Belfast Beverage, the New Century bottling company and a root beer launched in 1940.

Mug is an American root beer sold today under the PepsiCo umbrella, but its story begins in San Francisco. SFGATE reported in a history of the brand published on 2 October 2021 that the drink reached the market in the city in 1940 as Belfast Root Beer. It was made by the San Francisco-based Belfast Beverage Company, which the article says had been known since 1877 mainly as a maker of sparkling water and ginger ale.

By then Belfast was no longer independent. SFGATE says that by 1925 the company had been bought by another local business, the New Century Beverage Company, which was co-founded by Angelo Campodonico. According to the article, Campodonico started out as a busboy at the North Beach restaurant Fior d’Italia in the early 1900s, opened a saloon of his own in 1907 and in 1908 co-founded New Century, a soda bottling company that also produced drinks of its own.

New Century already had a citrus success. SFGATE says Orange Crush was added to the company’s roster in 1918, and it quotes the San Francisco Chronicle of 1927 describing the drink as made from the juice of California oranges. In 1927, the article says, Campodonico moved his soda plant to a much larger building on Pacific Street in Chinatown, and a fleet of trucks took over from the horse deliveries of the early 1900s. He invited the public to come and watch the bottling; the Chronicle quoted him that year saying the company had customers in every part of the city and a route down the peninsula to Half Moon Bay.

The next step tied New Century to a national cola. SFGATE reports that in 1936 the company won permission to franchise Pepsi-Cola products and became the Bay Area arm of that business, on condition that it met a monthly sales quota. It was this Pepsi-Cola bottler that put Belfast Root Beer on sale four years later. The New York Times, reporting on the brand in May 1988, likewise described Mug as having been developed by the New Century Beverage Company, “a Pepsi-Cola bottler in San Francisco”.

The Dr Pepper Museum in Waco, Texas, gave a short account of the brand in a post of 15 October 2014. It described Mug as a product of the Belfast Beverage Company that was marketed locally before it spread, and it said a sugar-free version joined the line in the 1960s, followed soon after by a companion cream soda.

The Campodonico family, PepsiCo and a brand that travelled east.

For four decades and more the business stayed in local hands. SFGATE says different members of the Campodonico family continued to run the New Century Beverage Company until they sold it to Pepsi in 1986. The New York Times reported on 27 May 1988 that New Century had been acquired in 1986 by PepsiCo. PepsiCo has owned Mug since that purchase, and SFGATE described the root beer in 2021 as part of the “Pepsi family”.

The new owner set about taking the root beer beyond the West Coast. The same New York Times report said Mug was then on sale in markets west of the Mississippi and was “slowly trickling eastward”, and that the new parent had been spreading the brand at a faster pace. The article was about advertising: it announced that Lois Pitts Gershon Pon/GGK, the New York agency led by its chairman George Lois, had become the agency for “Pepsi-Cola’s Mug Root Beer”. The client, the paper noted, declined to release a budget figure.

The report also recorded the brand’s earlier agency history. The previous agency was Mojo of San Francisco, a branch of an Australian agency, which according to the Times had acquired the agency that had served Mug since 1954. Through those decades the brand was advertised from San Francisco, on billboards, painted walls and newspaper pages around the Bay Area, as the SFGATE history illustrates.

Production in the city did not outlast the change of ownership for long. SFGATE reports that Pepsi continued to make its sodas in San Francisco, later from a factory at 17th Street and Valencia Street in the Mission District, before closing its San Francisco operation in the early 1990s. The article notes that the production facility is no longer in the city.

The brand’s roots are still visible on a few walls. SFGATE says that in 2019 a painted 1950s advertisement for “Belfast Old Fashioned Mug Root Beer” was uncovered in Oakland near the Fruitvale BART station, during the remodelling of a building at San Leandro Street and 34th Avenue. According to the blog and Instagram account San Francisco Ghost Signs, cited in the article, the sign had been hidden under wooden panels and was in relatively good condition. Another painted Mug advertisement, on stucco in Alameda, had been found and restored before that.

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.

Foam-topped glasses, a cartoon crowd, radio slogans and a bulldog named Dog.

The name itself grew out of the advertising. SFGATE reports that during the 1950s the drink took on the title Belfast Old Fashioned Mug Root Beer, “a mouthful of a name”, before it was officially shortened to Mug Root Beer. Newspaper advertisements and billboards of that decade, the article says, carried the catchphrase “You haven’t tasted Root Beer like this in years!” and showed large glass vessels of soda topped with thick, white foam. The glass mug was, in other words, both the product name and the main picture.

The tone could also be playful. SFGATE describes an advertisement in the San Francisco Examiner of 1955 in which cartoon characters enjoy the drink: a character with a buzz cut declares that anybody who doesn’t drink Belfast Old Fashioned Mug Root Beer is “a square”, while a dancing figure says the whole gang is drinking Mug Root Beer these days. A 1946 Belfast Beverage Company advertisement near Lombard Street in San Francisco is also illustrated in the same article.

Later slogans moved to radio and television. SFGATE says a 1970s commercial on the San Francisco station KFRC called Mug “the one root beer with true draft taste”. By the 1980s, according to the article, television jingles described the soda as “one of a kind”, and another, featuring the comedian Phyllis Diller, rejoiced “I love my mug!” The word mug did double duty throughout, as the brand name and as the vessel on the label.

A visual change came under PepsiCo. SFGATE reports that after the brand became part of the Pepsi family, the company eventually dropped the root beer vessel from its identity altogether and adopted a bulldog, named simply “Dog”, as its soda mascot. The change moved the identity from an object to a character, a step that came after the brand had begun its spread east under its new owner.

For a design guide, Mug shows how a regional soda can build an identity on a single object, a frothy glass whose name became the brand, and then trade that object for a mascot once a national owner takes over. Compare it with Pepsi, the cola whose San Francisco franchise launched it, and Crush, the orange soda that New Century bottled before it. For this guide we use root beer brown, foam cream, billboard red and bay blue with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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