Brian Alger is hoping to inspire nostalgia in the older generation by reviving the Pop Shoppe line of sodas reports The Globe And Mail.
“It was touch and go if we could do the run,” Alger yells over the cacophony, “because we weren’t sure we’d get the bottles in time.” The clear “stubbie” bottles were custom-designed–at the cost of a quarter-million dollars–to resemble those used by the original Pop Shoppe in the 1970s.
Back then, the Canadian discount soda was a staple of family life, requiring weekend runs to neighbourhood Pop Shoppe depots to refill two-fours with Lime Ricky and Cream Soda. What Alger is doing today is bottling nostalgia. Eight years ago, on a lark, the now 41-year-old entrepreneur started to re-register the lapsed trademarks for the Pop Shoppe. Two years later, he relaunched it–sans shoppes–as a premium brand, tapping into boomers’ and Gen-Xers’ fond memories and appealing to kids’ penchant for retro cool.
And he pulled it off: Last year, the Pop Shoppe sold more than six million bottles, making it Canada’s second-best-selling premium soda, ahead of Dad’s and Stewart’s and just behind Jones–all of them U.S. brands, and all of them, it bears noting, mere drops compared to the oceans of sugar water peddled by Coca-Cola Co. and PepsiCo.
Screenshot from The Pop Shoppe