Vintage Combo Coach and Four Soda Labels 🐎 from 1960s-70s

Want All Seven Coach and Four Soda Flavors? 🐎 The Coach and Four Line, All Seven Flavors

Size: 3 1/2" x 2 1/2" ~ Unused.

This is a set of seven Coach and Four bottle labels - Sarsaparilla, Bitter Lemon, Black Raspberry Soda, Ginger Beer, Ginger Ale, Tonic Water and Club Soda - every one of them wearing the same stagecoach-and-four-horses mark in its own color band. A "coach and four" is literally a carriage pulled by four horses, and that's exactly the little scene printed across each label: team out front, coach behind, reins in hand. Whoever built this brand knew what they were doing - it's a mark you'd spot across a whole shelf of flavors without reading a word.

📮 A Zip Code Did the Dating For Me

Every label reads "Bottled under authority of Coach and Four Products Co., Phila., Pa." with a five-digit zip code printed right under the address - most say 19140, the Ginger Ale says 19117. Five-digit zip codes are younger than you'd think: the Post Office Department didn't introduce them until July 1, 1963, and rolled them out with a cartoon mascot named Mr. ZIP and something like 72 million postcards mailed that day to explain the new system. So any label carrying one of these codes was printed in 1963 or later. I like when the object hands you its own timestamp like that.

🍹 More Bar Cart Than Soda Fountain

Look at the flavor list and this set skews grown-up. Tonic Water says "Contains Quinine" right on the label. Bitter Lemon is "made with whole lemons and quinine salt." Ginger Beer lists "Jamaica ginger, citric acid and citrus oils." Between those, Club Soda and Ginger Ale, that's most of a 1960s home bar in one lineup - with Sarsaparilla and Black Raspberry Soda thrown in for whoever at the party wasn't drinking cocktails.

🏭 Bottled Under Authority Of

"Bottled under authority of" is franchise wording, printed right on every label - it means Coach and Four licensed local bottlers to fill and label soda under its name rather than running every plant itself. And the company does have a paper trail, in the U.S. Patent Office. The name COACH AND FOUR first went on soft drinks on June 26, 1956, and it was registered on January 29, 1957 (trademark No. 640,759, for "maltless soft drinks and carbonated waters") by Sheffield Bottling Co., a Philadelphia partnership doing business as "Coach 'N Four Products Co.," with Harry Labovitz signing as a partner. On July 11, 1969 Sheffield handed the name and its goodwill to a new partnership, Coach and Four Products Company, which was Harry Labovitz and Arthur Labovitz on North 6th Street in North Philadelphia, ZIP 19140. That's the company name printed on every label in this set, so these belong to the Labovitz years, late 1960s into the 1970s. The trademark was renewed in 1977 and finally lapsed in 1997. The odd one out, the Ginger Ale's 19117, is Elkins Park, just over the city line in Cheltenham Township, so the company printed from two addresses over its life.

🫚 A Little History in Every Flavor

Tonic water began as medicine: British officers in 19th-century India took bitter quinine against malaria and mixed it with soda and sugar to get it down, the first commercial tonic was patented in London in 1858, and the gin and tonic turns up in print in 1868. Ginger beer is older still, first brewed in Yorkshire in the mid-1700s, and in 1928 a snail in a bottle of it in Paisley, Scotland led to Donoghue v Stevenson, the 1932 case that founded modern negligence law. Sarsaparilla was sold in the 1800s as a "blood purifier," and after the FDA banned sassafras oil in 1960 it had to be flavored another way, which is why Coach and Four's label says "artificial sarsaparilla flavoring."

🎨 The Name

Philadelphia's most famous coach and four is Thomas Eakins's painting The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand (1879 to 1880), in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with the horses posed from Eadweard Muybridge's 1878 photographs of horses in motion. A Philadelphia soda company picked a great Philadelphia image for its mark.