Granny Squibb's Lemonade: The Whole Story

By BRETT WARNKE

NARRAGANSETT—100 years ago Sarah Harris, whose ancestors settled with Roger Williams in his new plantation experiment, was married and became Sarah Harris Squibb.  In the 1930s her family built a beach house in Saunderstown where she, her husband George, and her two boys would spend peaceful and breezy summers sailing Narragansett Bay and gazing at Jamestown while, of course, sipping iced tea.

                Sarah was born and raised in Providence and lived their all her life.  She was an athlete, dancer, sailor, bowler, dressmaker and a pianist who spoke French and gardened.  She received a citric-charged recipe from her mother in-law and passed it around amongst friends.  Granny would  conjure batches of home brew using black tea, juice squeezed from fresh lemons, granulated cane sugar, spring water from their well, and mint that grew wild by the brook.   Robin Squibb, Sarah’s granddaughter said:  “Everyone in South County seemed to have her recipe.  They’ve made it and served it at weddings and social events for years.”  For roughly 60 years Rhode Islanders have been drinking the tea but it was only in 2009 that it became available in stores for purchase.

                The product comes courtesy of Robin Squibb who recently left her job as a script supervisor in the New York film business, having worked on films as various as Mississippi Burning and Analyze This.  When asked about her work she said, “It was a difficult, competitive, tense business and I worked in it for 35 years.”  She paused and said with a grin, “Let’s put ‘30’ in your article instead.”

                She now works on Rhode Island movies, owns Granny’s beach house in Saunderstown, and since 2003 has lived on Benefit Street in Providence.  “When I’d make the iced tea for people, they kept telling me, ‘You should sell this!’  So, I started doing my research,” Squibb said.  The difficulty of producing the tea was the laborious task of finding a viable formula for the fresh ingredients.  “You can’t make it the same way I did at home with fresh mint from the garden,” Squibb said.   She hired three food chemists who produced 20 different stillborn variations.  After they gave up with a shrug, it seemed Squibb’s investment was a busted flush.  She went through 52 more trials until she discovered the perfect commercial formula with number 53.  “Feel free to throw the fact that I don’t have a clue what I’m doing,” she said.

                    Squibb made additional investments into her product, forged connections with local dairies—who produce their own teas—and then ferreted out the right distributors.  By the end of 2009 Squibb’s tea was in 40 stores and now is selling in over 200, including Roch’s in Saunderstown and Belmont’s and Dave’s in Narragansett.  Today, the new mojito flavor has outsold the original and tapsters around New England are incorporating the drink into their boozy mixtures. 

Squibb praised the Rhode Island Development Council, Small Business Development Center, and Brown University’s Rhode Island Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship for helping her start up.  Most recently, Squibb’s business plan was a finalist in Rhode Island’s 2010 Business Competition and one of her iced tea bottles had a cameo in Jennifer Aniston’s The Bounty Hunter.

                Asked how Granny Squibb would feel about the product Robin paused and said, “I think she’d like it, though I doubt she’d like seeing her face on a bottle.”