Proprietary bottle
German: Individualflasche Also known as: Sonderflasche, Individualgebinde
A reusable bottle with its own shape that only one bottler or brand fills and takes back.
Individual bottles are reusable bottles with a brand-specific shape, embossing or labelling. Unlike pool bottles, only the owner may fill them, so they must be collected separately and returned.
For retailers this means more sorting effort; for brands it means an unmistakable appearance. Breweries and spring-water producers are the usual users of their own bottle designs. Because they cannot be exchanged with others in the deposit system, retailers need separate crates and counts, and wrongly returned bottles lead to queries from the bottler.
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