In any American diner, the pot with the orange neck holds the decaf and the one with the black neck the regular coffee. The convention is so well established that it has crossed borders: it is found on professional equipment sold in Europe, on capsules, on supermarket shelves. Generally, nobody knows where it comes from. It comes from a commercial operation in 1932.

The Sanka package was bright orange, chosen so that it could be spotted from afar on the shelf. When General Foods bought the brand from Roselius in 1932, the company launched a large-scale campaign and, among other things, shipped free new pots with orange necks, the color of the package, to thousands of American restaurants and cafés. The intended message was “we serve Sanka here.” The message received, after a few years, was “here, orange means decaf.” The brand has disappeared from the counters, the color has stayed: a brand name turned into a universal color code, just as frigidaire became, in French, a word for any refrigerator.

Sprudge, A brief history of decaf and the color orange; The Takeout, How orange became the new black for decaf coffee pots; Wikipedia, Sanka, accessed on 09/18/2026