“We were really down to the bare bones of living,” Brown says. “We knew this wasn’t going to be a small little hiccup.”

Once the roads near their home got cleared of debris, Brown and Allen drove to the small brick building in Waynesville that serves as the production hub for their beloved beverage company, Waynesville Soda Jerks.

In normal times, this building is bustling. The husband-and-wife duo create small-batch sodas using fruit and herbs from farmers in Southern Appalachia. There’s a crowd-pleasing Peach Soda using peaches from KT’s Orchard & Apiary in Canton and a Blueberry Basil Soda featuring berries from Table Rock Farms in Morganton and basil from the Biltmore Estate. The popular Raspberry Cream Soda, meanwhile, includes fruit from Stepp’s Plants in Flat Rock.

Megan Brown and Chris Allen of Waynesville Soda Jerks.

When Brown and Allen got to their production facility a few days after Helene, they breathed a sigh of relief when they discovered it had escaped major damage. There were no trees sticking out from the roof, and the floor wasn’t swimming in water. In fact, the building even had electricity and the neighborhood had cell service.

But that didn’t mean they were out of the woods. As soon as Brown and Allen started making contact with the farms they buy from, they realized the extent of the damage. Widespread flooding had drowned the early fall harvests on farms across the region, with the deluge of rain creating new highways of water across rows of plantings.

One such farm was Rayburn Farms in Barnardsville, which supplies the ginger for their ginger and cranberry ginger sodas. Earlier in the week, just days before the hurricane hit, owner Michael Rayburn was planning to harvest his full year’s worth of ginger crop and deliver it to Brown and Allen for the 2024 and 2025 soda production. But in a sad twist of fate, he was delayed by other tasks and wasn’t able to get it out of the ground before the storm hit. “He lost the whole crop of ginger,” Allen says.

That was the bad news from the supply side. On the sell side, things were just as tough and Brown and Allen had not even begun to process what was going to happen in the weeks and months ahead.

As a small business, Waynesville Soda Jerks sells its lineup of hand-crafted sodas through a network of regional wholesale accounts—namely local restaurants, bars and breweries, specialty retail stores and gift shops. About 75% of its revenue comes from these wholesale sales, while the remaining 25% comes from its own gift shop and online sales.

Some of these businesses had been so badly damaged that they were forced to shut down for major repairs; others, sadly, had quite literally disappeared. The Village Scoop in Chimney Rock, for example, a popular ice cream shop that carried a few different varieties of Waynesville Soda Jerks sodas, was completely swept away by flooding of the nearby Broad River. “That was a new account for us; it was so sad to see that happen to them,” Brown says.

Other businesses, meanwhile, suffered a prolonged loss of electricity and water and then also a dramatic decline in tourism, forcing them to either shut down temporarily or scale back operations. When James Beard Award–nominated chef John Fleer announced he was closing Rhubarb, one of the darlings of downtown Asheville, Allen and Brown mourned the loss of both a favorite restaurant and a client. Fleer “was a very early adopter,” Brown says. “Rhubarb was one of our successful and long-standing accounts.”

Stacking the bottles at Waynesville Soda Jerks.

In the months following Helene, Waynesville Soda Jerks lost roughly one third of its accounts and sales dried up. And while sales have started to climb back, their revenue is still down 25% year over year. “Instead of bottling two to three days per week, we were bottling once a week or once every other week,” Brown says.

The story of Waynesville Soda Jerks is an all-too-familiar tale among the small businesses of Western North Carolina. While some operations suffered a tragic loss in the form of damaged buildings and flooded inventory, others suffered financially—a less dramatic but no less challenging reality. It was often an inevitable consequence of operating in a region that had effectively shut down for several weeks after a major natural disaster.

“We had some pretty gut-wrenching conversations,” Brown says. But Waynesville Soda Jerks is also emblematic of the strength and resilience of many local businesses, finding ways to stay afloat and move forward one step at a time. After tapping into some grants and loans and adjusting their production to account for slower sales, they are now hopeful about the future of both the region and their business. And their optimism is fueled in part by the farmers with which they partner who are back on their land, going about the business of planning and planting.

“There’s this human nature instinct to sit and wallow and we certainly had our moments,” Brown says. “But fortunately, we have these connections with folks who are in- spiring us and finding ways to keep going.”

Waynesville Soda Jerks got a big boost early this year when it landed a contract with Ingles Markets, its first major retail account and a relationship that could eventually generate sales from across the Southeast. And with the promise of new accounts, Brown and Allen are rebuilding their team.

“It’s absolutely full steam ahead for us,” Brown says. “We continue to expand our team and this is by far the strongest team we’ve ever had. This felt like a re-do for us.”

The “Road to Rebuilding” series is presented in partnership with Ingles Markets, celebrating and honoring businesses in Western North Carolina that are rebuilding after Hurricane Helene.