Antique NOS Late 1930s Ritz Orange Pineapple Soda Cork Bottle Cap 🍍 St. Louis MO

Orange and Pineapple Together? 🍍 Antique NOS Late 1930s Ritz Soda Cork Bottle Cap, St. Louis MO

Size: 1 1/4"

🍍 NOS Late 1930s Ritz Orange Pineapple Soda Bottle Cap

This is an original NOS (New Old Stock) cork-lined bottle cap from Ritz Beverage Co., a regional soda producer operating at 1822 South 12th Street, St. Louis, Missouri. Ritz was active during the 1930s and early 1940s, producing a variety of fruit-forward sodas, including blended flavors such as Orange Pineapple.

The cap features the distinctive Ritz top hat logo, a branding element associated with the company’s late-1930s production period. The ingredient panel—listing carbonated water, sugar, citric acid, artificial flavor & color, and ¼ of 1% benzoate of soda—reflects pre-World War II soda formulation standards, supporting a 1930s era dating.

The presence of an original cork liner further confirms early production, as cork remained standard prior to the widespread adoption of composition liners in the 1940s.

✨ Condition

📌 Collector Reference

• Brand: Ritz Beverage Co.
• Location: St. Louis, Missouri
• Era: Late 1930s
• Liner: Cork
• Flavor: Orange Pineapple

A character-rich survivor from the regional soda era, representing early St. Louis bottling history and pre-war flavor experimentation.

🏭 WHS — the Mark of W. H. Hutchinson & Sons, Chicago

Alongside the bottler's own line there is a small WHS on the skirt. That is not the bottler — it is the company that made the cap itself: W. H. Hutchinson & Sons of Chicago.

William H. Hutchinson was a Chicago soda bottler and a maker of bottling plant. In 1879 his son Charles G. Hutchinson patented the Hutchinson's Patent Spring Stopper — a wire loop and rubber disc that sealed a soda bottle from the inside, and that you opened by thumping it down with your thumb. It swept the trade and made every rival closure obsolete. By 1882 the family had sold the bottling side to the Hayes brothers so the firm could concentrate on manufacturing.

Then William Painter's crown cap arrived and did to the Hutchinson stopper exactly what the stopper had done to everything before it: cheaper, more sanitary, quicker to apply. Rather than go down with their own patent, W. H. Hutchinson & Sons went into making crown caps, shipping them out of Chicago by the gross in wooden barrels stencilled W H HUTCHINSON & SONS CHICAGO and marked to be kept dry — because of the cork. The mark on this cap belongs to the people whose own invention the crown cap destroyed.