Seaman's Beverages facts for kids
 |
|
| Industry | Beverage |
|---|---|
| Fate | Acquired by The Pepsi Bottling Group. Brand survived while the company was dissolved. Brand discontinued in 2020. |
| Founded | 1939 |
| Headquarters |
Charlottetown
,
Canada
|
|
Area served
|
The Maritimes, but mostly Prince Edward Island |
Seaman's Beverages was a company that made fizzy drinks, also known as carbonated beverages. It was started by the Seaman family in 1939. The company worked on its own for a long time, until 2002. Then, a bigger company called The Pepsi Bottling Group bought it.
After the sale, most of Seaman's drink flavors were stopped. Only two flavors continued to be made for a while. In 2020, the Seaman's brand was completely stopped.
Contents
The Story of Seaman's Beverages
How Seaman's Started
The company began in 1939. A man named F. R. Seaman started it with a loan of $2,500 from his cousin. He worked out of an old brick building that was also his home. In the early days, he delivered his soda drinks to local stores. He used the back seat of his old Ford car to carry the bottles! F. R. Seaman was married to Jean MacLeod.
Growing with Pepsi
Sometime in the 1960s, Seaman's got a special agreement. They were allowed to bottle Pepsi Cola products. This meant they could make Pepsi drinks in their factory. Because of this, the factory had to get bigger.
Pepsi encouraged Seaman's to stop making their own drinks and only make Pepsi products. But the Seaman family said no! They knew their own Seaman's brand drinks were very popular and sold well.
The Company Changes Hands
The last person in the Seaman family to own the business was Rundell Seaman. In 2002, he sold the company to The Pepsi Bottling Group. Before the sale, Seaman's made 11 different flavors of drinks. After the sale, this quickly dropped to only 4 or 5 flavors. Eventually, only two flavors were left: Orange and Ginger Ale.
The factory in Charlottetown, where Seaman's drinks were made, was closed down. It was turned into a storage place for soda that came from a factory in Moncton. The Moncton factory then took over making the Seaman's brand drinks.
Before Seaman's was sold, their drinks were sold in many places. You could find them across The Maritimes, in Toronto, and in Montreal. Before the brand was stopped in 2020, Seaman's drinks were mostly sold on Prince Edward Island. Sometimes, you could still find them in other parts of the Maritimes.
Later, in 2010, The Pepsi Bottling Group and another company called PepsiAmericas were bought by a very large company called PepsiCo.
In early 2020, Pepsi decided to stop making the Seaman's brand drinks. This was because not enough people were buying them anymore.
Seaman's Drink Flavors
Over the years, Seaman's Beverages made many different kinds of fizzy drinks. Some of the flavors they produced included:
- Olde Fashioned Orange
- Diet Orange with Sucralose
- Cream Soda
- Ginger Ale
- Ginger Brew
- Birch Beer
- Grapefruit and Lime
- Lime Rickey
- Root Beer
When the brand was finally stopped in 2020, only the Ginger Ale and Orange flavors were still being sold.
