Vintage 1970s Coach and Four Black Raspberry Soda Label 🐎 from Philadelphia, PA

Remember Black Raspberry Soda? 🐎 Vintage 1970s Coach and Four Soda Label, Philadelphia, PA

Size: 3 1/2" x 2 1/2" ~ little to no wear

Black raspberry is one of those flavors you just don't see on a soda label much anymore, which is part of why I like this one so much. Add that little stagecoach and the colors, and it's a great Philadelphia label with a real story behind it.

🐎 What's on it

COACH AND FOUR over a black silhouette of a coachman and four horses, then Black Raspberry SODA, and the fine print, word for word: "Artificially colored, preserved with sodium benzoate, caramel color added." Along the foot: "Bottled under authority of Coach and Four Products Co., Phila., Pa. 19140." The back is plain paper.

👬 The people behind the stagecoach

The name went on soft drinks for the first time on June 26, 1956, spelled COACH'N FOUR back then. Sheffield Bottling Co., a Philadelphia partnership doing business as "Coach 'N Four Products Co.," registered it with the U.S. Patent Office on January 29, 1957, trademark No. 640,759, for "maltless soft drinks and carbonated waters." Harry Labovitz signed for it as a partner.

On July 11, 1969 Sheffield passed the name and its goodwill to Coach and Four Products Company, a partnership of Harry Labovitz and Arthur Labovitz on North 6th Street in North Philadelphia, ZIP 19140, the same ZIP printed on this label. In January 1971 the registration was amended to the new owner and to the COACH AND FOUR form you see printed here. The trademark was renewed in 1977 and lapsed in 1997. Along the way the line ran to ginger ale, ginger beer, tonic water, bitter lemon, club soda, sarsaparilla and this black raspberry.

🏠 The family bottling works behind the stagecoach

Coach and Four was a brand of Sheffield Bottling Co., a family soda works at 3727-3729 North 6th Street, listed there in a bottlers' trade journal as early as 1945. Sheffield told the Patent Office it had used its mark on soft drinks since October 6, 1931. In 1949 Mr. Labovitz of Sheffield was president of the Philadelphia Manufacturers of Carbonated Beverages and sat on the board of the Pennsylvania Bottlers Association, and in 1950 Sheffield was packing Logan Beverages for the Penn Mutual Grocery Co. A 1974 Philadelphia industrial directory still lists the Sheffield Beverage company at 3729 N. 6th St., ZIP 19140, making soft drinks with 20 employees, Harry and Arthur Labovitz partners.

A grandson of the family got in touch with me about this brand, and the way the family tells it, Coach and Four was meant to be the more polished line next to the everyday Sheffield label. Sheffield bottled a Wishniak cherry of its own, and getting into Philadelphia's tight-knit Polish neighborhoods mattered back then (wiśniak is the Polish name for a cherry cordial). Frank's, the much bigger company, had a Wishniak too, and he says the Polish customers liked Sheffield's best of its three cherry sodas, Wishniak, Cherry and Maraschino, even though all three were the same recipe. A big part of the business was filling seltzer bottles for Philadelphia's hotels and bars and for the dining cars of the Pennsylvania Railroad, headquartered right here in Philadelphia, and when Sheffield bought out smaller bottlers it kept their labels, Girard and Rising Sun among them, running on the old routes so the customers got what they were used to.

⚖️ The milk company that wanted the name

In November 1961 Sheffield applied to register its own label: SHEFFIELD on a red-and-gold pennant with a chess knight and the word "Tingly." National Dairy Products Corporation, the company behind New York's Sheffield Farms milk, opposed it, and its own Sheffield Farms carbonated drinks, ginger ale and club soda among them, came up in the case. The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board dismissed the opposition on June 7, 1967. National Dairy appealed to the U.S. Court of Customs and Patent Appeals, and that appeal was dismissed on May 9, 1969. Two months later the Coach and Four name went to its own company. The family remembers the legal bills of fighting for the Sheffield name, with more still coming, as the reason everything moved over to Coach and Four. And that chess knight? The grandson says his dad loved carved chess pieces.

"Bottled under authority of" means the company owned the brand and the flavors while the bottles were filled under its label. The bottling was the family's own: Sheffield's works on the same block of North 6th Street.

📅 How old is it?

The company name dates it. Five-digit ZIPs began on July 1, 1963, so the ZIP alone says 1963 or later, but "Coach and Four Products Co." is the Labovitz partnership that took over the name in July 1969, and the COACH AND FOUR form printed here only went onto the registration in January 1971. The family firm is still in the Philadelphia industrial directories in 1971 and 1974, and the mark was renewed in 1977. That makes this a 1970s label.

🫐 Black raspberries

The black raspberry is an all-American berry. It grows wild across eastern North America, from New Brunswick out to Nebraska, and it goes by other names too: black caps, scotch caps, even bear's eye blackberry. It's the fruit in France's Chambord liqueur (Korea's bokbunja wine comes from a black raspberry of Korea's own), and it's packed with the deep purple anthocyanins that make it a natural food dye. Today the center of black raspberry growing is Oregon's Willamette Valley, where the berries are tipped by hand in summer and machine-picked, which keeps yields low and prices high.

So a black raspberry soda that owns up to being "artificially colored" on the label is a little bit funny to me. The real berry is about the best natural coloring there is!

🥤 Philadelphia's dark fruit sodas

Philadelphia has its own soda legends, and one of the best known is a dark fruit soda: Frank's Black Cherry Wishniak, from the company Jacob Frank started in 1885 selling lemon soda on the city's streets. Coach and Four's black raspberry comes out of that same Philadelphia tradition of small local bottlers making their own flavors.

🎨 A coach and four

A coach and four is a carriage pulled by four horses, all driven four-in-hand by one driver. Philadelphia's own famous one hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Thomas Eakins's The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand (1879 to 1880), with the horses posed from Eadweard Muybridge's 1878 photographs of horses in motion.

🏡 Display

Frame it in a kitchen, a bar or a game room, or collect all the Coach and Four flavors and hang them as a set. Black raspberry is the odd one out in that lineup, which is exactly why I like it.