This page is in NOT sponsored, endorsed, or anyway affilitated 
by Mountain Dew or Pepsi, and all trademarks 
are the property of Mountain Dew/Pepsi.

In 1925, a fellow by the name of William H. (Bill) Jones went to work for the National Fruit Flavor Company, selling the flavors used to make soft drinks to bottlers in the South. By all accounts, Bill was a hell of a guy, who was not only a fruit flavor salesman, but also a good friend of the local bottlers. Bill and his friends could often be found playing golf, or hunting, or fishing, or having a drink together. No doubt about it, Bill and his friends were Good Ole Boys (by the way, a Good Ole Boy is a good thing).

When one of those friends, Clay P. Church, started the Tip Corp. of America, Bill invested in the company and became a shareholder. Bill also became the manager of the Tip Corporation. Initially, Tip had been created to market a grape flavored drink that would compete with Grapette, a drink that was doing well on the soft drink market. Unfortunately, Tip's grape flavored drink never really caught on with the public. Church ended up filling for bankruptcy, and the Tip Corp. wasn't able to meet its obligations either. It wasn't long before other stockholders in the company started looking for someone to just take their stock in Tip, and relieve them from its obligations.

Bill didn't give up though, he started calling his bottling friends (who just happened to all be Pepsi bottlers), and he convinced them to invest in Tip. It turns out that none of these bottlers actually expected to make money with their investment, they actually thought they would never see their money again, but they wanted to help out an old friend. One of the new investors, Allie "Ollie" Hartman, also threw in an old dormant trademark by the name of Mountain Dew.

The original Mountain Dew had been a lithiated lemon-lime soda that Ollie marketed as a mixer for bars back in the 1940s (it was similar to 7 UP). The name of Mountain Dew had been given to this drink because of its use as a mixer, and because Mountain Dew was often used as a slang for the moonshine coming out of the hills in Virginia. The original Mountain Dew was even billed as "zero proof hillbilly moonshine." However, the original Mountain Dew seemed to have run its course, so Ollie just gave it to the Tip Corp.

Now, the first thing Bill did after he refinanced the Tip Corp. was to pay off its debts, and then he started working on a new flavor that would become Tip's new flagship product. Bill was a pretty bright fellow, and he realized two things. First, the majority of his buddies were Pepsi bottlers, as were all of the investors in Tip. Surely, these would be the same people that would be buying and bottling the new Tip flagship product (at least initially). Second, he realized that Pepsi didn't have a lemon-lime soda. Bill quickly through all of his efforts into making the best lemon-lime flavored soda on the market. He called it Mountain Dew, which had been a similarly flavored drink, and the new Mountain Dew quickly became the Tip Corp's leading product.

Then the sky fell. Pepsi introduced their own lemon-lime flavored drink -- Teem. Pepsi also required that bottlers stop manufacturing any other competing product if they wanted to bottle Teem. Although Bill was a friend, the Pepsi bottlers had to abandoned Mountain Dew. Bill was told that the best thing he could do was to file bankruptcy, and start over again. Bill wouldn't do it though -- he didn't want to leave someone else holding the bag. Instead he contacted his creditors, and setup a long term payment plan, and even his wife went to work (this was a big thing back in the 50s). For the next few years, Bill's family scraped by while he tried to come up with another flavor.

It took him awhile but eventually Bill settled upon a formula that still contained a lemon-lime base, but also contained enough orange juice to remove it from the lemon-lime classification. This would allow Pepsi bottlers to manufacture the new drink even though they were prohibited from bottling another lemon-lime flavored soda. A few other things Bill did was to reduce the amount of carbonation, add more sugar, and add more caffeine than was usually found in other soft drinks.

Don't get the idea that Bill's friends would bottle just anything that Bill created either, as it took Bill about three years to come up with this formula. First, it had to pass taste tests with his family, then with employees at Tip, then with employees at Flossie Richardson's Florist (were his wife worked), and then with employees at a Pepsi plant of his friend Wythe Hull. He would pour samples of his products and competitors products into small coded cups, and when the majority of each group agreed that his product was the best it was finally time to start giving samples to all his bottling friends. Mountain Dew went through 15 or 16 of these test before a final formula was settled upon. He also had to sneak over to Wythe Hull's bottling plant after Wythe had gone for the day. Then he would shut down Wythe's plant and run a batch of his new formula through the bottling line. Wythe probably wouldn't have been pleased to know this was going on, but Tip didn't have any bottling facilities of their own.

Once Bill found a formula that everyone raved about, he started trying to sell it. At first, several bottlers turned him down, but he was finally able to convince North Carolina bottlers Herman and Charles Minges to try marketing his new soda. Now Bill had several names in mind for his new drink, but the Minges insisted that it be sold under the old Mountain Dew name. You see, the Minges were stuck with a bunch of old bottles and by using the old name they could get rid of the bottles. They wouldn't even consider selling Bill's soda if they had to buy new bottles. Bill reluctantly agreed to use Mountain Dew as the name of his new drink, and it was introduced in April of 1961.

With almost no advertising, the new soda sold better than anyone could have imagined. Soon other bottlers were demanding Mountain Dew concentrate. Within three years of its introduction, Tip was supplying 40 bottlers, and they were selling over 10 million cases of Mountain Dew a year. By March of 1964, Bill was being contacted by several companies that were interested in purchasing either an interest in Tip, or in buying the company out right. Bill and the rest of the Tip board members took a look at the bids, and on September 3rd, 1964 it was announced that Pepsi had acquired the rights to Mountain Dew. It wasn't long before Mountain Dew became Pepsi's second best selling drink, and even today, Mountain Dew remains one of Pepsi's most popular sodas.