Vintage 1960s Coach and Four Black Raspberry Soda Label 🐎 from Philadelphia, PA

Remember Black Raspberry Soda? 🐎 Vintage 1960s Coach and Four Soda Label, Philadelphia, PA

Size: 3 1/2" x 2 1/2"

Black raspberry is one of those flavors you just don't see on a soda label much anymore, which is part of why I like this one so much. Add that little stagecoach and the colors, and it's a great Philadelphia label with a real story behind it.

🐎 What's on it

COACH AND FOUR over a black silhouette of a coachman and four horses, then Black Raspberry SODA, and the fine print, word for word: "Artificially colored, preserved with sodium benzoate, caramel color added." Along the foot: "Bottled under authority of Coach and Four Products Co., Phila., Pa. 19140." The back is plain paper.

👬 The people behind the stagecoach

The name COACH AND FOUR went on soft drinks for the first time on June 26, 1956. Sheffield Bottling Co., a Philadelphia partnership doing business as "Coach 'N Four Products Co.," registered it with the U.S. Patent Office on January 29, 1957, trademark No. 640,759, for "maltless soft drinks and carbonated waters." Harry Labovitz signed for it as a partner.

On July 11, 1969 Sheffield passed the name and its goodwill to Coach and Four Products Company, a partnership of Harry Labovitz and Arthur Labovitz on North 6th Street in North Philadelphia, ZIP 19140, the same ZIP printed on this label. The trademark was renewed in 1977 and lapsed in 1997. Along the way the line ran to ginger ale, ginger beer, tonic water, bitter lemon, club soda, sarsaparilla and this black raspberry.

"Bottled under authority of" means the company owned the brand and the flavors while the bottles were filled under its label.

📅 How old is it?

The ZIP code dates it. Five-digit ZIPs began on July 1, 1963, so this label can't be older than that, and the company name on it matches the Labovitz partnership of 1969. Late 1960s into the 1970s.

🫐 Black raspberries

The black raspberry is an all-American berry. It grows wild across eastern North America, from New Brunswick out to Nebraska, and it goes by other names too: black caps, scotch caps, even bear's eye blackberry. It's the fruit in France's Chambord liqueur and Korea's bokbunja wine, and it's packed with the deep purple anthocyanins that make it a natural food dye. Today the center of black raspberry growing is Oregon's Willamette Valley, where the berries are tipped by hand in summer and machine-picked, which keeps yields low and prices high.

So a black raspberry soda that owns up to being "artificially colored" on the label is a little bit funny to me. The real berry is about the best natural coloring there is!

🥤 Philadelphia's dark fruit sodas

Philadelphia has its own soda legends, and one of the best known is a dark fruit soda: Frank's Black Cherry Wishniak, from the company Jacob Frank started in 1885 selling lemon soda on the city's streets. Coach and Four's black raspberry comes out of that same Philadelphia tradition of small local bottlers making their own flavors.

🎨 A coach and four

A coach and four is a carriage pulled by four horses, all driven four-in-hand by one driver. Philadelphia's own famous one hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Thomas Eakins's The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand (1879 to 1880), with the horses posed from Eadweard Muybridge's 1878 photographs of horses in motion.

🏡 Display

Frame it in a kitchen, a bar or a game room, or collect all the Coach and Four flavors and hang them as a set. Black raspberry is the odd one out in that lineup, which is exactly why I like it.