In 1911, Clayton J. Howel, president and founder of the Orange-Crush Company, partnered with Neil C. Ward and incorporated the company. Ward made the recipe for Orange Crush. Howel was not new to the soft drink business, having earlier introduced Howel's Orange Julep. Soft drinks of the time often carried the surname of the inventor along with the product name. Howel sold the rights to use his name in conjunction with his first brand; therefore, Ward was given the honors: Crush was first premiered as '''Ward's Orange-Crush'''. Originally, Orange Crush included orange pulp in the bottles, giving it a "fresh squeezed" illusion, even though the pulp was added rather than remaining from squeezed oranges. Pulp has not been in the bottles for decades. Crush was purchased by
Procter & Gamble in 1980 (with the exception of the Canadian rights, which were purchased in 1984). Procter & Gamble only manufactured "bottler's base", which was a concentrate consisting of flavor and colour. One milliliter of bottler's base was combined with syrup and carbonated water to create a 12-ounce bottle of Crush. In 1989,
Cadbury Schweppes acquired Crush USA from Procter & Gamble Co. Cadbury Schweppes spun off its United States beverage business as
Dr Pepper Snapple Group (predecessor of
Keurig Dr Pepper) in 2008. Bottles were originally ribbed, and were made of brown glass at one point. Initially, Orange Crush came in the ribbed or "Krinkly", clear glass bottle. The brown (amber) glass bottle was introduced in 1937, and is known as the "Krinkly Brown" bottle. The bottle design changed again in 1955, leaving the amber glass and "krinkles" behind. This bottle was called "the Big New Bottle" and was intended to give the product a larger and more "graceful" look.
Today The Crush brand and trademark are currently owned by
Keurig Dr Pepper of
Frisco, Texas. It is distributed by various
Pepsi bottlers, the biggest being the
Pepsi Bottling Group United States. Other countries where Crush is sold are
Argentina,
Colombia,
Chile,
Guatemala,
Mexico,
Panama,
Paraguay,
Peru,
Syria,
Uruguay and at one time
Nicaragua,
Costa Rica,
Ecuador and
Bolivia. In Chile, Crush has been distributed by
Compañía de Cervecerías Unidas since the 1940s. In contrast, in some countries of
Latin America the Crush brand is distributed by
The Coca-Cola Company, using the same colours and bottles as
Fanta. Several flavors (Orange, Diet Orange, Grape, Strawberry, Pineapple) are available at most stores throughout North America; others, however, are distributed only within small markets. Pineapple Crush, Birch Beer Crush, and Lime Crush for instance, are found in both cans and single serving bottles in the Canadian province of
Newfoundland and Labrador and in
Fort McMurray,
Alberta. From 2009, changes in bottling rights allowed many of these regional flavors to be distributed by
the Pepsi Bottling Group in a majority of their territory in the United States, and for
PepsiAmerica to distribute Crush in most of its territory. ==Flavors==