Retro 2000s Sun Drop Bottle Cap 🍋 NOS West Jefferson NC Twist-Off Crown Soda Advertising, Dale Earnhardt NASCAR Era

Was Sun Drop a Southern Secret? 🍋 Retro 2000s NOS Bottle Cap, West Jefferson NC

Size: 1 1/4"

🍋 Sun Drop was a Southern secret for most of its life, the citrus soda you asked for by name at a Carolina filling station and got a funny look for anywhere else. This green crown is from its last years as a regional soda, and the skirt tells you exactly who bottled it and when.

🔍 What's on it

A New Old Stock twist-off crown, never on a bottle, in bright metallic green. On the face, a big white oval with Sun Drop® in green script and the little white drop-and-swoosh curling off the bottom, and TWIST OFF → around the edge. Around the skirt: "…WEST JEFFERSON, NC 28694 UNDER THE AUTHORITY OF DR PEPPER/SEVEN UP, INC, 5301 LEGACY DRIVE, PLANO TX…" Inside, a plain liner with a small 4 pressed in.

📅 How old is it?

The cap dates itself. Dr Pepper and Seven-Up only became one company, Dr Pepper/Seven Up, Inc., on May 19, 1988. Cadbury Schweppes bought the whole of it in March 1995 and moved the head office to 5301 Legacy Drive in Plano, with the old Dallas headquarters torn down in 1997. And the green oval logo on the face is the one Sun Drop wore before its 2011 national relaunch, when MTV Scratch redrew the whole package. So this is a 2000s cap, from Sun Drop's last years as a Southern regional soda.

☀️ A salesman's scribble

Sun Drop's story starts with Charles Lazier, a Missouri salesman of beverage concentrates, who scribbled a recipe for a new soft drink on a little piece of paper and handed it to his son, Charles Jr., a lab technician. The son worked on it for two years, and in 1951 Sun Drop Cola made its debut at the American Bottlers of Carbonated Beverages conference in Washington, D.C. Some tell it older and wilder, that Lazier was working on his citrus drink back in the late 1920s and sold it off carnival midways as a cure-all tonic, which is a great picture whether or not it's the whole truth. Across the South it went out as "Sundrop Golden Cola" and "Golden Girl Cola," and it has always packed a real caffeine kick: 64 milligrams in a 12-ounce can.

🏭 Gastonia, and the franchise bottlers

Sun Drop may have been born in Missouri, but its home was Gastonia, North Carolina, down in the Piedmont, the headquarters for bottling it for more than fifty years, until 2016. Gastonia folks will tell you Charles "C.P." Nanney was the town's very first franchised Sun Drop bottler, a piece of family and local history more than a matter of record, and they'll also tell you it's a "soft drink" there, never a soda or a pop. The brand changed hands a few times: Crush International took it over in 1970, Procter & Gamble in 1980, Cadbury Schweppes in 1989, then the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, and today it's Keurig Dr Pepper's. It wasn't until 2011 that Sun Drop went coast to coast, with a new look and an MTV promotion.

🏁 The Earnhardt connection

Ask a Carolina race fan about Sun Drop and you'll hear about Dale Earnhardt, who promoted the drink from the 1970s into the early 1990s. The green-and-yellow Sun Drop race car is still a point of real nostalgia, and the family tie kept going: Sun Drop was on Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s late model in 1993 and 1994, and he signed a new multi-year partnership with the brand in 2023. Junior was 18 in 1993 and ran the green No. 3 Sun Drop Chevy in about a dozen races that year, North Wilkesboro among them, and in the mid-'90s it was a familiar sight going around Myrtle Beach Speedway, so that car really did run both Carolinas. My favorite bit of track lore comes from Myrtle Beach: the story goes that Junior and Edward Jordan, a fellow racer whose car was sponsored by Kentucky Fried Chicken, used to trade Sun Drop for chicken. A cap from the years in between is right in the middle of that story.

⛰️ The town on the skirt

The bottler here is the Dr Pepper Bottling Company of West Jefferson, up in the Blue Ridge in Ashe County, about three hours from Gastonia. H.R. Vannoy started it 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, Dr Pepper, RC and Sun Drop among them, for Ashe, Avery, Watauga, Wilkes and Alleghany counties and Grayson County, Virginia. One small mountain plant, a whole cooler's worth of brands, and that's how a West Jefferson ZIP and a Plano, Texas address ended up on the same little cap.

📌 A great little piece of Sun Drop and North Carolina soda history for a cap collection, a shadow box next to some NASCAR memorabilia, or a bottle-cap craft.