94 Business View - January 2016
Walton Beverage Company
Eighty-five years; three generations; one great company
The Walton Beverage Company, based in Ferndale,
Washington, began as the Walton Fruit and Produce
Company in nearby Bellingham, in 1931. According
to current company CEO, Ford Carothers, the original
owner of Walton Beverage was Harold Walton, who be-
gan the business when he was still a teenager. Young
Walton used to travel to the eastern part of the state to
pick up apples, peaches, onions, and other foodstuffs,
and then truck the produce back to the western coun-
ties. “Sometime around 1934 or ’35,” says Carothers,
“somebody in Seattle said, ‘Hey, there’s this new prod-
uct called Pepsi-Cola. You might want consider ped-
dling this off your truck.’ In those days, soda pop was
not an item you would regularly find in a grocery store,
and people didn’t consume very much of it; it was just
a bit of an add-on.”
Apparently, Walton’s add-on proved to be popular with
his customers. “Well, as time went on, it became big-
ger and what started out as a very small idea morphed
into him becoming a Pepsi-Cola bottler and he felt it
would be more profitable to build a small bottling line
in Bellingham, which he did in the summer of 1941,
right before World War II” Carothers recounts. “He
made Pepsi-Cola products and a few other brands -
7-Up and Hire’s Root Beer - and then that expanded
FOOD & BEVERAGE
