A letter to our customers, our neighbors, and our friends.

Dear friends,

I want to be honest with you about where Pemberton's has been, and where we are going.

The last three years have been the hardest in this company's history. We have lost shelf space at two of our largest regional accounts. The cost of glass has gone up, and the cost of cane sugar has gone up, and the cost of running a small bottling plant in Ohio has gone up faster than either of those. Last winter, my management team and I sat down at the conference table on Industrial Parkway and discussed, for the first time in seventy-seven years, whether we should close the Akron plant.

We did not close it. I want to tell you why.

We have seventy-five employees here. Some of them have worked at Pemberton's longer than I have been alive. Marlene in shipping started here in 1981. Her husband works on the line. Their daughter packed cases here through college. When you run a small company in a small city, you don't make decisions about a balance sheet. You make decisions about people who came to your father's funeral.

In February I was introduced to a gentleman named Brad Keller, of Vanguard Digital Strategies in Columbus. Brad has spent his career helping heritage American brands, his phrase, find their footing in what he calls Web 3.0 community-building. He explained to me that there is a way for companies in our position to invite the public to participate in their recovery directly, through something called a blockchain coin.

I will be honest with you: I do not understand all of it. I am a soda bottler. My grandfather was a soda bottler. But Brad walked me and our CFO through the model several times, and what I came to understand is this. We can launch a token, called $FIZZ, and the FIZZ community will become tokenholders, and stakeholders, and shareholders in our story. The people who believe in Pemberton's can hold a piece of what we are doing here.

I am not a salesman. I have never been comfortable asking for anything. So I want to be very clear about what I am and am not asking.

I am not asking you to invest. I am not promising you that this token will be worth anything. I have read enough to know that I cannot promise that, and I would not want to.

What I am asking is that, if you have ever loved a bottle of Pemberton's, if you grew up with it, if your father drank it, if it reminds you of a Sunday afternoon at your grandmother's table, you might consider being part of the community that helps us keep going. That is what Brad has explained to me this is for.

We are still going to make our soda the same way we always have. Real cane sugar. Madagascar vanilla. Glass bottles. Industrial Parkway, Akron, Ohio. None of that changes. I want to be very clear about that, too.

I'm not asking you to invest. I'm asking you to believe in cream soda.

With gratitude,