The History of Snapple

Snapple was originally built from its New York home base. Snapple was founded in 1972 by two window washing brothers-in-law, Leonard March and Hyman Golden and health food store owner, Arnold Greenburg. Snapple is named after a carbonated apple soda that was part of the original beverage line.

They began selling all-natural beverages to New York health food stores in 1986, and their small company experienced rapid growth, especially in the relatively untapped market of ready to drink tea.

It took Snapple creator Leonard Marsh, Hyman Golden, and Arnold Greenburg, fifteen years of experimentation with different types of apple sodas and seltzer water before they came up with Snapple tea.

The brand's distribution channels were as unconventional as its promotions. Initially Snapple had very little supermarket coverage.

Instead, it flowed through the so-called cold channel: small distributors serving hundreds of thousands of lunch counters and delis, which sold single-serving refrigerated beverages consumed on the premises.

In the early 1990s, Snapple of New York demonstrated with over $500 million of real brewed bottled tea sales that the healthy food craze would translate to drink.

By 1994, Snapple was available across the country, and as distributors added painstakingly cultivated supermarket accounts, sales ballooned to $674 million from just $4 million ten years earlier.

It was highly successful and was eventually sold for $1.7 billion to Quaker Oats in 1994.

In 1997, Quaker Oats sold the business to Triarc, an entrepreneurial group sponsored by a set of venture capitalist for barely a quarter of the price that it had originally paid.
The History of Snapple