Clayton Christopher founded the company 11 years ago with $10,000 and his Beaumont, Texas, grandmother's recipe for home-brewed iced tea made with cane sugar, not corn syrup, which many commercial brands use.

Dell is launching a new generation of enterprise products today that represents a slight but potentially important shift in its approach to design and engineering. It is giving its product development teams more leeway to spend on the details that matter to customers, Dan Zehr reports. "There has been an increasing emphasis on design as a differentiator at Dell," points out Charles King, senior analyst at technology research firm Pund-IT. Hewlett-Packard, IBM and other server companies are expected to release a new collection of enterprise products in the coming days. All of them will claim that their products will …

I'm happy to see that Andrea James, a regular byline in these aggregations, is still tracking down marketing stories as a survivor on the slimmed-down staff of the newly digital-only Seattle P-I. This morning, James informs us that Starbucks has unveiled an ice cream line. It comes in flavors inspired by its most popular beverages -- caramel macchiato, mocha frappuccino, java chip frappuccino, and, of course, coffee. But wait a minute. Haven't I been buying Starbucks coffee ice cream at the A&P for years? Well, yes. Since 1996, Starbucks had been selling ice cream under a partnership with Dreyer's …

Remy Stern is one of those guys who not only gets mesmerized by the likes of Ron Popeil, he winds up succumbing to the siren call of the Ronco Automatic Pasta-Maker and other products that, if nothing else, prove the axiom that "if it's too good to be true, it probably is." But it's payback time. Stern has written But Wait . . . There's More!, which reviewer Steve Salerno calls an "entertaining portrait of a business that might have been sliced and diced by ridicule over the years but that somehow still has countless viewers …

Looking to boost traffic for their spanking new McCafes, regional McDonald's cooperatives are building a rare bottom-up marketing strategy for the traditionally monolithic marketer, Emily Bryson York reports. The mother ship isn't expecting to begin national advertising until midyear. McDonald's spokeswoman Danya Proud says some markets will have been selling McCafe drinks for as long as three years by the time national creative hits. The national ads, which haven't been completed yet, will reflect what the company has learned from regional rollouts, she says. McDonald's hasn't undertaken a rollout of this magnitude since the 1970s -- but that was …

A&P -- whose supermarket brands include Pathmark, Super Fresh, Waldbaum's, Best Cellars, Food Emporium and Food Basics -- is rolling out new marketing and packaging for its private label brands this month, Elaine Wong reports in Brandweek. It will now sell more than 2,500 "high-quality, value-conscious food and other grocery products" across its portfolio of 10 store brands including such labels as Green Way, Hartford Reserve, Via Roma, Market Spa and America's Choice. Meanwhile, dollar stores have gone mainstream, selling food as well as more items in newer packaging, Jaclyn Trop reports in the Detroit News. …

The new half-liter (16.9-oz.) bottle for Aquafina weighs about 20% less than the one it is replacing.