I've received a number of questions from people who have found Coca-Cola bottles that don’t exactly look like Coke bottles! Generally, the bottles don't have the curvy contour shape of a Coke bottle, and they don't have Coca-Cola written in our famous script, but they do have Coca-Cola on them and they carry the name of a bottling company.

Coke_flavor_and_contour_bottlesI can see why people are curious about them -- or confused by what they've found! These are actually what we call "flavor bottles." One is shown here next to a contour bottle.

Though our Company has more than 450 brands around the world today, until 1960 in the U.S. we only had one drink: Coca-Cola. Many of our bottlers wanted to offer people other flavors, such as grape, orange or root beer. So Coca-Cola bottling companies sold flavored drinks in generic bottles. The bottles carried the Coca-Cola name (usually in block letters), because of the bottling company, even though Coke wasn't in the bottle and our Company didn't make the drink.

There are a lot of different styles of these flavor bottles, and this one is just an example. The bottles will often have symbols on them as well -- ranging from a star to a tree. And though many people think they've unearthed their child's college fund by finding one of these bottles, they're generally worth about $10!