The Coca-Cola Countour History

After the Civil War, John Pemberton launched the Pemberton Chemical Company with entrepreneurial dreams and a secret formula for a new beverage: cola-flavored syrup mixed with soda water. Pemberton’s accountant, a fan of alliteration, suggested the name “Coca-Cola.” The drink was originally sold only from soda fountains. In 1899, two Chattanooga lawyers contracted with Coca-Cola to bottle the drink to be consumed on the go.

Within just a few years, there were hundreds of independent bottlers, and, unfortunately, legions of imitators. The banality of Coca- Cola’s bottles—simple, straight-sided glass containers with an embossed name or a paper label—made them easy to duplicate.

In 1915, the Trustees of the Coca-Cola Bottling Association commenced a national contest for the design of a unique new bottle. They sought a bottle that “a person can recognize as a Coca-Cola bottle when he feels it in the dark ... so shaped that, even if broken, a person could tell at a glance what it was.” Two employees of the Root Glass Company of Terre Haute drew inspiration from the shape of a cocoa pod to design the winning bottle.

The distinctive bottle, with its contoured shape and the words “Coca-Cola” scrawled in cursive, put a stop to imitators and was “the catalyst that [helped] Coca-Cola become the most widely distributed product on earth.” A 1949 study showed that more than 99% of Americans could identify a bottle of Coke by shape alone. The impact of the contour bottle’s design on the company’s profits— and American culture—is difficult to overstate. According to Coca-Cola, “No one can even guess where the Coca-Cola business might be today if it were not for the unique package that distinguishes the product ... around the world.” The iconic shape of the bottle is so important as a brand signifier that today it is reproduced in silhouette form on aluminum cans of Coke.

But the contour bottle represents more than just marketing for the brand, -it has become synonymous with the beverage itself. Customers routinely report that Coca-Cola tastes better when consumed from the contour bottle, though there is no difference in the formula. In the words of Coca-Cola’s Executive Vice President: “Nothing instantly communicates the essence of Coca-Cola throughout the world like our contour bottle.”