By the early 1990s, most of Coke’s drinks across the US were being sold in disposable cans and PET bottles. Returnable glass made up less than 1 percent of what it sold in the US. Yet the company still wanted to hang on to the wholesome image evoked by its contour glass bottle.
Coca-Cola’s advertising sought to evoke nostalgia, and for this the company used imagery of the old hobble-skirt glass bottle, often ice-cold with beads of condensation dripping down it. It had used the distinctive bottle since 1916. Also called the “Mae West” bottle after the American actress’s famously curvaceous figure, the shape was arguably the most recognized corporate symbol in the world. The company’s CEO, Doug Ivester, was convinced that Coke needed to keep the contour bottle high in the public’s imagination.
Hailing from New Holland—a small village in Georgia built for cotton mill workers—Ivester had started out life with modest ambitions. As a young teenager, he had worked the cash register and carried bags for customers at the Kroger store in Gainesville. He had longed to buy a swanky car like the 1964 Pontiac GTO driven by a regular customer. The man told Ivester that he was a certified public accountant. That car spurred the future Coke CEO to get an accounting degree.
“The bridge from growing up in that modest environment to having what I considered to be a good income-producing job was a CPA,” Ivester says. “I knew some people who had done it. They were successful and happy, they had good lives and didn’t need to be multimillionaires.” Ivester spent a decade at an accounting firm, Ernst and Ernst, where much of his time was taken up by Coke, his main client.
In 1979, he joined the drinks giant’s auditing department, putting in the same long hours he had at Ernst. His hard work paid off; six years later, at the age of 37, he became Coke’s chief financial officer. Then, in 1989, the company’s Cuba-born CEO Roberto Goizueta appointed Ivester as Coke’s head of Europe. His time abroad was short-lived. While Ivester was still apartment hunting during his first year in Europe, Coke’s US president, Ira Herbert, started having heart problems. One day, Goizueta phoned Ivester in his hotel room to say Herbert was soon to retire. “I need you back here to take Ike’s place,” Goizueta told him.
Soon after returning to Coke headquarters in Atlanta, Ivester made it his mission to renew Coke’s focus on the contour bottle, convinced it would help sales. While the company was doing brisk business overseas, growth at home was sluggish.
“I was concerned about the loss of brand imagery,” Ivester says. “I felt the contour bottle was a major conveyor of image and quality. It conveyed heritage and all the right things.”
He charged a 29-year-old marketing executive, Susan McWhorter, with figuring out whether Coke could make a contour plastic bottle.
“You can segregate people into two groups. There’s the problems group—that says let me tell you all the problems we’re facing—and the solutions group,” Ivester says. “Susan was a solutions person.”
McWhorter had gone to Ivester’s alma mater, the University of Georgia, and had long idealized her now employer. As a child, she’d spend all week looking forward to the icy bottle of Coke her grandmother gave her every Saturday at 11 am. At age 7, McWhorter’s payment for sweeping up hair at Wilma’s beauty parlour in her hometown of Ocilla was a 6.5-ounce returnable bottle of Coke.
McWhorter polled consumers, who indicated that they’d prefer contour bottles over straight-walled ones by a margin of five to one.
Younger consumers saw the bottle as modern and different, while older people who remembered the shape associated it with quality. Consumer interest confirmed, Ivester wanted not just a plastic replica of the glass bottle, but a much larger version. Over the years, Coke had steadily increased the sizes of its fountain drinks. A large soda now stood at 20 ounces, a full 4 ounces bigger than the previous iteration. “We were really training consumers at that time to drink more and more,” says McWhorter.
Coke didn’t have to charge consumers much more because the profit margin on fountain soda was so much higher than on bottles and cans. The huge fountain sodas paved the way for the company to slowly but surely reshape consumer expectations, creating a thirst among Americans for larger amounts of soda, across every packaging type.
“The consumers just ordered a large,” explains McWhorter. “They didn’t know whether it had 16 ounces or 20 ounces in it. For us, the thinking was, ‘We sell more, we make more, so let’s size up.’”
Ivester instructed McWhorter to find a way to make a 20-ounce plastic bottle that looked like the original 6.5-ounce glass one without compromising the design’s integrity.
But sizing up was looking expensive. For one thing, the bottle manufacturers needed to use extra plastic to give the curvy bottle added reinforcement. Curvy bottles also couldn’t be blown as quickly as straight ones. The bottles wobbled on filling lines. Bottlers trialling them pumped in just 10 percent of the liquid they usually filled in a day. Modifying the filling equipment could cost a bottler between $1 million and $2 million. Yet the payoffs were uncertain, and Coke’s recent track record was anything but reassuring.
Ivester had only recently pushed bottlers to get behind a clear, sugar-free soda intended to compete with a clear, colorless Pepsi. Coke called it Tab Clear and Ivester told reporters the product would be “marketed for what it is: a study in contradictions.” But the marketing confused people. They didn’t recall the ads. The key message—that Tab Clear had a “mysterious flavor”—didn’t resonate. Tab Clear’s many critics said it looked like lemonade but tasted like weak cola. By late 1993, about a year after Tab Clear’s launch, Goizueta was hinting that the product was dead.
“We were going into an environment where bottlers said, ‘Yeah, we’ve seen all this research from the company on how great things are going to be. We’ve done all this work, but it doesn’t pay off,’” says McWhorter.
To win over the bottlers, Ivester knew he needed to put his money where his mouth was. “Coke will loan you the money for the conversion of your lines,” he told them. “If you execute the marketing plan Susan and her team give you and don’t meet the target numbers, I’ll forgive those loans.”
Ivester was taking a gamble. Coca-Cola was ploughing tens of millions of dollars into modifying the bottlers’ lines, which meant the amount of soda it sold needed to jump significantly to cover the added costs.
In January 1993, Coke launched the plastic contour bottle in test markets in Alabama and Tennessee. Sales jumped 25 percent. “For more than 75 years, our contour bottle design has been the unparalleled symbol of quality,” Ivester said when announcing the launch. “The new 20-ounce package preserves that heritage while offering the convenience of a recyclable plastic package to today’s consumer.” The plastic contour bottle, the company told investors, will “invite consumers to drink more Coca-Cola, more often and in larger sizes.”
The Wall Street Journal dismissed the bottle as a “marketing gimmick,” in an article titled “New 20-Ounce, Plastic Version Is Trying to Be Nostalgic and Hip at the Same Time.” Unsurprisingly, Pepsi denigrated the bottle, telling the Journal: “The more nostalgic Coke gets, the more Pepsi looks progressive, from an image standpoint.”
But Coke saw the potential for its new drink packaging to be far more than just a container. “We call it unleashing a powerful marketing tool that touches consumers where our competitors cannot—in the palms of their hands,” the company’s chief marketing officer Sergio Zyman told a trade magazine.
Retailers loved the new bottle, handing over large chunks of shelf space to Coke. Profit margins on single bottles of Coke were significantly higher than on ones that came in packs. The contour bottle was aimed at growing this single-serve segment, targeted at people on the go.
Consumers loved it too. Coke’s sales volumes jumped as much as 90 percent in parts of the US where the bottle had been launched. The results were beyond anything the company had expected.
By September 1994, Coca-Cola told investors that it was on track to post its largest sales volume of any quarter in the past five years. Ivester rolled the bottle out nationally. Coca-Cola forecast that total sales of 20-ounce Coke in plastic bottles for that year would jump 50 percent from the year before when only straight-sided bottles were offered. “Contour is a brand in and of itself,” boasted Ivester.
Through the 1990s, the returnable glass bottle’s already tiny share of all carbonated soft drink sales in the US dwindled. By the decade’s end, it stood at 0.2 percent.
Excerpt adapted from Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic, by Saabira Chaudhuri. Published by arrangement with Blink Publishing an imprint of Bonnier Books UK. Copyright © 2025 Saabira Chaudhuri.
