The Coca-Cola contour bottle is a treasured and iconic shape. Created in 1915, it was designed in 1915 by Earl R Dean of the Root Glass Company. Dean and his team decided to base the bottle design on the drink’s two main ingredients, the coca leaf or the kola nut. Dean couldn’t find any photographs of either, but became inspired by the cocoa pod, and transformed the shape of the pod into a bottle. This shaped bottle, together with the Coca-Cola logo itself makes the drink the single most recognizable brand in the world.

Dean sketched out the design of the bottle, and it was approved for moulding in only 24 hours. A prototype was made, and the bottle received a patent in November 1915. However, the prototype of the first contour bottle never actually made it into production because its diameter was larger than its base, making it unstable on conveyor belts. Dean solved the problem by reducing the diameter slightly.

The patent for the contour bottle was renewed on December 25th, 1923, thus creating the “Christmas” bottle. This particular bottle has become hugely popular amongst collectors because most of these bottles bear the name of the city where they were first filled on the base plate.  In 1957 The Coca-Cola Company decided to eliminate the traditional embossing of its trademark on the bottle, and replaced it with Coca-Cola in white Applied Color Labeling (ACL). In 1960 the bottle was registered as a trademark, becoming only the second package in history to be trademarked in this way, the first being a “Pic-Pac plaster”.

Since then, the contour bottle has seen many incarnations. In 1994, the plastic contour bottle was introduced, in 2007 aluminum contour bottles were introduced and in 2008, Coca-Cola introduced a contour aluminum can to select markets, designed by Turner Duckworth as well as a 2 L plastic bottle.