Foxon Park makes its soda with cane sugar. That’s not a marketing angle — it’s just how they’ve always done it, since before high-fructose corn syrup existed as a concept worth avoiding. The bottling plant sits on Foxon Boulevard in East Haven, technically, though New Haven claims it the way it claims anything good in the orbit of the city. The building is not glamorous. The signage is modest. The parking lot is utilitarian. None of that matters once you crack open a bottle of their White Birch.
White Birch is their version of birch beer — pale, faintly medicinal in the way that old-school sodas can be, with a clean sweetness that doesn’t linger past its welcome. It is quietly one of the more distinctive regional sodas in New England, and most people outside of southern Connecticut have never heard of it. Foxon Park also makes a surprisingly good grape soda (if you have any residual affection for grape anything), a cream soda that tastes like it was designed for people who actually like cream soda rather than just the memory of it, and a ginger ale with more backbone than the national brands bother to produce.
You can visit the plant on weekdays for tours — small-scale, informal, the kind of operation where someone who actually works there shows you around rather than a scripted guide in a polo shirt. It’s worth calling ahead, because the schedule is not rigidly tourist-oriented. This is a working bottler, not a museum of itself. The tour takes maybe forty-five minutes, costs nothing or close to it depending on when you go, and ends, predictably, with samples.
What makes Foxon Park interesting beyond the nostalgia angle is the stubbornness of the thing. Family-owned since the beginning, still running small-batch glass-bottle production, still selling primarily through Connecticut delis, diners, and pizza places. If you’ve ever gotten a pizza at a New Haven spot and noticed the glass bottles in the cooler, there’s a decent chance those were Foxon Park. Sally’s used to serve it. A lot of the apizza institutions have carried it over the years, partly because it’s local and partly because a sharp, fizzy cane-sugar soda is genuinely good with pizza in a way that the flatter, sweeter national options aren’t.
You can also buy cases directly at the plant, which is the most economical route if you want to stock up. Individual bottles run well under two dollars at most retailers that carry them. A case of twenty-four will set you back somewhere around thirty dollars or less, depending on the flavor and where you buy. Shady Glen in Manchester is the most famous retail destination for Foxon Park loyalists, but you don’t need to drive that far — Liuzzi’s on State Street usually has it, as do several of the Fair Haven bodegas and Italian markets scattered across the lower half of the city.
It is not a dramatic destination. There’s no cocktail menu, no Instagram moment, no chef’s tasting flight of proprietary flavors. It’s a soda company that has been making soda the same way for over a hundred years in a part of Connecticut where longevity of that kind deserves at least a little credit. Bring a cooler. Buy the White Birch. Maybe the grape too, if you’re feeling adventurous.
