Contributed by collector and Overstreet Advisor Art Cloos

In 1966 as the Batman TV show captured the imagination of much of the western world, retailers in just about every category raced to cash in on the Batmania. Food companies were no exception and suddenly Batman could be found on dairy products, cookies, chips, jelly, bread, candy, ice cream, and many more products. And of course, there was Batman soda which bring us to a look at the Cott Soda company.

The Cott Beverage Corporation was founded in 1923 by Polish immigrant Solomon Cott and his son Harry, in Port Chester, just north of New York City. Then Harry Pencer, a clothier from Montreal, began to import Cott sodas into Quebec in 1952. From 1976 to 1991, Cott expanded its distribution throughout Canada and back into the US and into Europe.

In 1969, the name was changed to Cott Beverages Ltd., and in 1991 to Cott Corporation. It has expanded offerings across many platforms and many countries. In 2001 Cott acquired the Royal Crown Cola company from Cadbury Schweppes. With this Cott became a global supplier of soft drink, energy, and other beverage concentrates to independent bottlers around the world with customers that resided in Asia, Latin America, Europe and the Middle East. In 2002 Cott entered into a joint venture to manufacture and sell private label soft drinks and bottled water to major retail and other customers in Mexico. In 2005, Cott bought the Macaw Soft Drinks Company located in the UK giving Cott its first space into aseptic, or preservative-free, drink production.

In 1966 Cott got in on the Batmania and now some of these individual Cott collectibles are quite scarce and desirable to collectors. Cott cola bottles do not show up often and can be quite pricey when then do.

In terms of their cola bottles there are two known versions. One which is the more common of the two has a turquoise/blue label around the middle with a version of the ‘60s era Batman logo that calls the contents “Batman sparkling soda” and a Cott label around the neck with the same color scheme.

The second featured a white label that resembled a champagne bottle. But it is the neck label that collectors covet. It advertises 10,300 free prizes to kids who watched the Batman TV show on channel 7 in Boston to get details on how the contest works. As such this makes the bottle a regional release and very rare. That poses the question, are there other regional Cott bottles advertising the contest? In 31 years of collecting I have never seen another.

Besides the two bottles Cott released two known soda cans. Except one wasn’t designed for soda and that can drove Batman collectors crazy for years. The dominate opinion is that since it has a slot on the top, it was meant to be used to save coins. However, the bottom was like a typical beverage can, so a can opener would be needed to open it to retrieve the money. This is validated by the fact that many other beverage makers also made cans like these. In fact there was a vast number of soda can banks in the ‘60s from companies that included Dr. Pepper, Fanta, Pepsi, Diet Rite, and others.

The second one was an early pull top can. This type of soda can was first used in 1962 by Iron City, a brewing company in Pittsburgh. But in 1966 pull tops were still rare for soda cans, which were mostly used on beer cans. As such the pull top Batman cans are extremely rare and I have only seen one in all my years of collecting.

Known advertising for this promotion basically comes down to two items. First a small 5-3/4” x 11-1/2” thick paper sign featuring their famous slogan, “It’s Cott to be good,” that was found in a warehouse about 15 years ago. The second is a sales folder for Cott that was used to sell the promotion in stores. This is especially hard to find.

There are some questions about other potential collectibles. It seems the Cott bottles were usually brought to stores in wooden crates. These wooden crates were used at least up into the 1950s and possibly into the 1960s when they would have been replaced by plastic crates. If any of the Cott crates were still made of wood in 1966 with Batman graphics on them none has shown up. As to the cans, we know that Coca-Cola introduced what it called the Handy Six Pack in 1923 for its bottled soda. It was in 1960 that it first introduced soda in cans. Did Cott sell its cans in six packs in 1966? If so could Batman graphics be on the packaging? To date that remains unknown. 

All the Cott products are difficult to find and it is a tossup between the contest bottles and the cans as to which is the toughest to find. Both of them are cross collectibles and as such none of them are cheap. In the past, the cans have gone in the $2,000 to $4,000 range though in recent times prices on the rare ones have come down. So keep your eyes peeled when you clean out that basement or attic. You just might find one of them or one of the other Cott collectibles, which would be quite a nice find.