How Nicole Tanner founded Swig: And created the famous "dirty soda.".

• Author: Tanner, Nicole

I GREW UP ON A DAIRY FARM in Driggs, Idaho, and had an amazing childhood as the fifth of eight children. When you live out in the country, you have to create your own fun, so it helped that I had seven siblings to keep me entertained. I had a love for a good cold soda from an early age. I lived next door to my grandparents, and I have many fond memories of sneaking an ice-cold Coca-Cola out of their fridge and then also a Ding Dong or a Twinkie from their pantry.

After high school, I attended Ricks College (now Brigham Young University-ldaho) and obtained my associate's degree in office education. After that, I moved to Provo and worked in the marketing department at SirsiDynix.

Years later, my husband and I moved with our five children to St. George in the fall of 2009. There was a nationwide recession, and we had just left the family business in Colorado, so we needed a way to provide for our family. That's when the memories of grabbing an ice-cold Coke from my grandparent's fridge came flooding back.

I knew many people in the nation had just lost their businesses and homes and needed a pick-me-up in their daily routine. People weren't going out to dinner or vacationing as much because funds were limited, but they wanted to do something for themselves, even if that was simply going to get their favorite drink.

We would go to Sonic all the time to get our drink fix. My drink of choice, by now, was a Diet Coke with lime. Though we loved it, sometimes the drive-thru wait was long, and our cups would smell like onions or be greasy.

I was also tired of feeling like a number in the drive-thru lines and I knew there had to be a better way to get our drink fix with friendly customer service and an exceptional product. So why not create a drive-thru drink business that had all of that? That's how Swig got its start.

Once we had our idea, we found an old, worn-out building in St. George right by Utah Tech University that we thought would work for our first location. The building was only 700 square feet, but it had a huge parking lot, so I envisioned lines of cars wrapping around the building to get their drinks.

I shared the idea with the landlord, who thought it was crazy because everybody sells fountain drinks, so how would we be different? But I knew Swig would be much more than just a drink--it would be a destination and the best part of people's day.

After we got our landlord on board, we fixed up the building and opened the first Swig on...