Better Goulds Beverages

Better Goulds Beverages

Soft Drinks

Foodways

The story behind Goulds is exemplary of how muddy the historical side of historical archaeology can be. Two bottles, one called Gould Beverages (Quality Plus) and the other called Better Goulds Beverages, were found in the same box and they are the only two examples of Goulds in the collection. They look strikingly different. p407 was bottled by the Orange Crush Bottling Co. in Atlanta while p418 was bottled by the Goulds Better Beverage Co. in one of three cities in Mississippi. It could be assumed that the company was based in Mississippi and sold bottling rights to the Orange Crush Bottling Co. for distribution in Georgia, but upon looking at other examples of the bottles online there was an instance of Better Goulds being bottled by Crush in Atlanta as well. Notably, it also does not have the ingredients listed on the back as p418 does. p407 also looks stylistically older than p418 and the “better” implies it was improving an existing product.

p418 only has a small empty “keystone” mark on the base. The keystone shape was characteristic of the Knox Glass Co., and typically the specific plant would be identified by a letter within the keystone, but there is not one on this bottle. Knox Glass’s last plants were bought in 1968. p418 has the ingredients listed on the back, indicating it was likely produced after the 1966 Fair Packaging and Labelling Act. Therefore, this bottle can be dated from 1966-1968.

There were barely any internet resources on a beverage by the name of Gould other than Ebay listings for the bottles. This led me to check the Atlanta Journal-Constitution archives, where there was also no results for any variation of “Gould(s) beverages” or “Goulds Better Beverage Co.” The last option was to look into the Orange Crush Bottling Company, and though there were few internet sources on it as well, in the AJC archive I found that the president of the Orange Crush Bottling Co. was named Fred S. Gould and it went bankrupt in 1956.

This leads me to believe the Gould Beverage was named after said president. At some point before the bankruptcy, they decided to change the formula of the drink and brand it as “Better Goulds Beverage” (similar to “New Coke” in the 1980s). It is possible that the original Gould and Better Goulds could have existed at the same time, but in the case it was replaced it must have happened after p407 was produced in 1954. Perhaps after the bankruptcy of the Orange Crush Bottling Co., the Goulds Better Beverage Co. was formed in Mississippi and retained the same bottle design.

Contains SUGAR WATER
FRUIT JUICES
CARBONATED WATER
ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR & COLORING
1/10 OF 1% BENZOATE OF SODA
GOULDS [Better] BEVERAGE CO. JACKSON, [McComb], NATCHEZ, MISS

https://www.ebay.ca/itm/335313245737

https://sha.org/bottle/pdffiles/Knox2_BRG.pdf

Phoenix Project

1966-1968

Emmett Cantkier

Glass

Bottle

p418 ACC 171

CCU 310