Coca-Cola bottlecap coins are back, and they’ve brought some other flavours with them

It was CIT Coin Invest that first debuted the idea of a coin struck to replicate a bottlecap. Issued to celebrate the anniversary of the Bavarian Purity Law that makes German beer so good, it was a novel item, but a comparitively difficult coin to strike, so not one that made the leap to ‘trend’ status. It was a year later that SA-Partners launched their hugely popular Coca Cola bottlecap coin.

There’s pretty much nothing that you could put on a bottlecap that is more iconic than the famous red and white Coca Cola logo. It has a rich association with American culture in particular, but is known pretty much anywhere that human beings reside. After the success of the first issue, a follow-up was a no-brainer, but SAP have chosen to widen the net with an interesting new set.

Four coin-caps make up this new release and the set includes the original Coca-Cola cap, a Diet-Cola, a Sprite and a Fanta design. All are perfect replicas and carry the national coat of arms of Fiji on their indented obverse interiors. Clearly this is aimed at collectors of Americana and those that loved the debut solo release. The packaging is the icing on the cake.

The box is designed to look like a classic branded vending machine and seemingly manages to do it convincingly well. Themed certificates of authenticity are included and the whole package sits in a themed shipper box. Clearly, a lot of attention has been paid to making this set as attractive as possible to the legions of Coca Cola memorabilia fans and the sub $130 USD price certainly helps. Available to order now.

Coca-Cola

One of the most iconic brands in history, Coca-Cola, or Coke, is a simple carbonated soft drink invented in the late 19th century. Named after kola nuts and coca leaves, a couple of the original ingredients, Coca-Cola was bought from its inventor John Pemberton, by Asa Griggs Candler, who through some impressive marketing, turned it into a market dominating product.

In 2015, Coca-Cola was said to be the world’s third-most valuable brand, behind Apple and Google, and in 2013 their products were served up in over 200 countries worldwide to the tune of 1.8 billion servings per day. They now produce a wide range of variants of their base product and have a long-standing competitor in Pepsi-Cola, a competition that Coca-Cola have been winning for years.

One of the most iconic items in Coke history has been their ultra-famous glass bottle. Called the “contour bottle”, it was created by bottle designer Earl R. Dean and was patented in November 1915. Said to be inspired by a picture of the gourd-shaped cocoa pod in the Encyclopedia Britannica, it was revised in 1923 and has become the most famous bottle design of all time. It is topped with a metal cap that has inspired the new coin.

During the Second World War, a trade embargo was established against Nazi Germany—making the import of Coca-Cola syrup difficult. To circumvent this, Max Keith, the head of Coca-Cola Deutschland, decided to create a new product for the German market, using only ingredients available in Germany at the time, including beet sugar, whey, and apple pomace—the “leftovers of leftovers”, as Keith later recalled. The name was the result of a brainstorming session, which started with Keith’s exhorting his team to “use their imagination” (Fantasie in German), to which one of his salesmen, Joe Knipp, retorted “Fanta!” The orange Fanta of today was produced for the first time in Italy, in Naples, in 1955.

Sprite is a colourless, caffeine-free, lemon and lime-flavored soft drink created by The Coca-Cola Company. It was first developed in West Germany in 1959 as Fanta Klare Zitrone (“Clear Lemon Fanta”) and was introduced in the United States under the current brand name Sprite in 1961 as a competitor to 7 Up. (Source: Wikipedia)