About Us

Private Label Specialties offers a variety of branding solutions and products to increase your business' recognition and your profits. Our original unique concept started with our premium line of old fashioned beverages which we custom label for a variety of establishments and industries. In addition to our flagship beverages, we also provide a full range of promotional products, currently at 750,000 and growing. We also offer imprinted and embroidered apparel services with accelerated production times unmatched in the industry.

Our History

Private Label Specialties started in 1991 with an idea to Private Label Sparkling Water to go up against Poland Spring and Perrier. Instead of competing head-on with national brands, our beverages offered our customers the additional incentive of being custom labeled with their name and image. Customers enjoyed their labeled water so much that it wasn't long until they asked for more flavors.

In 1992, the "Juice Guys" wrapped up the juice market, Snapple had the teas and Coke and Pepsi had the cola market. Our Founder and President, Ray Duhaime, decided to target and revitalize the Root Beer market. After all, no one at the time carried Root Beer, much less cared for it anymore.

After working with a chemist from New York, we developed the flavor we most remembered from our past. The result was a not too sweet, low in carbonation flavor that was mellowed with wintergreen for just the right flavor. Private Label Specialties Root Beer was born!

We went after the market, but as mentioned, not many establishments carried it so we had the challenge of getting them to buy into both the flavor AND the concept. Game on!

In 1995, Coke and Pepsi decided to make Root Beer popular again and spent a total of $25 million marketing their root beer brands. That triggered our growth. Now folks wanted to carry Root Beer and we had the best flavor. It was easy, the customers performed multiple taste tests and we won!

It was always a win-win concept. Our customer's label would get their patrons to try our Root Beer and the great taste inside kept them coming back. The reorders were strong and we were quickly termed the "Root Beer Guys". We had carved our Niche! Not only did we grasp our market share of the beverages, we were the only beverage company that could help our customers market and brand themselves.

Over the years, competition unsuccessfully tried to mimic our concept, but they just couldn't compete with our quality product and unique processes. 20 years later, we still remain the market leader. We continually added flavors as the years went on. Today, we have 15 varieties of sodas as well as Spring Water and our own Energy Drink.

Our innovation has allowed for many positive changes. In the beginning, it would take about 2 to 3 months from the time we'd sign up an account until we delivered their first cases. Today, after investing in great employees, technology and equipment, we can go from concept to design, production and to final product in under an hour if need be. This extremely fast service is made possible by our proprietary processes and systems.

Moving forward and listening to our customers, they kept asking for additional branding options. So we became a Promotional Products Distributor in 1997. This allowed us to use our graphics and creative ability to offer customers their logos on a multitude of products.

Among the additional items we can brand is apparel. We can embroider or screen print on a vast amount of items, some of which include aprons, shirts, coats, hats and the list goes on.

From 2006 - 2007, not satisfied with what our vendors could do, we made two major changes. We invested in the newest Direct-to-Garment printing technology and decided to purchase our screen printing and embroidery vendor. This gave us more then a step up on our competition as we could now control production for our most important asset - our customers.

Looking forward, our vision is simple. Since we have grown every year since we started and we have customers all over the United States, we decided to begin Franchising Private Label Specialties.

Together with our franchisees, we have the strength to carry our brand of Private Label Beverages across the US. We will always maintain that our customers come first and to satisfy their needs. We will always invest in technology and equipment to stay way ahead of any possible competition. We will develop and introduce products to extend the benefits of doing business with us to our customers.

We do this with our trade marked concept we call, The Unique Branding Advantage™