Jackson Hole Soda Company is a small craft bottler from Jackson, Wyoming, founded in the mid-2000s during the wave of independent soda makers that pushed back against the corn-syrup, mass-market can. Where most of the drinks in this archive come from the age of the corner pharmacy, Jackson Hole belongs to a newer tradition: the deliberately local, cane-sugar craft soda made in small batches and sold first to its own community.
A craft soda with a mountain identity
The company built its identity around the landscape it comes from. Its flavors lean on regional character rather than national trends, and its packaging trades on the imagery of the Tetons and the frontier West. That sense of place is the point. In an era when a soda can be brewed anywhere and shipped everywhere, Jackson Hole Soda made its Wyoming origin the selling proposition, positioning itself as a taste of a specific corner of the Mountain West.
The signature flavors
Two drinks anchor the lineup. Buckin’ Root Beer is the flagship, a full-bodied cane-sugar root beer that leans on the creamy, vanilla-forward profile craft drinkers expect. The other standout is High Mountain Huckleberry, built around one of the region’s most prized wild fruits. Huckleberries are notoriously difficult to cultivate and are strongly associated with the Rockies and the Pacific Northwest, so a huckleberry soda reads instantly as a product of its region in a way a cola never could. The rest of the range rounds out the familiar craft-soda flavors, all sweetened with cane sugar rather than high-fructose corn syrup.
Where it fits in the regional map
Wyoming is not a state with a deep soda-bottling history the way Michigan or Georgia is, which makes Jackson Hole Soda unusual: it is a modern brand deliberately filling the role that older regional sodas occupied by accident of geography. The economics that once forced every region to bottle its own drink no longer apply, so a craft brand has to manufacture the local loyalty that companies like Vernors or Cheerwine inherited. Jackson Hole does it through tourism as much as residence, selling to the millions of visitors who pass through Grand Teton and Yellowstone and want to take a taste of the trip home.
A living brand
Unlike most of the discontinued names catalogued here, Jackson Hole Soda is very much alive, still bottling and still expanding its reach into specialty grocers and gift shops across the region and beyond. It represents the optimistic end of the regional-soda story: proof that the category did not simply die with the old bottlers, but found a second life in the craft movement, where being small and being local are advantages rather than liabilities. For a drinker assembling a picture of American regional sodas, Jackson Hole is the modern chapter, showing how a sense of place can still be bottled and sold more than a century after the first pharmacy fountains did exactly that.
Craft soda and the return of place
Jackson Hole Soda also illustrates how the craft revival rewrote the economics that once governed regional pop. The old bottlers were local because glass was heavy and shipping was dear; distribution, not marketing, drew the map. A modern craft brand faces the opposite situation, where anything can be shipped anywhere, and so it must choose to be local. Jackson Hole leans into that choice, tying its identity to Wyoming water, Rocky Mountain fruit and small-batch cane-sugar recipes rather than to price or reach. The result is a drink that functions as a souvenir as much as a beverage, carried home from national parks and gifted as a taste of the trip. For the purposes of this archive it marks the newest layer of the regional-soda story: not a survivor from the fountain era, but a deliberate revival of the idea that a place can and should have a soda of its own, made small and sold close to home.
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