Coca-Cola doesn’t have too many direct ties – or even indirect ties – to the collector car hobby. There’s the “coke-bottle shape” of many muscle cars and the urban legend that you can use the soft drink to clean rust off chrome (it’s probably a good chelating agent – just think of what it does to yore innards, then). So I’ve never had the occasion to browse through the company’s Coca-Cola Conversations blog – which includes several interesting posts on the company’s history – until recently, when MrFire added the above photo to the H.A.M.B.’s thoroughly entertaining pre-WWII photos post.
As we learned elsewhere in the blog, Coca-Cola in 1933 introduced the automatic fountain dispenser, which for the first time offered a ready-to-mix soft drink, at the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition. Apparently, the company then decided to take the new fountain drink on the road the next year with a home sampling campaign. Kinda like milkmen in their Divcos, but with heavily syrupy confections instead.
According to one commenter on the blog, the truck was a 1934 White with body by H. McFarlane & Company of Chicago, wagonmakers that dated back at least to 1878. From the Illinois plates, we’d assume these pictures were also taken in Chicago. Gotta wonder if Coca-Cola commissioned just the one truck or an entire fleet of them?
BTW, a quick search through the rest of the blog turned up a Rapid-built Coke delivery truck, a fleet of Atlanta-based delivery trucks, and a post on the Coca-Cola Cup from the 1909 Atlanta Speedway race won by Louis Chevrolet.
Me, I’d much prefer to have streamlined beer trucks make home deliveries than streamlined Coke trucks.