US Patent Issued to THE COCA-COLA on Nov. 25 for "Systems and methods for associating vessels with user accounts" (American, Belgian Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Nov. 25 -- United States Patent no. 12,481,966, issued on Nov. 25, was assigned to THE COCA-COLA COMPANY (Atlanta).

"Systems and methods for associating vessels with user accounts" was invented by Joshua Casey Schwarber (Decatur, Ga.), Allen Lineberry (Liberty, N.C.), Benjamin John Kingston (Suwanee, Ga.), David Carrewyn (Atlanta), Matthew Baker (Atlanta), Axel Kling (Newnan, Ga.) and Patrick Etesse (Brussels).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A vessel is assigned a unique vessel identifier (620). Before or after the vessel is filled, the vessel identifier is encoded into a machine-readable code that is printed or etched onto the vessel (630; 640). The code may have the property ...