On his 79th birthday last week, Roy Devillier announced that his business is launching a new way for its customers and fans to find its much-loved lemonade. Starting in September, the Lafayette-based Roy's Lemonade will be available in bottles.
Devillier was a pharmacist in Krotz Springs in 1994 when he decided to retire and travel the country selling lemonade. He got the idea while selling funnel cakes at a festival. He noticed the lemonade line was always long at a nearby vendor.
After 29 years in business, largely selling lemonade at fairs and festivals across the country, Roy's Lemonade, based in Lafayette, will be available in bottles in September.
He tried the other vendor's lemonade and found it mediocre and thought, "I could make a better lemonade than that."
So, he went home and made lemonade every day for two weeks, continuously tweaking his formula. Finally, he created one that he and his family believed was a winner. He asked the local Walmart if he could try selling it in front of their store one Saturday. Within an hour, he was sold out — and the business was born.
"That’s when my parents decided to semi-retire, which would allow them to travel around the country and attend the occasional festival or rodeo selling lemonade — and that’s how it started," said Cynthia Thompson, Devillier's daughter.
Devillier's wife passed away in 1998. He made the decision to keep making lemonade. At 79, he's still going. Last week, he was in Wyoming at the National High School Rodeo Finals. This week, he's in Tuskahoma, Oklahoma, at the world headquarters of the Choctaw Nation for the Choctaw Labor Day Festival, with crowds expected of up to 50,000 for the three-day event. It's his 26th year at the Choctaw event in Oklahoma.
Devillier is careful about his word choice. He refers to the aging process as "maturing" instead of "getting older."
Old and new Roy's Lemonade fans in Norman, Oklahoma asked for photos with Roy Devillier, the lemonade guru and founder of Roy's Lemonade.
"When you mature in life, you need a purpose. My purpose is to promote Roy's Lemonade," he said while taking a break from overseeing the lemonade stand set-up in Oklahoma.
Rather than the 35 events a year he did when he was younger, Devillier now does 15 to 18, traveling all over the country, often chasing the best temperatures and getting away from the heat of a Louisiana summer. The family business runs out of their homes and with a warehouse in Scott.
He says his favorite aspect of his work is "meeting the people."
To the question, "Have you made friends along the way?" Devillier gives a deep belly laugh and replies, "I have friends all over."
He gave up traveling in an RV a few years ago and now drives a Ford 350 dually pulling a 20-foot cargo trailer. He sells his lemonade from a 10-foot by 10-foot tent and hires people on-site to help with the setup. By now, he has people all over the country who work for him for the festivals he's been visiting for years, if not decades.
"We are all about repeat business," he said.
In April, Roy Devillier, founder of Roy's Lemonade, was selling his lemonade at Fiesta San Antonio.
Thompson says the decision 29 years ago to hit the road "was totally out of the box" for her parents.
"They were brick-and-mortar people. I’m very proud that my dad pivoted before online businesses took off. He went to where people were at fairs and festivals," she said. "He saw the future. Instead of sitting in a brick and mortar and waiting for people to come to me, he went to them."
Until 2010, he and his family made the lemonade by hand.
"It got to a point that we couldn’t keep up by hand," said Thompson. "We would have a festival and be exhausted by the time the festival started just from making all the lemonade."
So, Devillier began working with a series of co-packers until he found one who was able to duplicate his recipe in a format called bag-in-a-box. The shift to the 3-gallon-concentrate bag-in-a-box allowed the previously festival-only product to be sold in fountain machines at convenience stores.
"It tastes exactly like he just made it in our kitchen," said Thompson, who explains that though efficient, the business is "not very corporate."
She, along with her dad and her husband, Allen Thompson, manage the whole business.
“We all three do whatever needs to be done to move the ship forward," Cynthia Thompson said Aug. 24. "For example, today, I’m delivering lemonade. Tomorrow, I could be going to a tradeshow or doing invoices."
About 10 years ago, Roy's decided to explore bottling the lemonade.
“It was very costly back then, and we found that it didn’t taste like our lemonade," Cynthia Thompson said.
After 29 years in business, largely selling lemonade at fairs and festivals across the country, Roy's Lemonade, based in Lafayette, will be available in bottles in September.
After a few tries, they decided to stick with the bag-in-a-box for the time being, but over the last decade, the bottling industry has evolved, with more bottlers willing to bottle smaller quantities.
Once they identified a bottler who appreciated their emphasis on taste, they started experimenting.
"He did a run of the bottles and the first wasn’t quite right," Cynthia Thompson said. "We did some tweaking and it tastes just like we made it in our kitchen — now, people don’t have to wait to go to the crawfish festival to get some Roy's. Soon, they’ll be able to pick it up in a convenience or grocery store."