A modern bottle with a long, slightly tangled family tree
The modern Robinsons name sits inside a bigger soft drinks story. Its Royal Warrant, granted during Queen Elizabeth II’s reign, lapsed in 2022 following her death. Before that, in 1995, Unilever bought the food business of Reckitt and Colman and sold Robinsons on to Britannia Soft Drinks, the parent company of Britvic. More recently, Robinsons has been manufactured by Britvic Ltd, now part of Carlsberg Britvic after Carlsberg’s acquisition of Britvic plc in 2025. That is the tidy corporate version. The less tidy, more useful version is that the bottle in your cupboard carries a name that has been passed through several hands while still remaining recognisably Robinsons.
Before squash, there was barley
The Robinsons story is older than the orange squash on today’s shelf. The business is usually traced back to 1823, when George Robinson and Alexander Belville founded Robinson and Belville Ltd. It began as a shipping and trading company and was also associated with Patent Barley and Groats, which sounds wonderfully Victorian and faintly medicinal. By the mid-1820s, Robinsons was linked with barley water as a health drink, using barley crystals. That matters because Robinsons did not begin as a fizzy pop brand or a bright supermarket label. It grew out of the older British habit of making useful drinks from fruit, grains and water, then finding ways to make them part of everyday life.
Norwich, Wimbledon and the British summer problem
Robinsons became especially tied to Norwich after J and J Colman, the mustard people, acquired Keen Robinson and Company in 1903. Production later moved to Carrow, near Norwich, in 1925, where Robinsons products were made for many decades. The brand’s most famous public moment came through Lemon Barley Water, developed in 1930 by Eric Smedley Hodgson using Robinsons barley crystals, lemon juice and sugar. From 1935, Robinsons was associated with the Wimbledon Tennis Championships, a partnership that lasted until 2022. Orange squash is not Lemon Barley Water, of course, but it belongs to the same British drinks cupboard: practical, summery when required, and capable of surviving a rainy July with dignity.
Why orange squash became so stubbornly familiar
Orange squash has a particular place in British memory because it was everywhere without making a fuss. It appeared after school, at birthday parties, in plastic cups at church halls, in packed lunches, and on kitchen counters where the bottle left a sticky ring that nobody admitted causing. Robinsons is one of the names people remember because it became part of that background noise of home. It was not grand. It was not rare. It was just there, which is often how British grocery nostalgia gets its claws in. You do not always miss the dramatic things. Sometimes you miss a glass of orange squash made exactly how your house made it.
The bottle in Canada
For British expats in Canada, Robinsons Orange Squash can do a surprisingly good impression of a kitchen back home. It is the sort of thing relatives used to put in cupboards before anyone arrived, because children needed drinks and adults needed not to negotiate every glass of water. Here, it sits among the items people ask for by instinct: proper squash, the one they know, not something that only resembles the idea from a safe distance. At The Great British Shop, it earns its place quietly, one diluted glass at a time, which is probably how orange squash prefers it.
