A small Akron company, three generations in.

Harold Pemberton came home from the Pacific in the fall of 1945 with a duffel bag, a Purple Heart, and an idea. He had grown up working summers at his uncle's drugstore soda fountain in Canton, and he believed, with the certainty of a young man who had recently survived several things he should not have, that he could make a better cream soda than what was on the shelves.

For three years he tinkered in the garage of the house he and his wife Eleanor had bought on Maple Street. He settled, eventually, on a recipe built around real cane sugar and Madagascar vanilla. He bottled the first commercial run of Pemberton's Original Cream Soda in the spring of 1948 and sold it case by case to grocers and lunch counters within driving distance of Akron.

By 1953 the garage couldn't hold the operation any longer, and Harold leased a brick building at 2847 Industrial Parkway. We are still there. The bottling line has been replaced four times, but the building, the recipe, and the glass bottles have not.

Harold's son Robert took over in 1978. Robert was the one who introduced Cherry Cream Soda (1983) and Diet Original (1986). Neither caught on the way the Original did, but both have their devoted holdouts, and we keep making them.

Robert retired in 2019 and handed the company to his daughter Linda. Linda grew up cleaning bottles after school. She became our third-generation owner with seventy-five employees on the line and the same recipe in the tank.

We are not a large company. We have never been a large company. We bottle in glass because Harold thought glass was the right way to do it, and nobody since has had a good argument against him.