Richard Minges brokered the sale of Mountain Dew to the Pepsi-Cola Co. The large consumer beverage corporations started taking notice. was supplying 40 bottlers, and they were selling over 10 million cases of Mountain Dew a year. Within three years of its introduction, Tip Corp. Soon other bottlers were demanding Mountain Dew concentrate. sold its first wholly-owned franchise as well as its first new flavor franchise to Pepsi Cola Bottling of Kinston, NC. Meantime, in 1962 Pepsi Cola Bottling of Lumberton NC introduced New Mountain Dew in the Columbus County, NC market. Jones added a bit of orange flavor, which seemed to make the drink a stand-out among the other lemon lime sodas then on the market. Jones decided to tweak the Mountain Dew recipe to give it a more orange flavor, so that the drink would not compete with Pepsi’s Teem. They sold the new Teem, instead of Mountain Dew. The majority of Tip Corporation customers were Pepsi bottlers, and remained faithful to their parent company. If this is to be believed, the trademark for Mountain Dew, one of today’s most valuable brands, along with the recipe for the soft drink, sold for a mere $6.95 dinner check.Īt the same time as Mountain Dew was making its way into the soft drink market, Pepsi Cola Company was launching its new lemon lime soda, Teem. Apparently Jones would not accept the gesture, and offered to purchase the dinner that evening for the rights to the name and recipe of Mountain Dew. Hartman was said to want to donate the recipe and name, on behalf of his deceased brother, to the newly formed Tip Corporation. It was rumored that Bill Jones acquired the name for Mountain Dew at a 1960 dinner with Ally Hartman. Its base flavor is still used in Mountain Dew today. This “New Mountain Dew” was a hit in the East Tennessee area (except for Knoxville, where the Hartmans stuck with their lemon-lime Mountain Dew for a few more years). The following year he transferred the company’s moderately successful Tri-City Lemonade flavor into the green Mountain Dew bottles. In 1959 Bill Bridgforth, manager of Tri-City Beverage, formulated Tri-City Lemonade to compete with SunDrop Cola. Some of these first investors were long time friends of Jones, from the days he had spent as a supply salesman. The first investors were Allie Hartman, Herman Minges and Pepsi Cola bottlers Richard Minges of Fayetteville, NC, and Wythe Hull of Marion, VA. Jones was not a wealthy man, and was forced to take on investors to further promote his venture. In 1958, Jones – a well known soft drink supply salesman – acquired a company by the name of Tip Corporation, located in Marion, VA. He had met the Hartmans through Bill Jones (photo below left). Herman Minges, co-owner of a North Carolina Pepsi franchiser that became a Mountain Dew licensee in 1955, was over time able to greatly expand the regional reach and appeal of the product. In fact, it sat on retailers’ shelves, and generated little revenue. Although they felt the Dew would be a big seller, it didn’t catch on as they had hoped. The Hartmans began selling Mountain Dew the next year, marketing it as a lemon-lime drink to be used as a whiskey mixer. This labeling quirk was carried on until Pepsi Cola entered the picture many years later.Ĭharlie Gordon’s Tri-City Beverage first commercially bottled Mountain Dew in 1954. Below the illustration is the phrase “by Barney and Ollie”-as in FILLED by Barney and Ollie, a nod to the way a homemade jug of moonshine might be hand filled by the moonshiner. John Brichetto drew the first sketches of the original Mountain Dew bottle labels in 1948, depicting a character known as Willy the Hillbilly shooting at a revenuer fleeing an outhouse with a pig sitting in the corner. At the convention the brothers met Charlie Gordon, of Tri-City Beverage. The Hartmans took an early prototype of their drink to a 1946 beverage convention in Gatlinburg, TN where they were assured by friends that their product, to them nothing more than a goof, could turn them a tidy profit.
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