Retro 2000s 7-Up Bottle Cap 🧢 Red Dot Logo, West Jefferson NC NOS Crown Cap

Remember the 7-Up Red Dot? 🧢 Retro 2000s NOS Bottle Cap, West Jefferson NC

Size: 1 1/4"

🧢 A cold 7Up and the little pop of the cap coming off: that green and that red ball are about as familiar as a soda gets. This one never made it onto a bottle, and it comes with a St. Louis story that starts in a log storeroom in rural Missouri.

🔍 What's on it

A New Old Stock crown cap, never crimped, in bright green with the white outlined italic 7UP, a shaded red ball sitting between the 7 and the UP like a little cherry, and the ®. Inside, a gold-toned liner with a 24 pressed into it. Like every uncrimped crown it measures 1 1/4" across.

📅 How old is it?

The artwork dates it. That white italic 7UP with the shaded red ball is the logo 7 Up used from 2000 to 2010, so this cap is a 2000s printing. 7 Up has changed its look plenty over the years: the first caps stacked up the three L's of that old "Lithiated Lemon Lime" name, a little winged 7 came along in 1929, an Art Deco 7 full of bubbles with a leaping silhouette of a man beside it in the 1930s, and by 1968 it was just the white wordmark on red. The red dot came into the logo around 1980, and in 1987 it even came to life as "Spot," a cartoon mascot, but this shaded-ball italic version belongs to the 2000s.

⛰️ Where these caps came from

These caps are old stock from the Dr Pepper Bottling Company of West Jefferson, North Carolina, up in the Blue Ridge in Ashe County, and 7 Up is one of the many brands that bottler has carried. H.R. Vannoy started the company in 1937, Carl Colvard and Vannoy ran it through the 1940s, and the Vannoy family still owns it. The old plant is the two-story brick building downtown at 108–110 North Third Avenue that still wears a faded "Dr. Pepper-Grapette Bottling Co." sign, part of the West Jefferson Historic District on the National Register. They moved to a newer plant on NC Highway 163, where they still fill glass longnecks with real cane sugar for Ashe, Avery, Watauga, Wilkes and Alleghany counties and Grayson County, Virginia. Small plants like that always ran several brands under one roof, one crew and one truck route for the whole county. West Jefferson itself is a little Appalachian mountain town, known these days for the murals painted across its downtown walls, which started going up in 1996.

🥤 From "Howdy" to 7 Up

7 Up's inventor was Charles Leiper Grigg, born May 11, 1868, in Prices Branch, Montgomery County, Missouri, in a rebuilt log storeroom. He made his way to St. Louis, drawn partly by the excitement of the 1904 World's Fair, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, and worked in advertising, for outfits like Ely-Walker Dry Goods and Rice-Stix Dry Goods, and he'd already had a hand in soda before 7 Up: he created an orange drink called Whistle for Vess Jones, and then an orange soda called Howdy with the flavor house Warner-Jenkinson.

In 1920 Grigg, the coal merchant Edmund Ridgway and the lawyer Frank Y. Gladney bought their own bottling plant and started the Howdy Company, named for the orange drink. One of their ads, "Here Comes the Howdy Man," showed a fellow walking up to a family with a case of Howdy orange, and I love that the State Historical Society of Missouri still has promotional pictures from that series in its Charles Trefts photograph collection, with Trefts's own kids posing in them. Grigg went back to Warner-Jenkinson to work out a lemon-lime drink, settled the formula in 1928, and put it on the market right around the stock market crash of 1929. It sold straight through the Depression. In 1936 the government made the company drop a number of health claims, and in 1937 the name was cut down to plain 7 Up.

Grigg died in St. Louis on April 16, 1940, and his son, Hamblett Grigg, took over. Ben Wells, a son-in-law of Frank Gladney, joined as an advertising man in 1936 and became company president in 1965, while Edmund Ridgway's son Howard served as executive vice president, and by the time Hamblett retired that year Seven-Up had nearly 700 bottling plants in 60 countries, from one St. Louis plant bought in 1920. Then came the famous "Uncola" ads that started in the late 1960s, selling 7 Up as the alternative to cola. Philip Morris bought the company in 1978 for $520 million, in 1986 the business was split, with PepsiCo taking the international side, and the American side merged into Dr Pepper/Seven Up in 1988, then Cadbury Schweppes in 1995. In 2008 Cadbury spun its American drinks business off as the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, and in 2018 that company merged with Keurig Green Mountain to become Keurig Dr Pepper. Today 7UP belongs to Keurig Dr Pepper in the States and PepsiCo everywhere else, which is part of why a Dr Pepper bottler was filling it.

🧪 The lithium legend

Here's the story everybody tells about 7 Up: the early drink was sold as a "lithiated" lemon soda, and soda lore says real lithium citrate, the same compound doctors use as a mood stabilizer, stayed in the bottle until the government banned it from drinks in 1948, and by 1950 it was gone for good. Grigg pitched his drink as a pick-me-up for Depression-weary Americans, and it worked. You'll also hear that 7 Up's first name was "Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda." That one's shakier: Grigg's own 1928 trademark was for "Seven Up," and "Bib-Label" seems to have been a way of labeling the bottles, not the drink's name. Great stories either way, and they've been told at soda shows for decades.

📌 A great little piece of 7 Up and North Carolina soda history for a cap collection, a shadow box or a bottle-cap craft.