Beginning around 1900, returnable containers were widely used for the delivery of goods such as milk or soft drinks. Milk had been sold to customers from cans or covered buckets, but concerns about sanitation and freshness led to regulations for its sale and delivery. Dairies either had their own bottles made, or they could purchase more generic ones such as this example. Customers returned empty bottles to storekeepers who then sent them back to the dairies to be refilled. The increasing cost of equipment needed to sterilize bottles and the inherent savings in consolidating milk delivery led to increasingly larger milk distributors. By the 1950s, a smaller number of distributors were delivering milk which had been collected from a number of small dairies in their vicinity. These larger operations usually had their own glassware custom-decorated with their own logos, and generic returnable glassware such as this example disappeared.