The independent layer here is more substantial than the equivalent in our Chicago beverage research, and the three oldest companies explain why.
Better Beverages is the oldest on the page, family owned in Cerritos since 1946, and it started as one man in Long Beach. It now runs two distribution and manufacturing facilities with close to fifty staff, fifteen delivery trucks and ten service trucks, covering nearly all of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties. It sells bag-in-box soda, juice, bar mix and frozen beverage syrups, its own house-branded syrups, and beverage-grade CO2, bulk CO2, nitrogen, beer gas and helium, and it installs and services the dispensing systems behind them. Its named institutional customers run to hospitals, nursing homes, schools and corporate lunchrooms.
Great American Beverage started in 1983 and incorporated in 1989 as BEV-SERV, and is an authorised distributor of Coca-Cola fountain syrups alongside bag-in-box juices, CO2 and ice. Its distribution arm works out of the Newhall Ice Building in Santa Clarita, a hundred-year-old ice house where it also fills CO2 tanks on site. A century-old ice building still doing beverage gas is the kind of continuity this trade rarely gets to keep.
Real Soda in Real Bottles is the one with the story, and unusually for this directory the company's own account is corroborated by a contemporaneous newspaper. It began with a bottle cap collection and a Volkswagen van, took a business licence in 1991, and moved into a Torrance warehouse in 1993, by which point, in its own words, it was in all of the hip coffeehouses in LA. The Los Angeles Times profiled the founder in December 1992 under the headline The Sommelier of Soda Pop, reporting that he sold about 200 kinds of bottled soda mainly to delis, coffee houses and people with antique vending machines. The company now lists more than 2,000 sodas and sixteen sub-distributors across the West, and manufactures its own brands including Leninade. The phone number in that 1992 article is long dead and we are not reprinting it.
