Retro 2000s Royal Crown Cola Bottle Cap 🥤 RC Cola West Jefferson NC Dr Pepper Bottling Co.

🥤 Why would a Dr Pepper bottler put its name on a Royal Crown Cola cap? That little puzzle is printed right around the edge of this one, and the answer runs through a Georgia grocery store, a fight with Coca-Cola, Hollywood, a sugar war and a bottling plant up in the North Carolina mountains.

Size: 1 1/4"

🔍 What's on it

A New Old Stock twist-off crown, never on a bottle, in deep blue. At the top, RC's white five-pointed crown over Royal Crown Cola in white script and EST. 1905, and filling the face, the big red RC outlined in white, with its ®. Around the skirt, printed in white: "BOTTLED BY DR PEPPER BOTTLING CO. WEST JEFFERSON, NC 28694", "TWIST OFF →", and a little printed code that isn't the same on every cap. Inside, a plain silver-colored liner with a 19 pressed into it.

📅 How old is it?

The "EST. 1905" is RC's birth year, not the cap's. The date comes from the artwork: that crown over "Royal Crown Cola" with "Est. 1905" is the RC badge that came in around 2009, so this cap is a 2000s printing. (The ZIP code on the skirt only tells you it's after 1963, and the bottler is still in business, so the artwork is what settles it.)

👑 Royal Crown's story

It started with a grudge. Claud A. Hatcher's family ran a grocery in Columbus, Georgia, and they bought a lot of Coca-Cola syrup. Hatcher figured a big customer deserved a better price, the local Coca-Cola salesman, Columbus Roberts, wouldn't budge, and the two fell out. So Hatcher went down to the basement of the store and started making his own drinks. In 1905 he launched the Union Bottling Works with Royal Crown Ginger Ale, and that's the 1905 on this cap.

Then came a cherry drink called Chero-Cola in 1907, and Coca-Cola took him to court over the word "cola." In 1921 an appeals court sided with Coke, and under a 1923 settlement Hatcher agreed to stop selling anything called Chero-Cola by 1928. He had another hit by then, a fruit soda called Nehi, launched in 1924, and in 1928 the whole company became the Nehi Corporation. Hatcher died in 1933, and in 1934 the company's chemist, Rufus Kamm, reworked the old cola into Royal Crown Cola. By the 1950s the company itself had taken the Royal Crown name.

RC was always the scrappy one with the new ideas. In 1940 it was selling itself as "Best by Taste Test," more than thirty years before the Pepsi Challenge of the 1970s, and from 1942 to 1948 its magazine ads were full of movie stars: Lucille Ball, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Shirley Temple, Loretta Young and Bing Crosby all told America RC tasted best, usually with a plug for their latest picture. In 1954 Royal Crown was the first company to sell soft drinks in a tin can, and later the first in an aluminum can. Its Diet Rite was the best-selling diet soda in the country by 1969, about a quarter of RC's sales, when the government banned the sweetener it used, cyclamate. Here's the part that makes collectors grumble: in the 1960s the sugar industry's research arm had spent more than $600,000 studying cyclamate, hoping to stop the rise of diet soda. RC brought Diet Rite back with a new formula, and in April 1980 it launched RC 100, a cola with no caffeine and no sugar.

🥧 An RC and a Moon Pie

In the South, an RC Cola and a Moon Pie was the working man's lunch in the 1950s, a cold cola and a marshmallow pie for a couple of nickels, and people still talk about it that way today. The pairing even got its own song, "RC Cola and a Moon Pie." And collectors will tell you RC's blue-collar loyalty traveled north too, that Chicago took to it in the ballparks and neighborhood pizzerias the same way mountain towns did. That's the kind of story that follows RC everywhere.

⛰️ West Jefferson, and the Dr Pepper puzzle

The bottler on the skirt is the Dr Pepper Bottling Company of West Jefferson, up in the Blue Ridge in Ashe County, North Carolina, high Christmas-tree country, famous for its Fraser firs. 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 out to a newer plant on NC Highway 163, and they still fill glass longnecks with real cane sugar for Ashe, Avery, Watauga, Wilkes and Alleghany counties and Grayson County, Virginia. Those counties are their franchise territory, and a territory gets drawn brand by brand: they send RC out across six counties, Dr Pepper across five and Mountain Dew across four. That's how the soda business was built. Coca-Cola's local bottlers were each handed their own exclusive patch of map for keeps, and plenty of them were little family outfits like this one. Pepsi, Royal Crown and Seven-Up did it the same way. In 1950 there were more than 6,600 soft drink bottling plants in this country. By 1998 there were about 500. I love that this mountain bottler is one of the ones still standing.

So why is a Dr Pepper bottler capping RC? Two reasons. A small-town bottler almost never ran just one brand: one plant, one crew and one truck route carried Dr Pepper, RC and a dozen others to the same stores. What a bottler couldn't do was double up on a flavor: the franchise contracts typically ruled out selling two drinks of the same flavor, so Coke, Pepsi and RC couldn't share a roof, and RC lived with the bottlers that carried neither of the other two. Dr Pepper kept landing right beside it: by 1995 more than four-fifths of the Dr Pepper sold by bottlers outside the Coke and Pepsi systems went through bottlers that also held RC, up from under half in 1990. And by the time this cap was printed, the two brands were family anyway. Triarc bought Royal Crown in 1993, Cadbury Schweppes bought it in 2000, and in 2008 Cadbury's American drinks, RC and Dr Pepper among them, were spun off together as the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, which became Keurig Dr Pepper in 2018.

📌 A great little piece of RC and North Carolina soda history for a cap collection, a shadow box next to an old RC bottle, or a Moon Pie lover's gift.