Community Profile


Wider Market Developing a Taste
for Cheerwine, Rowan's Unique Soda


Tales have been told for years about counselors at summer youth camps up in the mountains making “Cheerwine runs” down to Salisbury. Back in the 1960s you couldn’t find the soft drink in the western part of the state.

Such stories don’t surprise Mark Ritchie, the president of Cheerwine, which has been based in Rowan County since its founding in 1917. Once folks try this burgundy-colored cola with a hint of lemon-lime, they’re usually hooked. “In our county market, Cheerwine is a mainstream soft drink,” Ritchie explains. “We want to maintain an image consistent with modern times. Yet we’re an 85-year-old soft drink, and we’re proud of our heritage and history.”

Cheerwine remains a family-owned company. The product was invented and first bottled by Ritchie’s great-grandfather, L.D. Peeler. Ritchie’s grandfather, Clifford Peeler, is chairman of the company. Today it maintains a visible role in the community — as evidence, Cheerwine will be the sponsor for the 250 Fest parade in April 2003. “We felt it was a good fit,” Ritchie says. The parade will honor Peeler, co-chair of the county’s 250th anniversary celebration.

“It’s good for the company to expose our products through events and to present Cheerwine through positive, memorable experiences,” says Ritchie. “It’s also good for our company to support the community that supports us. This community has been good to us. This is our heartland.”

Has Ritchie ever been tempted to move the company to brighter lights and bigger cities? No, he says firmly. “We haven’t gotten that much bigger that Salisbury can’t meet our needs,” he says. “We are a part of Salisbury. We are very authentic. We are a family business and we take a family approach to doing business.”

That doesn’t mean Cheerwine isn’t on the move. The soft drink is considered a core brand in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. Recently, in partnership with Salisbury-based Food Lion, the company began distributing Cheerwine Ice Cream, a vanilla ice cream with a Cheerwine-flavored swirl, in targeted markets of the state. Still, Ritchie notes, “We see that there is still a great deal of opportunity in the Carolinas where Cheerwine has not been available.”

Forays into Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee and Florida are going “very well,” and Ritchie has plans to make the soft drink even more widely available. “Our newest initiative will be one that will offer the opportunity for people outside the Southeast to experience Cheerwine as a specialty beverage in a glass bottle,” he says. “It’s a good first step in becoming a mainstream soft drink in other parts of the U.S.”

Cheerwine also has developed a pretty respectable mail-order business from folks who have moved outside areas where the soft drink is distributed. Ritchie is even working on a licensing agreement to take Cheerwine to Norway — who would have guessed?

He says Coca-Cola and Pepsi can slug it out in the cola wars. “Our product is so unique, we don’t have to get into the one-upmanship you often see in the cola area,” Ritchie says.

After all, as the slogan says, Cheerwine is not your usual soft drink.  -- Susan Shinn

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