Fizzing business

SPRING GROVE — With 131 years of legacy behind it, Spring Grove Soda Pop is continuing to serve up fizzy bottles of old-fashioned soda across the upper Midwest. The current owners, Bob and Dawn Hansen, aim to continue the business’s growth while maintaining a small-town product with great, clean-finishing flavors.

“I’ve been pretty blessed,” Bob said. “I loved my job before this, and this is a great way to end my working career. … If you’ve got to do something where you need to be working inside, nothing brings a smile to people’s faces like a cold soda, and that’s a lot of fun.”

The soda company’s history precedes the turn of the century — the 20th century. In 1895, G.G. Ristey, a Spring Grove pharmacist, had a soda jerk as part of his drugstore, and when his customers started asking if they could buy soda to take home, he partnered with his brother-in-law, the town veterinarian, to buy bottling equipment. With gear that was state-of-the-art for the time, Spring Grove Bottling Works was able to make enough soda to meet customer demand, and these beverages were also sold in local venues.

Ristey and his brother-in-law maintained their respective pharmacy and veterinary practices, which continued doing well under their soda bottling venture. To keep all the businesses running, they sold Spring Grove Bottling Works to Henry and Leonard Halvorson in 1913, who later sold it to Charles Casterton and Dewey Goldberg in 1929. Then, in 1964, local entrepreneur Arnold Morken bought the business, which had become Spring Grove Soda Pop; Arnold was also the owner of the Pabst Blue Ribbon beer distributorship, and he included the soda shop products in the company’s beer deliveries.

The business stayed in the Morken family until Arnold’s son, Roger Morken, and his son, Eric Morken, sold it to Bob and Dawn Hansen in 2003. According to Bob, the decision to buy the company came from a moment of weakness on his part.

“We had been in town since 1988 (and) loved the soda,” he said. “My wife was selling insurance at the time, and I was a timber cruiser for a logging company in Preston. We were looking for something we could sink our teeth into, and when it (Spring Grove Soda Pop) came up for sale in 2002, we talked about it (and) decided it was something we wanted to pursue.”

After acquiring the soda company, Dawn digitized its ledger and computerized the business, running it for the first seven years. Then, Bob ran the business, and after a couple of years, the Hansens updated the equipment so they could do co-packing with other beverage companies. Co-packing (short for contract packaging) is the business practice of hiring a third-party company to package, label, or manufacture products under your own brand name

In 2003, the business was making about 10,000 cases of soda, with 24 bottles per case; by about 2013, Dawn had that case number up to 20,000, and with the installation of the new equipment in 2014, they now make about 35,000-40,000 cases per year, plus another 150,000-200,000 cases of co-packing.

The first bottles used by Spring Grove Bottling Works had the company name embossed on the glass, and they were stopped with a cork and clip and stored upside-down to keep the cork wet.

“We have a few of those bottles here and the case they stored them in,” Bob said. “When my wife and I bought it (the business), they were in a short, 12-ounce bottle you’d more than likely see in a stock bar in a hotel room. We ended up getting out of those and getting back to the long-neck bottles; that was probably in 2005.”

When the Hansens arrived, the business’s soda flavors were Root Beer, Cream Soda, Strawberry, Lemon Sour, Cherry, Orange, Grape, Creamy Orange and Lemonade. The lemonade-flavored line was removed, as it was hard to carbonate and bottle, but the Rhu-berry flavor was introduced instead. The rhubarb-strawberry combination was invented at the request of the Lanesboro Rhubarb Festival in Lanesboro; Bob took their suggested rhubarb flavor, which he found to be too strong, and toned it down with strawberry.

“The distributors took off with it after the Minnesota State Fair,” Bob said. “I brought it out the same year we started at the state fair, 15 years ago. … I took my 43 cases up to the state fair, and we put a little cardboard ‘Rhu-berry’ sign under our normal sign with our flavors. The fair starts on a Thursday; by 10 o’clock the first Saturday morning, we were sold out.”

The Hansens also introduced Blue Raspberry, Diet Root Beer and Sour Grapes. For Sour Grapes, the youngest Hansen daughter, Nicole, liked to combine Spring Grove Soda Pop’s Grape and Lemon Sour flavors, and when Bob tried it, he liked it, too, and added it to the soda lineup. Tonic Water was suggested by a Wisconsin distillery that wanted something to mix with their gin, as they already used Lemon Sour for their brandy old-fashioned cocktails.

Although the Hansens have added new flavors, they have continued the old-fashioned glass bottling and small-batch brewing traditions, using only pure cane sugar.

“Some real big ones (sodas) will use a liquid sugar in combination with some corn syrup,” Bob said. “Sure, it’s a lot cheaper for them to do it that way, but at the same time, they’re messing with their flavor because the corn syrup has a little bit of an aftertaste to it.”

The soda company opened its first retail outlet, The Sugar Shack, in 2017 in Spring Grove. A couple of years later, it was moved to its present location at the Spring Grove Soda Pop factory, where tours are also provided.

Today, the business’s products can be found in Minnesota, Wisconsin, northeastern Iowa, North Dakota and South Dakota, with the goal of entering Illinois someday. The Hansens are currently adding a canning line to the business, aiming to expand their co-packing operation while canning a few of their soda flavors as well.

The Hansens take pride in owning one of the few classic soda companies that has never shut down, and they aim to keep theirs running for the next generation of soda enthusiasts.

“They have to have the same passion and same drive to make it work that we did,” Bob said. “We want to see it keep going, so that’s kind of the pride and joy of it right there.”