling water, sparkling water with fruit juice, citrus-flavoured mineral water and a spring water made through a joint venture with Société Roxane of France.

That 1991 report is the key date in the brand’s ownership. The newspaper said that the Japanese company Otsuka Pharmaceutical had bought a controlling interest in Crystal Geyser Water Co., without disclosing terms, and quoted a company spokesman as saying the deal would help it expand marketing and distribution and give it access to Otsuka’s drinks, including a popular Japanese sports drink and fruit-flavoured soft drinks. English Wikipedia dates the purchase to 1990 and names Otsuka Holdings as the parent today.

The name needs care in two directions. Crystal Geyser is also a natural cold-water geyser on the Green River in Utah, with no link to the drinks company. And in Calistoga itself, the 2009 report noted, Crystal Geyser was not affiliated with Calistoga Water Co., a separate bottler that was then owned by Nestlé.

One name, two companies.

The most important thing to understand about the Crystal Geyser name is that it has long covered two separately run businesses. The first is Crystal Geyser Water Company of Calistoga, the original sparkling water maker. The second is CG Roxane, which makes the still water sold as Crystal Geyser Alpine Spring Water. CG Roxane says it started that brand in 1990, with the single aim of bottling natural spring water at the source, without trucking or blending.

The 2009 Glenn County Transcript report set out the relationship as the Calistoga company explained it: the two operated under separate management, and Alpine Spring Water was owned by CG Roxane LLC, which it described as an independently managed affiliate sharing the Crystal Geyser name through a licensing agreement. English Wikipedia describes both as affiliates of the Otsuka group, noting that Otsuka Pharmaceutical holds 49 per cent of the French water company Alma S.A., the parent of CG Roxane, according to an Otsuka announcement of May 2008. CG Roxane’s own site describes it as an independent, family-owned and operated company.

CG Roxane’s site lists seven spring-water plants, near Mount Shasta and Olancha in California, Norman in Arkansas, Salem in South Carolina, Benton in Tennessee, Johnstown in New York and Moultonborough in New Hampshire, and says each is built at its spring. It says that in 2019 it became the first US beverage company to build and run its own plant for recycling PET plastic, in San Bernardino, California, and that it broke ground on a second, in Benton, in 2023.

The palette in this guide is our own reading of alpine blue and white, with a touch of label red, not an official specification.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all water names: vitaminwater, Liquid I.V., Core, Crystal Geyser, Deer Park, Arrowhead and Harrogate. Water brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family companies that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger food and drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a restaurant table.

A water brand’s identity is usually carried less by what is in the bottle than by a label, a name and the place or idea 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 products 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 products are made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

The sparkling line ends; the spring water carries on.

The two halves of the brand have moved in different directions in recent years. In 2024 Crystal Geyser Water Company posted a notice on its website, first archived in February that year, announcing the discontinuation of its sparkling water “due to market challenges,” with stock to remain on sale while supplies lasted and its other product lines to continue. Those other lines include Tejava, a ready-to-drink tea that English Wikipedia says the company makes in Bakersfield, California; by October 2026 the crystalgeyser.com address redirected to the Tejava site.

CG Roxane, meanwhile, has added bubbles of its own. Its site now offers a Sparkling Spring Water in plain and four fruit flavours, bottled at its Moultonborough plant in New Hampshire’s Ossipee Mountains, alongside the still Alpine Spring Water that remains its core product.

The Olancha plant is also the setting for the brand’s best-documented legal case. On 9 January 2020 the US Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California announced that CG Roxane had pleaded guilty to one count of unlawfully storing hazardous waste and one count of unlawfully transporting hazardous material, over wastewater from filtering naturally occurring arsenic out of spring water at Olancha; the office said the investigation concerned the handling of the wastewater, not the safety or quality of the bottled water.

The Otsuka connection links Crystal Geyser to a very different drinks brand. The same Japanese group makes Pocari Sweat, the soft drink it launched in Japan in 1980, and it has also invested in water outside the United States, including its 2008 stake in Alma, the French company behind CG Roxane.

For a design guide, Crystal Geyser shows how one name can hold two companies, a sparkling water from a Napa Valley geyser town and a still spring water from seven sources, and how plain mountain-blue branding can outlast changes of ownership and product. Compare Pocari Sweat, the drink from the same Japanese group, and Arrowhead, another Californian spring water. For this guide we use alpine navy, mountain sky and glacier white with a classic serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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