The Pop Shoppe

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The Pop Shoppe was a soft drink retailer originating in 1969 at London, Ontario, Canada. The Pop Shoppe avoided using traditional retail channels, selling its soda through franchised outlets and its own stores in refillable bottles in 24-cartons.

Within three years, the company grew within the province to a chain of 14 stores, and entered the United States in the following three years. Eventually, Pop Shoppe was selling 30 different flavours of soda throughout Canada and 12 American states. National Hockey League veteran Eddie Shack was the predominant spokesman for the brand.

But by the early 1980s, sales slowed down, largely blamed on the rise of competition from private label grocery store soft drink brands. The original company ceased operations in 1983 and its copyright expired in 1993. A few small soft drink bottlers in the US have at times sold pop using some of the millions of bottles and cases left abandoned by the closure; these were not related or authorized brands.

Toronto businessman Brian Alger began plans to re-establish The Pop Shoppe brand in 2002. By mid-2004, bottles of Pop Shoppe soda began to sell through stores using conventional retail distribution, rather than through company-owned outlets. Many of the original flavours have returned, with a new marketing approach based on nostalgia rather than on low pricing. The glass bottles are of a new design and are no longer reused nor returnable; the old, now-worthless deposit bottles of the former company were not used. The corporate headquarters of the new Pop Shoppe is in Burlington, Ontario.

The new Pop Shoppe flavours are Cream Soda, Lime Ricky (not to be confused with the alcoholic Lime Rickey drink), Root Beer, Black Cherry, Orange, Grape, and Pineapple.