Martinelli’s 150th Anniversary

Fun Facts

3/8/18

  1. S. Martinelli and Company was founded in Watsonville, California in 1868. It is still owned and operated by the Martinelli family in the same location.
  2. Martinelli’s hometown, Watsonville, California, is celebrating its 150th anniversary in 2018 as well.
  3. A unique blend of premium apple varietals are used to achieve Martinelli’s crisp and full bodied flavor. Apple varietals include Pippin, Granny Smith, Gala, Honeycrisp, Fuji and Golden Delicious, just to name a few.
  4. It takes two apples to make one bottle of 10-ounce apple juice. It takes five apples to make one bottle of 25.4-ounce apple cider. It takes 25 apples to make one bottle of 128-ounce apple juice.
  5. In 1885 Martinelli’s produced approximately 10,000 gallons of juice a year. In 2017, the company produced that much in less than 2 hours.
  6. Martinelli products are sold in 41 countries on five continents. Labels are available in English, French, Spanish, Korean, Chinese and Japanese.
  7. Martinelli’s apple juice has been made with the same ingredient for 150 years – U.S. grown fresh apples. Martinelli’s products are 100% juice and contain no chemical preservatives or sweeteners.
  8. The founder of Martinelli’s, Stephen, immigrated to the United States, alone, from Switzerland when he was only 15 years old. He went to live with his brother in Watsonville, California, and began making cider from the apples on his brother’s farm.
  9. In the early years, cider was paid for in gold coins and bandits were a threat. It is said that Stephen would travel with one hand on the reins, and the other on his gun. Luckily, he never had to use it.
  10. Martinelli’s began as a soda company in the early 1860’s, and became a hard cider business in 1868. Not until Prohibition, 50 years after the company began, did Martinelli’s develop a pasteurization process for preserving non-alcoholic apple juice for year-round sales.
  11. The founder’s son, Stephen G. Martinelli, Jr. developed the tagline “Drink Your Apple a Day” along with the iconic apple shaped bottle in 1933, trademarked as “The Golden Apple.” When the bottle launched, customers were given pamphlets showing how to repurpose the empty bottle into a table lamp.
  12. Martinelli’s planted its first organic apple orchard in 2016.
  13. The average length of employment at S. Martinelli & Company is 19 years.
  14. Many think Dean Martin drank alcohol on stage. However, an excerpt from an interview with Martin’s daughter in the Los Angeles Times says otherwise… “When he started to redo his nightclub act, he started at the Sands Hotel and had some writers helping him. They just thought, we’ll put a drink in his hand and a cigarette. Every man wanted to be him, and every woman wanted to be with him.” The truth of the matter, she said, her father was swigging apple juice when he performed. We have reason to believe it was Martinelli’s.
  15. Martinelli’s was founded three years after the Civil War ended and has survived through every war since.

In 1868…

  • Ulysses S. Grant was elected president.
  • The 14th Amendment was adopted.
  • Memorial Day was established.
  • The first volume of Little Women is published.
  • Cornell University opens.
  • Watsonville, California was incorporated as a city