Original reference photography from the Cola Machines archive. Select any image to inspect the machine, mechanisms, identification plates, and restoration details.
The prolific vendor whose machines outlived its paper trail
Choice Vend
Choice Vend filled the 1960s and early 1970s with an unusually broad family of bottle, can and pre-mix machines—even as the company behind the badge slipped from public memory.
- Founded
- Corporate origins not firmly established
- Founders
- Not identified in the surviving public record
- Home
- United States; headquarters not established
- Archive
- 40 machines
Some manufacturers survive as corporate legends. Choice Vend survives as hardware: rows of model plates, service literature and cabinets built for nearly every package a bottler could put on a route.
An archive-led history
Forty machines, but few corporate answers
Choice Vend is a useful warning against making industrial history tidier than the evidence allows. The Cola Machines archive preserves forty models, yet dependable public records naming the company's founders, birthplace and exact opening date remain elusive.
Rather than convert repetition on collector sites into fact, this history begins where the evidence is strongest: the machines themselves. Their dated literature places the active line from the early 1950s through the early 1970s, with its deepest concentration in the 1960s.
Capacity becomes a catalog
One name, many ways to vend
The CV family ranged from modest cabinets such as the CV-72 to large-volume machines such as the CV-440. Pre-mix dispensers, quart vendors and multi-flavor versions show a company selling solutions to bottlers, not one signature collectible.
Model prefixes chart the line's evolution. CV machines dominate the 1950s and 1960s; CVB, CVC, CVS, VUB and VUC records cluster around the turn of the 1970s, when cans, changing package sizes and more selections demanded new mechanisms.
What the cabinets can prove
Reading history without inventing it
Choice Vend's surviving machines document an industry moving away from the single-flavor bottle vendor. The CV-120 appeared in several branded and multi-flavor forms, while later CVC cabinets offered far greater capacity behind broad illuminated fronts.
The company's eventual ownership and closure require better primary documentation than is presently available. Until that emerges, the responsible story is a material one: roughly two decades of increasingly flexible automatic retail, preserved cabinet by cabinet.
Seven turning points
Choice Vend in motion
CV-102, CV-136 and CV-440 records mark the early documented line.
The CV family expands across many capacities and package formats.
Pre-mix and multi-flavor equipment broadens the catalog.
CVC and related families begin the shift toward newer cabinets.
CVB, CVC, CVS, VUB and VUC machines dominate the surviving records.
Forty Choice Vend model records survive in this collection.
Machines and period literature remain the clearest route to the company's history.
The complete reference shelf
All Choice Vend machines
40 model records
Research notes
Sources & further reading
Corporate milestones are cross-checked against the sources listed here. Model dates and archive counts follow surviving Cola Machines records; gaps and uncertain dates are left visible rather than filled with guesses.
- Cola Machines — Choice Vend archivePrimary archive inventory, model families, dates and photographs.
- Arcade-History — Choice Vend CVB-106Independent surviving-machine and date context.
- Cola Machines model archiveCV-120 photographs and record evidence.