Brands - Buffalo Rock Company

On my mind today, Grapico is an Alabama soda with a Wikipedia page bigger than you’d expect. How will it continue to exist?

It seems inevitable that consolidation will kill it because there is no growth in this beverage segment. Artisanal soda efforts seem complicated considering how dangerous the ingredients can be. The American west has no soda culture so I don’t expect any surprises. I feel something distinct is lost as regional sodas collapse into a few international megabrands.

Water reigns now. It feels like the apotheosis of capitalism that they started with soda, which is water with a lot of other stuff added, and slowly refined it to just water without lowering the price. We still have rapacious capitalists doing whatever to sell it to us, and consumers drinking it to make themselves better. But we lost the local flavor that made it special in the first place.