Depression-era Phoenix, too much fruit and a drink called Citrus Club.

Squirt is an American grapefruit soft drink owned today by Keurig Dr Pepper. Its story begins with a surplus of fruit in the Arizona desert. Phoenix Magazine reported in March 2024, drawing on research by the Phoenix resident Ed Dobbins, that many farmers around the city turned to grapefruit after the cotton market collapsed at the end of the First World War, and that by the 1930s the market for the fruit was becoming saturated. Edward Mehren, who managed his family’s citrus ranch near the White Tank Mountains, co-founded an organisation of young citrus growers to develop and promote grapefruit products, the magazine said. Grapefruit-juice canning factories opened in the Valley but did not last, the magazine said.

Mehren’s answer was a drink, and at first it was not called Squirt. Writing in the July/August 2020 issue of Arizona Contractor & Community, Dobbins said the end of Prohibition in 1933 had opened new opportunities in Arizona, and that Mehren believed the Valley was ready for a cocktail mixer that made a good Rickey, a citrus drink mixed with gin, brandy or whiskey. In 1936, the article said, Mehren supplied Phoenix-area stores with a carbonated grapefruit beverage he called “Citrus Club” and marketed it as “ideal for summer drinks”. An uncarbonated version followed, and both sold well, Dobbins wrote.

Two years later the drink gained a partner and a new name. Both Phoenix Magazine and Dobbins’s 2020 article say Mehren teamed up with Herb Bishop and that the pair rebranded Citrus Club as Squirt, a caffeine-free grapefruit soft drink. The name, Dobbins wrote, came readily because “grapefruit squirts, so we picked up the name from that.” The Daily Meal reported in February 2024 that Bishop had been experimenting with Mehren’s drink to create one of his own, and called Mehren a Squirt co-founder. VinePair reported in May 2023 that Squirt was created in Phoenix in 1938.

Production found an unusual home. Phoenix Magazine says that in 1938 Mehren and Bishop leased a factory built in 1906 to process sugar beets, at Glendale and 52nd avenues. There they made Squirt concentrate from the juice and oils of Arizona-grown grapefruit and shipped it in bulk to bottling plants around the country, selling the pulp and skins as livestock feed. Dobbins wrote that from 1938 to 1977 the whole grapefruit was used in the process, and that neighbours remembered above all the intense citrus smell that hung over the area.

From a Phoenix partnership to Michigan, A&W, Cadbury Schweppes and Keurig Dr Pepper.

Arizona fruit did not supply the plant for ever. Phoenix Magazine reported that by 1961 grapefruit imported from Florida and Texas supplemented production at the Glendale plant. Picking in Phoenix itself carried on for some years after that: a resident who moved in 1977 into a house with grapefruit trees told the magazine that a crew picking fruit for Squirt came to her trees for some time afterwards.

Local ownership ended in 1978, when, the magazine said, a Michigan beverage group bought Squirt. The Glendale plant stopped operating in 1981, and the concentrate operation moved to Harlingen, Texas. English Wikipedia names the 1978 buyer as the Michigan bottler Beverage America.

The brand then joined a root beer company. The International Directory of Company Histories (volume 25, St. James Press, 1999) says that A&W Brands, which introduced A&W Cream Soda in 1986 and reformulated its diet root beer in 1987, also bought Squirtco, the producer of Squirt, in that period. The same reference says the British group Cadbury Schweppes purchased A&W Brands in 1993, bringing its soft drinks under Cadbury’s management. A&W Brands was the soft-drink company behind A&W root beer, according to the same reference.

Two later changes of structure brought the brand to its present owner. English Wikipedia records that in May 2008 Cadbury Schweppes spun off its Americas beverage business as an independent company, the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, and that on 9 July 2018 Keurig acquired Dr Pepper Snapple Group, renaming the combined company Keurig Dr Pepper. VinePair described Squirt in May 2023 as owned by Keurig Dr Pepper, and Phoenix Magazine said in March 2024 that the brand is currently produced by the company.

Squirt also has a long second life south of the border. The Mexican technology and business site Xataka México reported in May 2026 that Embotelladora AGA, the bottler also behind Red Cola, introduced Squirt to Mexico during the 1950s, and that for years the brand was mainly regional, strongest in Jalisco and neighbouring states in the west. From the 1990s, the site said, franchise and distribution agreements let Grupo EPP, the bottler behind Pepsi in Mexico, distribute Squirt across much of the centre and south of the country, which led many Mexicans to assume it was a Pepsi drink. Xataka México says Keurig Dr Pepper operates the brand in Mexico through Grupo Peñafiel, the mineral-water company covered in our Peñafiel guide, while AGA keeps its historic concession in the west.

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.

Grown-up tastes, a boy called Lil’ Squirt, a coinage campaign and a tequila highball.

At the outset Squirt was sold to drinkers rather than children. The Daily Meal reported in February 2024 that early advertisements described it as “for grownup tastes” and as a “quality mixer that sparkles your drinks” rather than as a soda, and recommended it for a Lime Rickey. Advertisements from 1962, the site said, suggested pairing it with whiskey, gin, vodka and rum under coined names such as “Squiskey” and “Squirtrum”. Phoenix Magazine describes the drink as a soda that “launched a thousand cocktails”.

The brand gained a character three years after its renaming. The Daily Meal says Squirt introduced a mascot known as “Lil’ Squirt” in 1941 to help sell the product, cementing its new name. The same article traces how the flavour was described over time. A print advertisement of 1963, and a television commercial the same year, said the soda took its flavour from “premium Southwest citrus”; by 1984 the advertising spoke of a special “squirt fruit”. Some current cans still describe the drink as a naturally flavored citrus soda, the site said, and it noted that the brand’s green and yellow packaging can lead buyers to expect a lemon-lime drink.

The drink even reached the United States Senate. Phoenix Magazine reported that in 1950 Mehren led a movement to split the nickel into new fractional coins, nicknamed “Bens”, “Links” and “Bits”, and that a Senate subcommittee on intermediate coinage held hearings on the idea. Squirt sold through vending machines, and Mehren wanted buying one to remain a one-coin transaction. The magazine said he gave President Harry Truman a bow tie painted with images of the proposed coins; the proposal failed.

Squirt is also tied to the Paloma, the tequila and grapefruit-soda highball. VinePair reported in May 2023 that Squirt gained a reputation as a key Paloma ingredient in Mexico, and afterwards in the United States, when the drink began appearing on American menus around the start of the twenty-first century. Bartenders the site interviewed in San Diego and Phoenix spoke of customers who ask for Squirt in their Paloma by name, and one linked the habit to Southern California drinking culture. In Mexico, Xataka México wrote in 2026, the drink came to feel like a local brand to many buyers.

For a design guide, Squirt shows how a brand can carry its origin inside its name: a word taken from the way a grapefruit behaves, a cheerful mascot and a mixer’s promise of “grownup tastes”. Compare it with Fresca, the grapefruit soda Coca-Cola launched in the 1960s, and Peñafiel, the Keurig Dr Pepper company that runs Squirt in Mexico. For this guide we use grove green, citrus yellow, pith cream and ruby grapefruit with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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