This is an original bottle of Ford tomato juice, a product that many don’t associate with the American automaker, however Ford produced its own tomato juice for years back in the 1930s.
The reason the Ford Motor Company got into the juice business was that it owned thousands of acres of farmland near its factory in Michigan. Henry Ford grew up on a farm and remained interested in farming for the rest of his life, any Ford Motor Company employee who wanted it could be assigned a plot of land that they were free to work, and they kept the produce or profit for themselves.
“We cultivate several thousand acres at Dearborn; we also have a dairy herd of around three thousand cows; and near our coal mines in Kentucky, on mountain soil that was not supposed to be good for much of anything, we are growing garden vegetables and fruit.”
“Most of my own life has been spent on a farm. We are in touch with farming nearly everywhere through the sales of automobiles and tractors.” – Henry Ford, published in The Canadian Countryman, circa 1926
There’s no publicly available information on exactly how long Ford tomato juice was in production, or how much was sold, however this is the only one we’ve been able to find that still has the actual juice in the bottle – all the others have been empty.
The label reads:
Ford
TOMATO JUICE
Rich in Vitamins A,B,C
Made from SELECTED TOMATOES
Grown on the
FORD FARMS Dearborn, Michigan
_________
Also good in Tomato Cocktail, Cream of Tomato
Soup, Meat Dressing, etc.
NET CONTENTS :: :: :: :: 16 OZS.
Ford Motor Company
Dearborn, Michigan
If you’d like to add this bottle to your collection it’s due to roll across the auction block with RM Sotheby’s in early September. If you’d like to read more about it or register to bid you can click here to visit the listing.
Images ©2021 Courtesy of RM Sotheby’s
Articles that Ben has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
