Big Marble\u2019s ginger beer was born downtown at The Breadfruit & Rum Bar, a restaurant that\u00a0Allen ran with his former wife, Danielle Leoni, for 12 years on Pierce Street.<\/p>\n
The Caribbean restaurant was a staple for its jerk chicken, sweet plantains and an impressive rum selection. When Allen and Leoni\u2019s Jamaican source for ginger beer shuttered, they couldn\u2019t find a good replacement. Instead, the pair decided to start making their own around 2018.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe wanted this to be a cocktail mixer,\u201d Allen told New Times in 2020<\/a>. \u201cIt was designed for the Dark and Stormy. It was important that the carbonation level would hold up once you start adding other ingredients.\u201d<\/p>\n The duo launched Big Marble Organics in 2020. The Breadfruit shuttered amid the pandemic, but Big Marble ginger beer emerged as a bright spot.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWe held to our guns,\u201d Allen says. \u201cWe want to do it this way <\/strong>because we saw this space was vacant in the marketplace, and we were going to step into it with our full chest.\u201d<\/p>\n The Breadfruit & Rum Bar made a brief return as a one-year kitchen pop-up<\/a> in downtown\u2019s Bitter & Twisted Cocktail Parlour. Allen handed the keys<\/a> to The Breadfruit\u2019s original home over to James Piazza, who opened the first brick-and-mortar location of his retro smashburger bar, Bad Jimmy\u2019s<\/a>, on Pierce Street in 2023.<\/p>\n At that point, Allen told New Times, \u201cUltimately, the focus is Big Marble Organics, and there\u2019s just not enough hours in the day for me to do both.\u201d<\/p>\n National growth plans dashed<\/strong><\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n The broader beverage industry took notice of Big Marble, too. The sodas won several beverage awards. In 2024, Big Marble\u2019s ginger beer received a platinum medal in the L.A. Spirits Awards\u2019<\/a> Soda\/Carbonated Mixer category. That medal joined others, including a gold medal for Best Soda for Big Marble\u2019s ginger beer and a silver medal for its tonic water in the New Orleans Spirits Competition in 2023<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you want to do anything at scale, you have to do business with one of these big guys,\u201d Allen says.<\/p>\n In just a few years, he\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMy alarm bells are really going off,\u201d Allen says. \u201cNobody\u2019s communicating; nobody\u2019s telling us anything.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Big](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/bigmarbledevour24tb.webp\")
The Big Marble Organics crew rolled up in style to serve their naturally flavored sodas at the Devour Culinary Classic.<\/p>\n