An award-winning Phoenix drinks company says goodbye

When Dwayne Allen was getting his fledgling ginger beer soda business off the ground, he drove across the Valley, delivering bottles in his Prius. Six years later, he delivered the last cases of Big Marble Organics to a Phoenix restaurant group and cafe this week.

“As it stands with Big Marble, it’s over,” Allen says.

He announced the closure of his award-winning bubbly beverage brand, which had grown to include lemon and hibiscus sodas and tonic water, on Monday.

Those in search of a last taste of Big Marble will find it at restaurants owned by Genuine Concepts, including The Vig, Campo, The Womack and The Little Woody, as well as Strip Mall, the Seventh Street cafe run by the team behind Monsoon Market.

After six years of hard work, he’s proud of how far the beverage business had come.

“I chalk it up as a win,” Allen says. “Nothing lasts forever.”

A homemade ginger beer takes off

Big Marble’s ginger beer was born downtown at The Breadfruit & Rum Bar, a restaurant that Allen ran with his former wife, Danielle Leoni, for 12 years on Pierce Street.

The Caribbean restaurant was a staple for its jerk chicken, sweet plantains and an impressive rum selection. When Allen and Leoni’s Jamaican source for ginger beer shuttered, they couldn’t find a good replacement. Instead, the pair decided to start making their own around 2018.

“We wanted this to be a cocktail mixer,” Allen told New Times in 2020. “It was designed for the Dark and Stormy. It was important that the carbonation level would hold up once you start adding other ingredients.”

The duo launched Big Marble Organics in 2020. The Breadfruit shuttered amid the pandemic, but Big Marble ginger beer emerged as a bright spot. 

Allen committed to making each beverage with real, organic ingredients from the outset. The spicy, effervescent soda quickly became an enticing mixer for people making cocktails at home. Allen found Valley shopkeepers eager to sell the local soda. Once restaurants and bars began reopening, they followed suit, stocking Big Marble.

“We held to our guns,” Allen says. “We want to do it this way because we saw this space was vacant in the marketplace, and we were going to step into it with our full chest.”

The Breadfruit & Rum Bar made a brief return as a one-year kitchen pop-up in downtown’s Bitter & Twisted Cocktail Parlour. Allen handed the keys to The Breadfruit’s original home over to James Piazza, who opened the first brick-and-mortar location of his retro smashburger bar, Bad Jimmy’s, on Pierce Street in 2023.

At that point, Allen told New Times, “Ultimately, the focus is Big Marble Organics, and there’s just not enough hours in the day for me to do both.”

National growth plans dashed

With his full attention on Big Marble, Allen expanded the number of soda flavors and got the glass bottles on the shelves of more liquor and grocery stores. 

The broader beverage industry took notice of Big Marble, too. The sodas won several beverage awards. In 2024, Big Marble’s ginger beer received a platinum medal in the L.A. Spirits Awards’ Soda/Carbonated Mixer category. That medal joined others, including a gold medal for Best Soda for Big Marble’s ginger beer and a silver medal for its tonic water in the New Orleans Spirits Competition in 2023.

Allen and his investors considered how to grow the business. In 2025, they partnered with a national seller in hopes of Big Marble being stocked on shelves at stores across the country. At the time, Allen says, that excitement was tempered by concerns about going all in with one distributor. The beverage maker says he felt there was no other way to grow.

“If you want to do anything at scale, you have to do business with one of these big guys,” Allen says.

In just a few years, he’d gone from mixing that ginger beer with rum for regulars at his neighborhood restaurant to building a production facility and entering the competitive world of consumer packaged goods.

Yet the concerns materialized when the distributor missed several months of payments while Big Marble continued to supply its bottled beverages. As he was running low on the cash needed to buy their supplies for the coming year, he continued to press for answers. In April, emails to his contacts at the distributor began bouncing. 

“My alarm bells are really going off,” Allen says. “Nobody’s communicating; nobody’s telling us anything.”

By May, headlines detailed the collapse at Republic National Distributing Co. VinePair reported on RNDC’s West Coast exit, which left small beverage makers in a conundrum similar to Allen’s: Could they afford to wait to see what would happen while no payments were coming in? 

“We were just jammed between a rock and a hard place,” Allen says. “We couldn’t even apply pressure.”

While they held on, Allen lost staff and had to pause production. Reyes Beverage Group acquired RNDC’s assets in 11 states, including Arizona, in June. Big Marble’s outstanding invoices have now all been paid, Allen says, but concerns loom.

Ultimately, he and his investors saw too much risk in putting all their eggs in one basket to expand nationally. They’d also become too big to scale back. Ultimately, they decided to close Big Marble.

“We’ve lost half a year of business,” Allen says. “We have no leverage to prevent something like this from happening again.”

With those last deliveries made, still in his Prius, Allen isn’t sure what comes next other than a trip back to Jamaica. From there, he muses, he may start a beachside taco stand. 

“I’ve had a good time,” Allen says. “Now it’s time to start working on my next piece of art.”