Course:HIST104/Classic Coca-Cola Bottle

Coca-Cola is sold to more than 200 countries and is enjoyed 1.8 billion times a day, making it one of the most popular drink in the world. But the Classic Coca-Cola Bottle is just as popular as the drink itself. According to packaging experts, 90 percent of the world’s population recognize it by sight alone. The bottle is called the "contour bottle" by the Coca-Cola Company but is also known as the "hobble skirt" bottle and was designed in 1915 by Earl R. Dean.

Where is the Coca-Cola Bottle Made

The Beginnings of Bottling

Coca-Cola began as a fountain drink in 1886 and sold for five cents a glass. A shop owner in Vicksburg, Mississippi was impressed by the high sales of Coke and began to sell it in a glass jar. The owner decided to send a case of bottled Coke to the owner of Coca-Cola, Asa Griggs Candler. Candler thanked the shop owner but did nothing and tried to focus more on soda fountain sales. However in 1899 two attorneys from Tennessee by the names of Benjamin F. Thomas and Joseph B. Whitehead met with Candler and got the right to exclusively bottle Coca-Cola in most of the United States. Later a third man named John T. Lupton joined the team and together the three of them sold the bottling rights to local business people. By 1909, almost 400 Coca-Cola bottling plants had opened.

The Contour Bottle

In 1915 The Coca-Cola Company challenged glass manufacturers to make a new distinctive design for the Coca-Cola Bottle because the suppliers were afraid that the straight sided design they had would be easily confused with imitators. An employee of the Roots Glass Company in Indiana, Earl R. Dean, modeled his bottle after a gourd-shaped cocoa pod and in 1916 Dean's bottle was chosen over other designs during a convention. It was named the Contour bottle and the same year it was being put on store shelves. By 1920 it was the standard bottle for the drink.

Where the Coca-Cola Bottles are Made in the 21st Century

Since 1889 The Coca-Cola Company has sold the bottling rights of its drink to other companies through what is called a franchised distribution system. The Coca-Cola Company based in Atlanta, Georgia takes care of the marketing and development of their product but they do not bottle their product, instead they sell their syrup to distribution centers who mix and bottle it. However, many of the big bottling companies are solely dependent on Coca-Cola and do not bottle anything else. To make it even more confusing many of these companies have Coca-Cola in their name.

Anchor Bottler

An Anchor Bottler is a term used by The Coca-Cola Company for their biggest bottlers around the world.

North America

Recently The Coca-Cola Company decided to buy its North American Bottlers and named it Coca-Cola Refreshments. It is the largest Anchor Bottling Company for Coca-Cola and has bottling factories all over North America.

Europe

In Europe the main, or anchor bottler, of Northern Europe is Coca-Cola Enterprises. They have exclusive bottling rights to Belgium, Great Britain, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. Coca-Cola Enterprises have many bottling factories in cities like Antwerpen, Rotterdam, Luxembourg, Brussels, and many more. In Eastern Europe Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company S.A. is the anchor bottler. It is in fact the second largest bottler of Coca-Cola products in the world, bottling in 28 different countries. These include Greece, the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, Austria, Switzerland Italy, Russia, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungry, Ukraine, Bosnia, Serbia and many more.

Australia

Coca-Cola Amatil is the anchor bottler based in Australia, they bottle for Australia, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, Fiji, and Indonesia and have bottling factories in many cities throughout these territories. The one thing that sets this company apart from Coca-Cola Refreshments, Coca-Cola Enterprises and Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company S.A. is that they bottle other things like sports drinks, Vitamin Water, juices and even some alcoholic drinks.

What is it Made of

The components of the Classic Coca-Cola Bottle

The primary component of the Classic Coca-Cola Bottle is a special chemical-stabilized glass which is called Pyrex. Pyrex is a kitchenware glass introduced by Corning Incorporated in 1915. This glass is well known for its chemical stability and low-thermal-expansion. Chemical stability guaranteed its non-toxic to food and beverage. Low-thermal-expansion allows high-temperature pasteurization, which makes the re-use of the bottle meet the sanitation requirement of food industry. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, standard laboratory Pyrex is made of borosilicate glass. However, the food industry usually use tempered soda-lime stone instead of borosilicate to reduce the cost of the beverage bottle. Soda-lime version of Pyrex also have an advantage of higher mechanical strength than borosilicate glass. The original version of borosilicate bottle is composed of (as the percentage of weight): 14% boron, 51% oxygen, .3% sodium, 1% aluminium, 38% silicon, and less than 1% potassium. The current bottle supplied by Coca-cola's contractors all around the world varies from place to place. Different bottle manufactures have different solution to meet their interests and local requirements.

Production process

In most factories, the classic Coca-Cola bottle is made by the following process.

Batch House

This is where the factory accept the raw materials. They usually delivered by trucks in large silos. The manufacturer requires several days to pre-process them including measurement, mixes and calibration of chemical components.

Furnace

The furnace melts the glass. The temperature of these furnaces will be as high as 1,575°C

Forming Process

The molten glass is blown through a valve, forcing it down to the mould of the bottles. This is usually done by an automatically forming machine. In this process we get the classical Coca-Cola Bottle's shape: the contour bottle.

Internal treatment

In this process, the chemical resistances of the internal side of these bottles are improved.

Annealing

Cool the glass bottle evenly in order to strengthen the glass.

The life-cycle of the Coca-Cola Bottle

Because the class bottles are 100% re-used, the return rate of glass bottle is higher than bottles made of other materials (aluminum, plastic, etc), which is as high as 95% in some countries. Thus it is a sustainable solution for the beverages, while some critiques claimed the re-use facility consume a lot of water and energy to clean and sanitize these bottles.