Retro NOS 2000s Sunkist Orange 🍊 Soda Bottle Cap

Remember Sunkist Orange Soda? 🍊 Retro NOS 2000s Bottle Cap

Size: 1 1/4"

🍊 Retro NOS 2000s Sunkist Orange Soda Bottle Cap

A beautiful cap! New Old Stock, never on a bottle, in bright orange with Sunkist® in that big swirly white script, curls and flourishes all the way around. TWIST OFF with a little arrow is printed twice around the edge, and inside the liner there's a 23 pressed in. Like every uncrimped crown it measures 1 1/4" across. That swirly white script with the giant swash S curling underneath is the Sunkist logo of the 2000s, from before the sun went back on the can, so that's when this cap was printed.

☀️ Sunkist soda, 1979

Orange was already the third best-selling soft drink flavor, mostly thanks to Fanta, when Mark Stevens set out to build an orange soda to take it on. His team spent 1977 and early 1978 working out the taste, the color and the fizz, and in 1979 Sunkist Growers licensed its name to the General Cinema Corporation for the new drink. It launched big in New York through the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of New York City, and it ended up franchised to Coke and Pepsi bottlers alike. And the company behind it, Sunkist Soft Drinks, started out tiny, with just five key people: Mark Stevens as president, Peter Murphy on sales, Ray Sissom on finance, Jim DeDreu running the Northeast region, and Dr. John Leffingwell heading research and development. Leffingwell was a flavor chemist, and by 1985 he was running his own firm, Leffingwell & Associates, doing research work for the flavor and fragrance trade. The ads sold "fun, sun and the beach" set to Beach Boys music, and it worked: by 1980 Sunkist was the number one orange soda in the country and the tenth best-selling soft drink of any kind. It went to Del Monte in 1984, Cadbury Schweppes made it from 1986 to 2008, and today it belongs to Keurig Dr Pepper. Here's how it got there: in the 2000s Cadbury ran its drinks business in the Americas as Cadbury Schweppes Americas Beverages, in May 2008 it spun that whole business off as a company of its own, the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, Sunkist soda and all, and in 2018 Dr Pepper Snapple joined up with Keurig Green Mountain and took the name Keurig Dr Pepper. One thing people forget: the original Sunkist orange has caffeine in it, and back in 2010 a batch got mixed with six times the normal amount by mistake and had to be recalled.

🍊 The name on the cap

The name is a lot older than the soda. In 1893 P.J. Dreher, his son Edward, and a group of citrus growers in Claremont, California formed the Southern California Fruit Exchange to sell their oranges together. When the ad agency Lord & Thomas took on the account, they started from "sun-kissed" and boiled it down to Sunkist. The growers wrapped every orange in paper stamped with the name so nobody could pass off other fruit as theirs, and in 1909 you could mail in twelve Sunkist wrappers for a free Sunkist spoon. The cooperative took the name Sunkist Growers in 1952, and today the Sunkist name is licensed on more than 600 products.

⛰️ Where these caps came from

These caps are old stock from Dr. Pepper Bottling Co. of West Jefferson, North Carolina, up in the Blue Ridge in Ashe County. H.R. Vannoy started the company in 1937, and in the 1940s it ran out of the two-story brick building at 108–110 N. Third Avenue downtown, which still wears a faded Dr. Pepper-Grapette Bottling Co. sign. The Vannoy family still owns the company, and it's still bottling today at a newer plant out on NC 163, and Sunkist is still one of the brands they carry.

📌 A bright little piece of Sunkist soda history, great for a collection, a shadow box or a bottle-cap craft.