It began with the desire to protect brand Coca‑Cola and was a cooperative project between The Coca‑Cola Company and its bottlers.

One of the most famous shapes in the world is the iconic contour fluted lines of the Coca‑Cola bottle. Renowned as a design classic and described by noted industrial designer, Raymond Loewy as the “perfect liquid wrapper,” the bottle has been celebrated in art, music and advertising. When Andy Warhol wanted a shape to represent mass culture, he drew the bottle and when Volkswagen wanted to celebrate the shape of the Beatle, they compared the car to the bottle. The contract the two signed was a geographic one and The Coca‑Cola Bottling Company began franchising the rights to bottle Coca‑Cola in cities across the U.S. By 1920, over 1,200 Coca‑Cola bottling operations were established. Sales in both fountain and bottle form continued to increase and that popularity led to dozens of competitors trying to imitate the famous trademark of Coca‑Cola to deceive the public into buying their drinks.

About us

We are not building Coca‑Cola alone for today. We are building Coca‑Cola forever, and it is our hope that Coca‑Cola will remain the National drink to the end of time. The heads of your companies are doing everything in their power at considerable expense to bring about a bottle that we can adopt and call our own child, and when that bottle is adopted I ask each and every member of this convention to not consider the immediate expense that would be involved with changing your bottle, but to remember this, that in bringing about that bottle, the parent companies are bringing about an establishment of your own rights. You are coming into your own and it is a question of cooperation”. In 1899, two Chattanooga lawyers, Joseph Whitehead and Benjamin Thomas, traveled to Atlanta to negotiate the rights to bottle Coca‑Cola. The product had been an increasingly popular soda fountain drink established a mere 13 years previously. In fountain form, Coca‑Cola grew from an average of nine drinks per day sold in 1886 to being sold in every state of the US by 1900. Thomas and Whitehead wanted to capitalize on the popularity of the drink by bottling it to be consumed outside the four walls of a soda fountain.