Now there’s a petition to KEEP Dr Pepper from being the official soft drink of Texas

By now, you have probably heard — because seemingly every media outlet in Texas, including us, covered it — that Dr Pepper has launched a change.org petition to become the official soft drink of Texas.

And, like Mentos dropped into a soda bottle, it has caused a reaction — not just from fans, but from people who don’t want Dr Pepper to become the official soft drink of Texas.

It’s not that there’s a move to make something else the official soft drink of Texas (which, we learned this week, does not have an official soft drink). It stems, instead, from Dr Pepper’s recent history with the Texas town of Dublin.

For decades, Dublin, a small Erath county town about 90 miles southwest of Fort Worth, was home to a family-owned Dr Pepper bottler that delivered a sugar-sweetened Dr Pepper. For a lot of decades: The institution was 121 years old when it lost distribution rights to Dr Pepper.

That happened relatively recently: In 2011, the Plano-based Dr Pepper Snapple Group sued the Dublin bottler, contending that it violated its licensing agreement by selling beyond its distribution territory and using an unauthorized logo, which carried the name of the town.

The trademark dispute was settled in early 2012, when Dr Pepper Snapple Group acquired the rights to the Dublin Dr Pepper franchise. According to a Star-Telegram story at the time, a unit of Dr Pepper Snapple continued to distribute the sugar-sweetened Dr Pepper (most of which was produced by another independent bottler in Temple) in a six-county area, but all references to Dublin were removed from the bottles.

According to the new petition, the settlement put many Texans in Dublin (a town of about 3,700) out of work and devastated the local economy. “It was a reaction to their inability to keep Dublin Dr Pepper, which had continued to be made according to the original Dr Pepper recipe, from being sought after by fans as the best version of the popular soft drink.” (Dr Pepper was created by a Waco pharmacist in 1885.)

The Dublin bottler had a 44-mile-radius distribution area, according to the petition, but bottles of the Dublin product managed to get out of the distribution area.

The Dublin bottler still exists, as Dublin Bottling Works, which specializes in cane-sugar-sweetened sodas such as Triple XXX Root Beer, Dublin Texas Red Creme Soda, Dublin Ginger Ale and some unusual flavors including a Blueberry Soda, a Green Apple Soda, and our favorite, Dublin Fru Fru Berry Soda.

This isn’t Dr Pepper’s only woe in the wake of its petition to become the official soft drink of Texas. According to a story in the UT Arlington Shorthorn, the university is removing Dr Pepper and Coca-Cola products as UTA finalizes a deal with Pepsi. So Dr Pepper won’t even be the official soft drink of UTA, but the Shorthorn story focuses more on the age-old debate over whether to choose Coke or Pepsi. Dr Pepper will still be available at vendors in UTA’s College Park District but the change will affect the rest of the campus, the story says.

But it’s not like Dr Pepper won’t be available nearby. You can even get Dr Pepper Cotton Candy, which is available (among other places) and fancy candy-and-soda store Rocket Fizz in the Champions Park development off Collins Street just north of I-30. Judging from their Facebook page, Rocket Fizz has a lot of sugar-cane-sweetened soda, too.

The opposing petition (which you can view here) could have an uphill battle. Launched this morning at change.org, it has three signatures at this writing. Dr Pepper’s petition to become the official soft drink of Texas, launched yesterday, has 10,550. We’ve emailed a Dr Pepper rep to see if the company has any comment on the opposing petition. We’ll update if we hear anything.

This story was originally published January 16, 2019 at 1:20 PM with the headline "Now there’s a petition to KEEP Dr Pepper from being the official soft drink of Texas."