LOCAL soft drink manufacturers are few and far between since the likes of the Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo began their domination of the market across Australia.
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But a yearning for a taste of the good old days, and the traditional flavours that are etched in the memory of many "of a certain age", has one family in Orange relaunching a family business with growing success.
The new face behind Mayfields Soft Drinks, Peter Golland, is the original owner's grandson.
Peter and his wife, Leanne Peters, restarted the business in 2019.
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It carries on a family tradition started in 1948 when Herb Mayfield and his son-in-law, Ray Golland, bought a shed behind Orange Fire Station and started making soft drinks and selling them to the corner stores around Orange.
This was a time just after the Second World War and Peter said rationing was still commonplace.
He said the new partnership didn't have a quota for sugar or bottles.
"Sugar was obtained from sundry suppliers who could not use their full quota for one reason or another, while sauce, beer, and wine bottles were used because soft drink bottles simply could not be bought," he said.
A year later, they bought out another local soft drink business run by Davis and Potter.
Peter said the purchase meant they had a bigger sugar quota, plus a much larger factory, and entry to the soft drink bottle market.
In 1954, Ray, Peter's father, became the first person in Australia to be awarded the Diploma of Soft Drink Manufacture.
"We found all his study notes and textbooks when we were restarting the business and that helped fill in some of the knowledge gaps to fine-tune the drinks' flavours," Peter said.
In the 1950s, Mayfields became the first franchise bottlers of Schweppes products in Australia, and by the end of the 1960s, the company started producing Orchy fruit juices, which were the first chilled fruit juices sold in the area.
By the early 1980s, after a series of key family retirements, company mergers and buyouts, Mayfields soft drinks were no longer on retail shelves.
The relaunch of the brand brings back recipes not seen for almost 40 years.
"In the early days [of the relaunch], we tailored the drinks so they had natural preservatives and no artificial colours or flavours to cater for today's health-conscious customers," Peter said.
"But we found the shelf life was limited and, coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic, which meant business was slow for a while, we decided to return to the original recipes."
Experimenting with natural preservatives remains a possibility, though.
"I think in the future we might give the natural preservatives another go as I imagine there may be an alternative market for us," Leanne said.
"The timing just has to be right."
Peter said there's been plenty to learn along the way about the chemistry behind making a soft drink taste just right.
"For example, the sweeter the drink, the less carbonation put in the bottle," he said.
All the Mayfields drinks have varied levels of bubbles as this affects the taste and the way the drink feels in the mouth.
Peter explained this meant that the soft drink with the highest sugar, or sweetness, has the least carbonation.
Carbonation not only leads to a dancing froth, but also reacts with the water to generate a slightly tangy flavour.
He said the temperature of the drink also affects the carbonation process.
To build up the pressure and therefore create more bubbles, he said the drinks are cooled and this affects the density of the liquid.
"The cooler the liquid, the more carbonation you can put in the bottle," he said.
Each of the drinks is made to an exacting process and no two have the same level of sugar or carbonation.
Peter said the recipes used were pretty much the same as the ones developed by his grandfather.
"We tweaked the lemonade to give it a traditional cloudy effect like old-style lemonade, but that's pretty much it," Leanne said.
She said their main market was via cafes, but the drinks were also sold at a local supermarket and at community events and markets.
At the moment, they sell 200,000 bottle a year and their reach stretches as far as Newcastle, Cudal, Molong and into the Blue Mountain villages of Dargin, Mount Victoria, Blackhealth and Leura.
Leanne said the aim was to keep the business small enough for the couple to handle themselves, and their next project was to move all the manufacture and bottling to be under the one roof in Lords Place, Orange.
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