A California citrus cooperative, its trademark and a deal with a Pepsi bottler.

Sunkist, also sold as Sunkist Soda, is an American brand of carbonated soft drinks built around an orange soda and owned today by Keurig Dr Pepper. The name on the can belongs to someone else. Sunkist Growers is a citrus marketing cooperative of farmers in California and Arizona, and the soda is made under a licence from it. This guide is about the drink, not the fruit.

The International Directory of Company Histories (St. James Press, volume 26, 1999) says the cooperative was formed in 1893 as the Southern California Fruit Growers Exchange, that it used the Sunkist brand name in an advertising campaign launched in 1907, and that the Sunkist trademark was registered in 1909. The cooperative changed its own name to Sunkist Growers in 1952, the same history says.

The move into soft drinks came in the 1970s, when the cooperative began to license its name for other products. The International Directory says that in 1974 Sunkist licensed its name to a candy company, and that three years later, in 1977, an agreement was reached with General Cinema Corporation to market citrus-flavoured carbonated drinks bearing the Sunkist trademark. English Wikipedia describes General Cinema as an independent bottler of Pepsi-Cola products at the time, and says the licensee then franchised the new drink to other bottlers.

English Wikipedia says the soda launched in 1979. CSP Daily News, reporting on a packaging redesign in November 2013, described Sunkist Soda as introduced in 1978. By the early 1980s the drink was on shelves well beyond its licensee’s own plants. The Washington Post reported on 3 December 1982 that a privately held Coca-Cola bottler in Lexington, Kentucky, bottled Sunkist orange soda alongside A&W root beer, and that Procter & Gamble regarded both as direct competitors of its own Crush and Hires.

Del Monte, Cadbury Schweppes, Dr Pepper Snapple and Keurig Dr Pepper.

The soft-drink business did not stay with General Cinema. By the mid-1980s it sat inside a food group. An Associated Press report published by The New York Times on 8 July 1986 said that RJR Nabisco’s beverage business, operated by its Del Monte Corporation unit, included Canada Dry and Sunkist soft drinks. English Wikipedia dates the sale of Sunkist Soft Drinks to Del Monte to late 1984.

The same AP report described the next change of hands. Cadbury Schweppes, the British confectionery and soft-drink group, had announced on 2 June 1986 a proposed purchase of that RJR Nabisco beverage business, and on 8 July the AP said the deal had been cleared by American antitrust authorities, with a vote by Cadbury’s shareholders scheduled for 15 July. English Wikipedia says Cadbury Schweppes produced Sunkist through its American beverage subsidiary from late 1986 until 2008.

That arm was separated in 2008. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on 21 August 2008 that Dr Pepper Snapple Group, a beverage company based in Plano, Texas, had been spun off from Cadbury Schweppes earlier that year. Ten years later Dr Pepper Snapple combined with the coffee company Keurig Green Mountain. A Dr Pepper Snapple Group press release of 29 June 2018 said its shareholders had approved the merger, which was expected to close on 9 July 2018 and form Keurig Dr Pepper. Keurig Dr Pepper has run the Sunkist soda business since that merger, and its press releases now carry a Frisco, Texas, dateline.

The licence itself still runs from the growers. The Sunkist Growers global licensing page lists Keurig Dr. Pepper as its licensee in the Americas for sparkling drinks and lemonade, alongside other licensees for candy, snacks and juicers. Outside the United States, other companies have held the soda rights under their own agreements. The Drum reported on 29 March 2010 that Vimto Soft Drinks was relaunching Sunkist in the United Kingdom, with new flavours such as Summer Fruits and Lemon & Lime alongside Orange, Lemon and Tropical.

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.

A UK relaunch, a New York agency’s “liquid sunshine” and a 2027 refresh.

The brand’s recent design work centres on two things: a script brandmark and a sun. CSP Daily News reported on 19 November 2013 that the New York brand agency CBX had worked with Dr Pepper Snapple Group to refresh the packaging graphics for Sunkist Soda. The owner wanted to take the brand back to what the article called its “fun-in-the-sun” roots, under the positioning line “Sunkist Soda lets you shine.”

The sun was the problem to be solved. Eric Blackwood, Dr Pepper Snapple’s director of brand marketing for core flavoured soft drinks, told the publication that since 2008 the packaging had been missing the original sun graphic, which he described as an equity present for much of the brand’s history. Without it, he said, the brand had lost a connection to its California beach story. Satoru Wakeshima, general manager of CBX, said the agency’s aim was to express the idea of “liquid sunshine”.

The changes, as CSP Daily News described them, were specific. CBX refined the playful script brandmark to give it what the article called a California surf feel, introduced fresh flavour colours so that the pack had a sun-like glow, and brought back a sun and beads of condensation. It also reversed the blue and white brand colours and set the logo directly on the sun, which the agency said helped the soda stand out on the shelf.

Britain had gone through its own redesign a few years earlier. The Drum reported in March 2010 that Vimto Soft Drinks would relaunch its Sunkist range with a new logo and package redesign, released in May that year, as part of a strategy to be known for fruit carbonates rather than for orange alone.

Another update is scheduled. In a press release dated 5 October 2026, issued ahead of the NACS convenience-store show, Keurig Dr Pepper said Sunkist would introduce updated graphics and a refreshed recipe in the opening three months of 2027, with what the company called an improved orange taste for a more fruit-forward experience. The same release described a refresh of 7UP, another Keurig Dr Pepper soda, with a modernised logo and updated visual identity.

For a design guide, Sunkist shows how a borrowed name can carry a soft drink when the pack supplies the setting: a script word, a sun behind it and a blue-and-white contrast that can be flipped without losing the brand. Compare it with 7UP, refreshed by the same owner in 2026, and Canada Dry, which sat in the same Del Monte beverage business that Cadbury Schweppes bought in 1986. For this guide we use soda orange, surf blue, sun yellow and foam white with a rounded script, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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