Food - News
You'll Never Guess The Inspiration Behind The Original Coca-Cola Bottle Shape
By LAUREN CAHN
In 1915, the Coca-Cola Company, wanting to have a bottle that can be used as the brand’s identifier, held a contest among a group of glassmakers to design a particularly “distinct” bottle. A year later, the company’s officials would select the Root Glass Company’s design, but do you know where the inspiration for the bottle’s shape comes from?
Root Glass Company's grooved design of the original Coca-Cola bottle took its inspiration from the vertical grooves that line a cocoa-bean pod. Root’s design team was under the misconception that Coca-Cola was made with cocoa beans, which pushed the designers to use cocoa-bean pods as their inspiration.
Coca-Cola has never had cocoa in it but gets its name from the coca leaf and the kola nut. In 1961, the Coke bottle got its trademark protection, and while Coke’s lawyers had led with the bottle’s “distinctively shaped contour,” the Patent Office was really impressed by the stats that even back in 1949, 99% Americans could identify a Coke bottle by its shape, alone.