Vintage 1990s Dunkin' Donuts Coffee Coolatta Keychain 🧊 NOS Promotional Fob Card

Size: 2.25 x 1.5 inches ~ New old stock, never clipped to a keyring — just set aside and kept safe all these years. They vary a little one to the next.

🧊 Cool Down Quick

This is a clear acrylic keychain fob with a printed card sealed inside it, and it's doing double duty — flip it over and you get two different faces. One side is the pitch: a blue badge reading "COFFEE COOLATTA," the O in COFFEE drawn as a little coffee swirl, with "COOL DOWN QUICK!" scrawled underneath in the same blue script. Next to it is a cartoon guy stretched out on a striped lounge chair, eyes closed, grinning ear to ear, holding up a straw-topped Coolatta cup in one hand with the other flung up in the air like he doesn't have a care in the world, just melting into pure relief. The "DUNKIN' DONUTS" lettering runs right down his swim trunks, and there's a growing blue puddle spreading out underneath him — a nice little joke about exactly how fast that drink was supposed to cool you down. Flip it again and the other face is just the wordmark, "DUNKIN' DONUTS ®," orange over pink, no cup graphic, no extra artwork. A metal split ring is still threaded through the corner.

☕ Dating a Fob With No Date On It

There's no maker's mark, no copyright line, nothing printed on this that tells you a year — so I go by what does date it. "COFFEE COOLATTA" was registered as a trademark by Dunkin' Donuts Incorporated, first used in commerce on September 1, 1995, and registered in March 1997. The Dunkin' wordmark on the back is the plain version too, without the little steaming-cup graphic the company added to its logo starting in January 2002. Put those two things together and this fob was made somewhere in that stretch — the second half of the 1990s into the very early 2000s, while the Coffee Coolatta itself stayed on Dunkin' menus all the way to 2017.

🍩 A Quincy, Massachusetts Idea

Dunkin' Donuts started as one shop. Bill Rosenberg opened the Open Kettle in Quincy, Massachusetts on Memorial Day weekend in 1948, selling doughnuts and coffee — the two things he'd already figured out, running a food-delivery business to factory workers, that people wanted more than almost anything else. By 1950 he'd renamed it Dunkin' Donuts. His real innovation wasn't the recipe, it was the math: where a typical shop sold four or five kinds of doughnut, Rosenberg offered fifty-two, one for every week of the year, with seating where you could actually sit down and coffee made fast. His own stated goal was to "make and serve the freshest, most delicious coffee and donuts quickly and courteously in modern, well-merchandised stores" — and the story goes he got the idea for all that variety from Howard Johnson's twenty-eight ice cream flavors.

The first Dunkin' Donuts franchise agreement was signed in 1955, and growth took off from there — the hundredth store opened by 1963, the same year Rosenberg's son Bob took over as CEO at just twenty-five. Baskin-Robbins' parent company, Allied Lyons, bought the chain in 1990. In 2004 Dunkin' and Baskin-Robbins both became subsidiaries of Dunkin' Brands, headquartered in Canton, Massachusetts — the corporate home never wandered far from where Bill Rosenberg fried his first doughnut. By the early 2010s the company had grown past 10,000 locations in more than thirty countries.

🏙️ The Shop Is Still There

Quincy sits just south of Boston, a working harbor city that calls itself the City of Presidents because it's the birthplace of both John Adams and John Quincy Adams — so a hometown coffee stand growing into something enormous is right in character for the place. And this isn't just local pride talking: a remodeled version of Rosenberg's original shop still operates today at 543 Southern Artery in Quincy. The Carvalho family has owned it since 1979, and it marked its 75th anniversary in May 2025, mixing 1950s retro touches with the original script sign out front.

🧑‍🍳 Bill Rosenberg, and the Brother-in-Law Who Went His Own Way

Rosenberg was born in Boston in 1916 and went to work at fourteen, during the Great Depression, as a full-time Western Union telegram boy. After the war he built up Industrial Luncheon Services, running roughly two hundred catering trucks — exactly the kind of experience that teaches a person how to feed a lot of people fast. He opened the Open Kettle at thirty-two, with his brother-in-law Harry Winokur as a partner. The two split ways in 1955, and Winokur went on to found Mister Donut with his son-in-law, which grew to around 550 shops of its own — a real rival chain, started by family. It's a funny twist of history that in 1990, Dunkin's new parent company bought Mister Donut too and converted its stores over, so the two brothers-in-law's competing chains ended up under one roof after all. Bill Rosenberg died at home in Mashpee, Massachusetts, on September 20, 2002, at eighty-six.

🥤 The Coolatta, and Why This Fob Outlasted It

The Coffee Coolatta landed on Dunkin' menus in the mid-1990s, with the wider Coolatta lineup — fruit flavors included — following a couple of years later as Dunkin's answer to the frozen-drink wave Starbucks had started with the Frappuccino. Dunkin's own telling is that it was built to keep people cool "at the beach, the backyard barbecue, or the office" on a hot day, which tracks pretty well with a keychain built entirely around a guy melting into a puddle of relief. In 2017 Dunkin' dropped the Coffee Coolatta specifically, replacing it with Frozen Dunkin' Coffee — the fruit Coolattas stuck around and are still sold today. So this little fob is advertising a drink that, in its original coffee form, doesn't exist on the menu anymore. As for the cartoon guy himself — the story goes he never had a name of his own, just a good long run as the face of "Cool Down Quick!" for as long as the drink lasted.