New York’s soda fountains once competed fiercely for customers, tempting them with increasingly unusual drink concoctions. In the late 19th century, soda jerks served up drinks like Kola Phosphates, Fuzzy Flips and Lime Rickeys while the Lower East Side’s Louis Auster created the egg cream, a simple mix of chocolate syrup, seltzer and milk that became an icon of the city’s soda culture. More than a century later, that old impulse has found a new life.
Dirty soda - fountain soda mixed with syrups, cream, fruit purees and citrus - has grown from a regional curiosity in the United States into a national trend, powered by customisation, social media and a generation of consumers looking for a cheap social treat and places to meet friends. In 2009, a woman named Nicole Tanner in St George in the western state of Utah had the idea to open a fountain drink business. She needed a way to provide for her five children after she and her husband relocated to Utah from Colorado.
Families recovering from the Great Recession were cutting back on dinners out and vacations, but Tanner thought a special trip to get their favourite drink might offer an affordable indulgence. This occurred to her because her family was already going to Sonic drive-ins to get their drinks of choice. Tanner would get a Diet Coke with lime, but she didn’t like how long she had to wait in the drive-through and started to dream of a different business model.
So why not create a drive-through drink business that had all of that?” Tanner wrote in 2022. Soon, Tanner knew she wanted to do for fountain drinks what Starbucks had done for coffee, creating a true destination with endlessly customisable combinations. The result was Swig, which opened its first location in St George in 2010.
For the first couple of months, drinks were priced at just $1 to build up a customer base. By the end of the first year, lines were wrapped around the corner.
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