Vintage Sun‑Rise Grape Soda Bottle Cap 🍇 Coca‑Cola Bottling, Marshall MN (1970s)

Who Bottled Sun-Rise Grape Soda? 🍇 A Sun Rising Over a Purple Horizon

Size: 1 1/4"

Look at the design before anything else, because whoever drew it was paying attention. The brand is SUN-RISE, so the cap gives you a sun — a half-disc with rays coming off it — climbing over a silver band that runs straight across the middle of the cap like a horizon. The name is the picture and the picture is the name. On a deep grape-purple ground, in silver, at about an inch across. For a throwaway piece of tin, somebody thought about that.

🔍 Everything Printed on It

• SUN-RISE curved across the top in silver capitals, with a registered ® beside it
• The rising-sun device below the name, rays fanning out over the horizon band
• GRAPE SODA in heavy silver capitals across the lower half
• Around the bottom rim, small: ARTIFICIALLY FLAVORED AND COLORED. PRESERVED WITH BENZOATE OF SODA.
• On the crimped skirt, the bottler's line — SUN-RISE INC., MARSHALL, MINN. — struck into the flutes and only partly legible on this example

That rim line is worth a second of your time. "Artificially flavored and colored" is printed right on the front, not buried. So is the preservative, by name. There was a stretch of the twentieth century when a soda told you exactly what it was in plain type on the cap, and this is one of them.

🏭 Where Sun-Rise Came From

Sun-Rise started a long way from Minnesota. The Tazewell Manufacturing Company was founded in 1910 by W. A. Scott in North Tazewell, Virginia — deep in the coalfields of southwest Virginia — and Sun-Rise was its line of fruit-flavored soft drinks, sold alongside a root beer. Strawberry, orange, black cherry, lemon sour, grape. The kind of regional brand that owned a few counties and never expected to own more.

🥤 The Coca-Cola Chapter — and Marshall, Minnesota

The brand later moved north and became Sun-Rise Incorporated of Marshall, Minnesota, and then it got the break most regional sodas never get. In 1956 the Coca-Cola Company took over the bottling and distribution of the Sun-Rise line, and a southwest-Virginia fruit soda went national on the back of the biggest bottling network in the country.

That is the single fact that makes this little cap interesting. Coca-Cola did not buy every flavor brand that came along — it carried Sun-Rise. For roughly two decades a Sun-Rise grape could turn up in a cooler a thousand miles from Tazewell County because a Coke bottler put it there.

It did not last. Sun-Rise ran into the 1970s and then disappeared, the way most of the second-tier flavor brands did as the soda business consolidated around a handful of names. The cap in front of you is from that last stretch — the brand still going, still under the Coca-Cola bottling umbrella, near the end of the line.

🎨 Why the Color Is Right

Grape soda caps had a job: tell you the flavor from across a room, upside down, in a dark cooler full of ice and water. Hence the purple, hence the silver, hence lettering heavy enough to read at a glance. The silver horizon band does double duty — it splits the cap so the brand sits on top and the flavor sits underneath, and it is the horizon the sun is rising over. Good, economical design in a format about the size of a quarter.

✅ Condition

New old stock. Never crimped onto a bottle, never opened, no rust and no bends. Unused caps like this survived because a bottling line shut down, or a flavor was dropped, and a box of caps went on a shelf instead of onto bottles. The ones that did their job were levered off and dropped on the ground.

🎁 Good For

• Soda and Coca-Cola bottling collectors
• Minnesota and southwest Virginia local history
• Bottle-cap collections, shadow boxes and magnet projects
• Anyone who likes a defunct brand with a real story behind it

❓ Questions People Ask

How old is it?

1970s. No date is printed on the cap; the dating comes from Sun-Rise's own timeline — national distribution under Coca-Cola from 1956, and the brand gone by the end of the seventies.

Was Sun-Rise a Coca-Cola brand?

Not originally. It began with the Tazewell Manufacturing Company in Virginia in 1910. Coca-Cola took over the bottling and distribution of the line in 1956, which is what put it on shelves nationally.

What does "benzoate of soda" mean?

Sodium benzoate — the preservative. It is printed on the cap face, which is how soda labeling was done at the time.

Has it been used?

No. New old stock, never put on a bottle.