Coca-Cola bottler maintains family ownership

In its 100-year life, the company has stayed under family ownership, the last 85 years held by the Rice and Heer families. By comparison, since the first Coca-Cola was put in a bottle, an estimated 750 U.S. Coca-Cola franchises have consolidated into 78 independent Coca-Cola bottlers.

Ownership of Ozarks Coca-Cola/Dr Pepper is expected to remain in the family. Currently, the Rice-Heer families are headed up by brother and sister Edwin “Cookie” Rice Jr. and vice president Virginia “Tookie” Heer. The two are members of the board of directors, along with Rice’s daughters, Sally Hargis and Peggy Rice, Heer’s daughters, Harriett Brown and Suzy Heer, and attorney Joe Greene.

Over the years, the industry has seen significant increases in the number of products, including packaging options that enable consumers to purchase anywhere from a single soft drink to a case of soft drinks. In 1905, there were six products; today, there are 312, according to Sally Hargis, Ozarks Coca-Cola’s vice president of corporate strategy.

Top-selling brands are Coca-Cola Classic, Diet Coke, Sprite, Dasani, Dr Pepper and Diet Dr Pepper, Hargis said. The bottling plant, which only produces bottled products, used 25,208 gallons of syrup and 7,507,208 gallons of water for its products in 2004, Hargis said.

Ozarks Coca-Cola/Dr Pepper has a territory that extends into 32 counties. Around 300 employees and a fleet of 45 route trucks enable the business to distribute products from its Springfield manufacturing plant northwest to Clinton, northeast to Rolla and south to Branson. Additional plants are located in Bolivar, Lebanon and Rolla.

Tom Haynes, director and general counsel for the Coca-Cola Bottlers Association in Atlanta, said Ozarks Coca-Cola/Dr Pepper ranks in the top 25 percent of all U.S. Coca-Cola bottlers, based on sales volume.

Owned in perpetuity

From its beginnings, as one of many bottlers that entered an agreement for the right to hold a franchise in perpetuity, the history of the company seems to be intricately intertwined with the pasts of its key product and the area served.

When the Rice family and a family friend, pharmacist “Doc” Sam Paris, purchased Springfield’s first Coca-Cola franchise, Electric Bottling Co., from W.C. Farmer in 1920, Coca-Cola was only one of several carbonated soft drinks sold by the company; Farmer’s Ginger Ale was the company’s biggest seller, Rice said.

The new owners came from Fulton, Ky., and it was the Coca-Cola product, rather than the flavored beverages, that drove their decision to purchase the plant, Rice said.

“That’s what they went there to buy, a Coca-Cola franchise, because of their awareness, being from the south, of its beginnings and development,” Rice said.

Indeed, Coca-Cola’s beginnings created the opportunity that would become the family business. Invented by a pharmacist, the product was only sold as a fountain drink until the early 1900s. When early entrepreneurs approached the company about selling its product in a bottled, take-home version, Coca-Cola began to sell franchises for the bottled product, which it saw as secondary to its core fountain product. It was a way of selling more syrup, Haynes said.

The number of bottlers at the time was a direct result of the period’s transportation systems; a franchise’s territory tended to average 400 square miles, or 20 miles in every direction, Haynes said.

“Because transportation by horse and buggy, and later by truck, was so difficult, it required bottling plants all over the country because you could only have a distribution center that would allow you to get as far as you could with a horse and buggy and back in one day,” Rice said.

In early years, the company used alternate methods to reach its customers. Before improved roads led to Branson, the chain-driven Mac trucks of the 1920s could not make the southern trek, Rice said.

“My father put Cokes on the Missouri Pacific railroad, shipped them to Branson, then moved them over to the mail boats so he could get them over to Rockaway Beach and Forsyth,” he said.

Expanding territories

By the 1930s, Ozarks Coca-Cola/Dr Pepper made the decision to eliminate the other flavors and concentrate on producing only Coca-Cola.

“We thought that opportunity lay in the development of Coca-Cola,” Rice said.

By the 1950s, consumer demand had changed and the company found it necessary to go back to flavors. And in the 1960s, Coca-Cola began adding larger packages to the mix, including the aluminum can.

The introduction of the can signaled the beginning of Coca-Cola as a one-way product, Haynes said. Previously, bottlers would need to collect, wash and reuse bottles; the manpower and time spent on these tasks could now be transferred to the expansion of territories.

Expansion was partly due to necessity. To support a canning plant, a bottler had to place a premium on becoming bigger and more efficient, Haynes said. Thus began the consolidation of bottlers.

For Ozarks Coca-Cola/Dr Pepper, consolidation seemed to work both ways. In 1920, the company held four franchises in addition to Springfield: West Plains, Lebanon, Aurora and Bolivar. “Doc” Parish eventually split from the business, retaining the West Plains franchise. And over the years, Rice said, the family had to sell portions of the business to retain Springfield. Lebanon, Aurora and Bolivar were all sold but bought back at later dates. In 1986, the company acquired the Dr Pepper franchise from the Garland Reynolds family.

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