Noth­ing beats the taste of a great Cana­dian soda, and there weren’t any greater than The Pop Shoppe. Start­ing in Lon­don, Ontario 1969, The Pop Shoppe let con­sumers buy their soda directly from their dis­tri­b­u­tion out­lets, bypass­ing the typ­i­cal retail route and pass­ing the sav­ings on to the cus­tomer. It sounds crazy, but it worked — within three years they’d expanded to over 500 stores and even­tu­ally branched out into the states. Peo­ple were mix­ing and match­ing cases and return­ing refill­able bot­tles all over the country.

The good times couldn’t last for­ever though, and despite hav­ing some of the best tast­ing soda on the mar­ket (and a big time spokesper­son like hockey leg­end Eddie Shack!) the com­pany folded in 1983. The gen­eral con­sen­sus is that the busi­ness was killed by a com­bi­na­tion of store-brand sodas enter­ing the mar­ket­place in major gro­cery chains and Coca-Cola’s intro­duc­tion of a diet cola.

In 2004 The Pop Shoppe made a quiet return. Store shelves in small con­ve­nience stores were being stocked with Black Cherry and Lime Ricky Pop Shoppe bot­tles for the first time — and they were just as good as ever. In the four years since, the prod­uct has suc­cess­fully rolled out into much larger avail­abil­ity, with select Zeller's stores fea­tur­ing the prod­uct and the 7–11 Food Store chain recently sign­ing on to carry it in all of it’s Ontario locations.