1870 – 2020retired
50/50 (soft drink)
“Half grapefruit, half lime, all Midwest — gone in one piece after a century and a half.”
“Squeezed fresh, laid to rest in a boardroom.”
Odwalla was a California health food company founded in Santa Cruz in 1980, known for fruit juices, smoothies, soy milk, bottled water, organic beverages, and its beloved food bars. It grew from a small West Coast operation into a North American brand, going public in 1993 and becoming a fixture of the health-food boom — juice that actually tasted like juice, because they refused to pasteurize it.
A fatal 1996 E. coli outbreak, for which the company was found criminally liable, forced flash pasteurization and a 90% sales collapse — but Odwalla recovered and was profitable again within a year. It was acquired by Coca-Cola in 2001, and in 2020 the brand was discontinued. What's left is the memory of that first swirl of the bottle and the sand at the bottom of the jar.
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“Half grapefruit, half lime, all Midwest — gone in one piece after a century and a half.”
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