TEXAS VIEW: Dublin Dr Pepper myths abound

However you might feel about cane sugar and high-fructose corn syrup in your soft drinks, the end of Dublin Dr Pepper last week yields two important truths. First, the free-market system isn’t always so pretty or so neat. Secondly, details have an inconvenient way of scattering to the four winds the tenuous mystique surrounding any beloved product.

For instance, popular Dublin Dr Pepper was not generally produced in the engaging little Erath County town of 3,700 but down in Temple. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s important to realize it was a Temple bottler that for years made this drink, complete with the seemingly requisite cane sugar, even though it was packaged and sold to folks as Dublin Dr Pepper.

Second, Jack McKinney, executive director of the Dr Pepper Museum here in Waco, tells the Tribune-Herald editorial board that Southwest Canners in Nacogdoches also bottles Dr Pepper with cane sugar in 20-ounce plastic bottles, 2-liter bottles and eight-can packs. And you can get Dr Pepper made with cane sugar at grocery outlets such as H-E-B and the Dr Pepper Museum.

Finally, it’s speculation, but we’re betting you’ll see more bottlers forsaking corn syrup for sugar as ethanol continues to pump corn prices higher, finally making them competitive with sugar prices, which is why bottlers years ago began using corn syrup — another nifty lesson in free-market dynamics.

All that said, there’s a good argument to be made that Dr Pepper Snapple, which owns Dr Pepper, might have been misguided in efforts to legally halt Dublin Dr Pepper operations. When your group sales were $5.6 billion in 2010 and Dublin Dr Pepper is making about $7 million a year, the old David vs. Goliath analogy does anything but spur sales.

On the other hand, it’s just as likely Dr Pepper Snapple was taking some heat from bottlers around the state who took notice of individuals who bought loads of delicious Dublin Dr Pepper, then hauled them off elsewhere to sell, cutting into profit margins of the others. And, after all, Dublin Dr Pepper was originally to be confined to a six-county area.

Finally, as is usual in such legal settlements, you can be fairly sure that the owners of Dublin Dr Pepper did not walk away from this empty-handed. There may be wailing and gnashing of teeth over in Dublin, but bad feelings will pass. When we talked with visitors from Shreveport, La., and Gainesville, Fla., at the Dr Pepper Museum on Tuesday, none had even heard of the infamous Dublin Dr Pepper flap.

“I love Dr Pepper,” said Crystal Tatum, of Shreveport, a former Texan who was at the museum with 18-year-old daughter Jackie Brown, a student at Baylor University. “But I really miss Big Red.”

Our take: It’s time for everyone to get past all this. We can’t put it better than McKinney did: “It’s like we have two good friends — Dublin, whom we’ve worked with on exhibits and collectibles, and Dr Pepper Snapple, and now they’re getting a divorce. And it’s all about business. So are we going to say bad things about the bride or the groom? Well, the answer is neither. If they ever get back together, they’d both hate you!”