Historic Charlotte

COCA-COLA
BOTTLING CO.
CONSOLIDATED
✧
Above: Charlotte Coca-Cola Bottling
Company, 1911.
Below: By the 1920s, bottled Coca-Cola
was delivered on trucks. This delivery
truck is outside the Charlotte Mint (now
The Mint Museum).
HISTORIC CHARLOTTE
152
The second-largest Coca-Cola bottler in the
United States and one of the world’s highest per
capita consumption bottlers, Coca-Cola Bottling
Co. Consolidated (CCBCC) has a consumer
base of more than sixteen million people.
In 1902 J. B. Harrison, great grandfather of
Frank Harrison III, present chairman of the
board and chief executive officer of CCBCC,
established operations in Greensboro. In
doing so, he became one of the first Coca-
Cola bottlers in the world. In the early 1900s,
Coca-Cola was purely a fountain drink sold at
soda counters in drug stores. That same year,
two other entrepreneurs also began marketing
bottled Coca-Cola in North Carolina. J.
Luther Snyder set up operations in Charlotte,
while J. P. Gibbons opened a bottling plant in
Hamlet. From that nucleus, CCBCC has
grown to encompass franchise territory across
the Southeast.
In Greensboro, J. B. Harrison found thirsty
residents clamoring for his product, and hired
C. S. Harper, Jr., to work in the plant. In 1903
he opened a plant in Raleigh. In 1906 Harper,
with twenty-five percent of the stock that was
then valued at $600, set up operations in
Winston-Salem. Having covered the Triad and
Triangle areas of the state, J. B. Harrison was
quickly spreading the gospel of Coca-Cola.
Meanwhile, Luther Snyder rented a small
facility in Charlotte and hired two helpers and a
salesman. Although bottles promised for his
operation failed to arrive on schedule, he began
advertising Coca-Cola in a horse and wagon he
rode. Having no bottled Coca-Cola actually
available didn’t stand in his way; he took orders
for the future. Banners on his wagon urged
people to “Drink Coca-Cola in Bottles” and
proclaimed the news that Coca-Cola was “Now
Served in Bottles at a Moment’s Notice.” Today,
Snyder Production Center in Charlotte, one of
the highest volume multipackage soft drink
plants in the world, bears the family name.
Gibbons operated from a back-room shop
in Hamlet, taking Coca-Cola to the streets in a
horse-drawn wagon. At night, he washed his
few bottles by hand and filled them for delivery
the next day. As in Charlotte, the saloon
business was strong competition, but Gibbons
occasionally landed a case of Coca-Cola in a
saloon for the saloonkeepers to drink. As the
product became increasingly popular and more
readily available, a few cases were shipped to
other communities.
As sales increased, more facilities were
needed. From 1905 to 1913, Charlotte Coca-