Ron the Yarn Spinner

 

     

                             Root Glass

 

Chapman J. Root moved to Terre Haute, Indiana in 1900 and opened the Root Glass Works a year later. The glass company not only supplied bottles to the United States, but also to Europe and Central and South America.  Root Glass proved to be  so great a success, Mr. Root, a savvy businessman, decided upon a form of backward vertical integration. For the non-business majors, a company exhibits backward vertical integration when it controls subsidiaries that produce some of the inputs used in the production of its products. In this case he opened a soda bottling plant. He already made the bottles.

He decided to begin bottling his favorite non-alcoholic beverage. You know it had to be Root Beer.

People are so intuitive. 

 

Sorry to take the fizz out of your pop, but it was Coca Cola.

 

Later Root again adopted the same integration technique  when he purchased 160 acres  of land in the Fern Cliffs area of Putnum County, Indiana where he built  a  processing plant at the foot of the sandstone cliffs.  He mined his own sand to produce the glass his factory needed to make the bottles for his bottling plant. A nearby railroad spur serviced the plant and carried the processed sand to Terre Haute to be melted and formed into bottles. Root Glass  quarried some 20,000 tons of sandstone a year from the site. At a time when Coca Cola was looking for ways to differentiate itself in the marketplace, the copper and minerals in the Fern Cliffs sand gave Root’s bottles the distinctive Coca Cola green color.

But that wasn’t enough, the cola giant wanted a distinctive bottle design as well. The company sponsored a contest soliciting bottle designs from its bottlers.  Root gathered a few employees and  went to work. Using AI and the Internet they found several designs promising.

 

Obviously not. They went “old school”  to the library and got out an 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica and other books and the Cocoa Pod was  ultimately chosen as a design model because of its distinctive ridges. The group finalized the company’s entry into  the design competition and won. The Root’s new bottle was patented on November 16, 1915, although it was a little too “fat”  for  the bottling machinery, so he  slimmed it down a bit to resemble the iconic bottle we know today.

Chapman Root's 1916 contract with Coca-Cola outlined that he was to receive 5 cents for every 144 bottles made. He died in 1945 as one of Indiana's richest men. In 1982, when the Root family sold its 57.5 percent stock interest in the Associated Coca-Cola Bottling Company its value was over 417 million dollars.

The Root family quietly used that money to support an array of arts, education, and youth programs over a span of 40+ years.