12 People You Need to Know in 2016: Edwin "Cookie" Rice

Forget the cookies and milk. In Springfield, it’s a Cookie and a Coke.

The 85-year-old Edwin “Cookie” Rice Jr. has been a fixture at the family-owned Ozarks Coca-Cola/Dr Pepper Bottling Co. plant for more than six decades.

Rice started helping out at the age of 14 by feeding the soaker – aka the glass bottle washing machine – and loading trucks in the summer, until he was able to work inside the plant at age 16.  He went full time in 1953 took and took over as chairman and CEO of the company in 1970.

“My dad didn’t care about a title, or maybe we just didn’t care about it, but he was the boss and that was that,” Rice says from his 1777 N. Packer Road office. “As far as I go, time took care of that title for me.”

Rice’s office is lined with memories. His bookshelves hold upwards of 100 Coke bottles he has collected throughout the years, from standard glass to foreign languages and commemorative bottles, such as the opening of Hammons Field. Nearly every inch of wall space shows a life well lived. Pictures of the original plant are intermixed with photos like Rice driving Ronald and Nancy Reagan during a Springfield parade as President Harry S. Truman looks on.

“Each and every day we make Coke, and yet no two days are alike,” Rice says, noting his favorite is Coke Zero. “When you have that much of a challenge, you are never perfect, you just aspire to it.”

When Edwin Rice Sr. moved his family from Kentucky in 1920 to purchase the Electric Bottling Co., Coca-Cola wasn’t even its main product. According to the company’s website, Electric’s principal product line was seltzer and Farmer Beverages, a soft drink line that included flavors such as orange, grape and ginger ale. The Rice family was one of the original bottlers that entered an agreement for the right to hold a Coca-Cola franchise in perpetuity.

“One of our highpoints was taking on Dr Pepper,” Rice recalls of a 1986 deal with the factory across the tracks. “Congress passed this capital gains tax, and they wanted to sell before the tax took effect.”

But for every good decision, Rice recalls a mistake.

“We shouldn’t have passed up purchasing Aurora,” he said. “I’m pleased to have it back now.”

In October, the company finalized a purchase agreement for new territories, giving Ozarks Coca-Cola access to northern Arkansas and southeast Kansas – interstate business for the first time.

“In this area, if you are drinking a Coke from a plastic bottle, it’s almost a 100 percent chance it came from this plant,” Rice says.

The broad distribution area started for Rice on the washing and packing machine. The 18-year-old spent eight hours a day inspecting bottles at the washer and the constant clink of glass on glass left him with diminished hearing in his left ear. Rice says he wouldn’t trade it for anything. And what about the name?

“Well, my dad was nicknamed Cookie, too,” he says. “From the moment I was born, I was just a little Cookie.”