Image: Shawano Speedway 7.15.06 – Fastrak Limited Late Models. Feature By: royal_broil
Source: flickr. License: by-sa | //creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
In Shawano, Wisconsin (a city of around 9,000 people tucked into the northeastern part of the state), there is a bottling plant that has been filling the same glass bottles since 1951. Some of those bottles are still in circulation. You can tell by the date stamps on the bottom. A few of them are older than most of the people drinking from them.
Twig’s Beverage is, by most measures, an anomaly. While the American soft drink industry spent the latter half of the twentieth century consolidating, automating, and switching to plastic, the Hartwig family just kept doing what they had always done. Real cane sugar. Real orange juice concentrate and pulp. Returnable glass bottles with a $20 deposit per case, refunded when you bring them back. The same plot of land in Shawano where Floyd Hartwig planted the business when he came home from the Korean War.
That founding story is worth telling properly. Floyd Hartwig was shot in the hand in April 1951, and then shot through both legs on April 24 of the same year (his 24th birthday, as it happens, while serving in the 24th Division). He spent four months recovering in a Tokyo hospital. It was there, in that bed, that he decided he was going to start a bottling plant back home in Wisconsin. He sent his military paychecks home to save up for the equipment. When he returned, he built the business with his softball teammates on land he had already bought, and named it after the nickname they had always used for him. In the early days, he would sell a single case of soda for enough money to buy a loaf of bread.
The drink that made Twig’s something more than a local curiosity is Sun Drop, a high-caffeine citrus soda developed in the late 1940s by a St. Louis concentrate salesman named Charles Lazier (the recipe reportedly scribbled on a piece of paper during a car journey). Lazier approached Floyd Hartwig in 1953 to produce and distribute Sun Drop across Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Over the following decades, as the brand passed through the hands of Crush International, Procter and Gamble, Cadbury Schweppes, and eventually Keurig Dr Pepper, most of the regional bottlers producing it closed down. Twig’s did not. Today it holds the distinction of being the last producer in the world making Sun Drop in returnable glass bottles, operating under a franchise license from a global conglomerate that owns the brand but cannot replicate what Twig’s does with it.
The returnable system is more involved than it might sound. Bottles come back, are washed in industrial sanitisers at high heat, inspected, and refilled. Some of the 16oz glass currently in use was manufactured in the 1960s. The glass itself is specially designed to withstand hundreds of wash cycles without losing structural integrity, etched with the Twig’s logo so it survives the process. In 2021, a global glass shortage forced the company to temporarily restrict new deposits just to protect their existing stock. When your competitive advantage is a physical object that takes decades to accumulate, you treat it accordingly.
None of this nostalgia has come at the cost of standing still. In 2023, Twig’s undertook a significant modernisation of the Shawano facility, installing new conveyor systems, a CIMEC rotary filler, and updated labelling equipment. The result was striking; production capacity jumped from around 8,600 bottles a day to 14,000, and what previously took a full week now takes two to three days. The family has also launched Twig’s FIZZ, a line of seltzers in plastic bottles designed for festivals and events where glass is prohibited. It is a pragmatic concession to the modern world, made without any apparent anguish, because the core of what Twig’s is remains unchanged in Shawano.
The company is now in its third generation of family ownership. Dan Hartwig, Floyd’s son, has run it since 1986. His sons Ben, Jake, and Luke manage production, marketing, and operations between them. The intention is to hand it to the fourth generation when the time comes. That kind of timeline changes how you think about investment and decision-making; the 2023 factory upgrade and the 2015 opening of an on-site museum (housing over 12,000 pieces of beverage memorabilia and offering free tastings at a bar with a countertop made of bottle caps and crushed glass) are not moves made with a quarterly earnings report in mind.
Twig’s turns 75 this year. Annual revenue sits at around $6.5 million, the workforce at 20 people. By the standards of the beverage industry those are small numbers. By the standards of what the returnable glass bottle system has become in America, Twig’s is the whole story.
