Two-liter bottle
container for soft drinks, beer and wine
The two-liter bottle is a common container for soft drinks, beer, and wine. These bottles are produced from polyethylene terephthalate, also known as PET plastic, or glass using the blow molding process. Bottle labels consist of a printed, tight-fitted plastic sleeve. A resealable screw-top allows the contents to be used at various times while retaining carbonation.
In the United States, the two-liter bottle is one of the few cases where a product is sold by a round number of metric units. Since very few other beverages are sold in this exact quantity, the term "two-liter" in American English almost invariably refers to a soft drink bottle. Other common metric sizes for plastic soft drink bottles include 500 milliliters, 1 liter, and 3 liters.
History
PepsiCo introduced the first two-liter sized soft drink bottle in 1970. Motivated by market research conducted by new marketing vice president John Sculley (who would later be known for heading Apple Inc. from 1983 to 1993), the bottle and the method of its production were designed by a team led by Nathaniel Wyeth of DuPont, who received the patent in 1973.
The public source identifies “Two-liter bottle” as container for soft drinks, beer and wine. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Two-liter, bottle and container.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 12, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7858729. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1970, 1983, 1993 and 1973.
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This entry incorporates text from “Two-liter bottle” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.