PART TWO
The premium Arbuckle brand, Yuban, shown here in a 1916 ad, could have revived the ailing coffee giant’s fortunes. But because it refused to pay for a national campaign, Arbuckles’ faded from view, eventually selling Yuban to General Foods.
7
[By 1915], the sheer excitement of expanded consumption, the new rituals of buying and selling—universalized by name brands, national trademarks, and chain stores—became characteristic of everyday life in which millions, regardless of place or position, shared. Materialism became Americanism.
—Thomas J. Schlereth, Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life, 1876-1915
Although many consumer products—Ivory Soap, Coca-Cola, Listerine—claimed a national market with the help of sophisticated advertising strategies, coffee was difficult to distribute widely. Once roasted, it staled quickly, thus discouraging aggressive national campaigns. Nevertheless, a few visionary coffee companies—Folger’s, Hills Brothers, Maxwell House, Chase & Sanborn, Arbuckle Brothers—learned Postum’s advertising lessons, while hundreds of other coffee roasters struggled to survive in an increasingly competitive, fractious market before the onset of World War I.
Brand Proliferation
The battle for coffee market share was waged primarily on a regional level in the pre-World War I era. Even so, a coffee marketing revolution would take place in a remarkably short period of time with branded coffee rapidly replacing the bulk coffee of the traditional country store.
Looking back over a thirty-year career, retailer J. C. Reid observed in 1915, “I have seen the transition or partial transition from selling crackers, rice, currants, raisins, spaghetti, macaroni, rolled oats, corn meal, borax, baking soda, coffee, etc., out of a box, barrel or sack to being sold in . . . packages under trade-mark brands.” True, he noted, there was a trade-off. Consumers got a little less for their money than when they purchased in bulk, but they received similar quality and quantity, protected by a moisture-proof package. Coffee no longer smelled (and tasted) of the pickle barrel sitting next to the bulk bin, and the blend’s flavor was generally consistent in every package.29
Many grocers were unhappy that their customers could buy the same brand of packaged coffee at a competing store. One grocer told Reid that he pushed his bulk coffee because he could get it fresh-roasted in small batches from his local roaster and blend to suit his customers—snaring a 40 percent profit, much more than the net from branded coffee. Even this grocer had to admit, however, that the percentage of coffee he sold by brand was increasing.
Another contemporary grocer favored brands, though. “Quality talks,” he wrote. “Best results are obtained by handling a good, advertised line in package or cans. [I] am now selling about twice as much since settling down to one line. Our coffees now run uniform, and when we find a blend a customer likes, we have no more trouble.”
In 1915 a survey of some 5,500 coffee drinkers revealed that 86 percent bought their coffee prepackaged. Together they listed over a thousand different brands. A concurrent survey conducted by the National Coffee Roasters Association came up with 3,500 American coffee brands.
Whether coffee came in a package or not, the American consumer continued to ruin the brew by boiling it. Now, however, they could do it conveniently with a pumping percolator. While percolation literally refers to a simple drip method, in North America it came to refer to a pot with a central tube and glass cover. When the water heated sufficiently, it perked up through the tube, spraying the coffee back over the grounds repeatedly. In the early twentieth century these pumping percolators were electrified and became standard kitchen appliances. Because the percolators produced an overextracted brew—leaching unpalatable components from the grounds—economical housewives were almost sure to get a bitter cup, either too weak or too strong, depending on the amount of coffee and water they used.
In 1908 German housewife Melitta Bentz began a revolution in coffee brewing when she punched holes in the bottom of a tin cup, lined it with her son’s blotter paper, and created a superior once-through drip brewing method that quickly spread through Europe and created a dynasty for the Melitta brand. The same year in the United States I. D. Richheimer introduced his drip Tricolator, a pot with a filtered midsection; and three years later Edward Aborn invented a superior drip brewer called the Make-Right, but neither of them achieved widespread popularity. It would take the rest of the century for most Americans to learn the virtues of drip brewing.
A & P Grinds Its Own
Although American brands were proliferating, they faced stiff competition from price-cutting chain stores and door-to-door peddlers.30 By far the greatest threat came from the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, known as the A & P. Founded in 1859 by George Francis Gilman, the company initially sold animal hides. Yet within a few years, under the co-direction of clerk and subsequent partner George Huntington Hartford, it was christened the Great American Tea Company, specializing in tea, with over a dozen stores in Manhattan. Soon they added coffee. Gilman and Hartford eliminated middlemen, buying coffee and tea on the docks straight off the clipper ships. In 1869 the Great American Tea Company became the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, ostensibly in honor of the completion of the transcontinental railroad that year. It also signaled the company’s plans for expansion beyond the East Coast of the United States. In 1871, in the aftermath of the Chicago Fire, the company sent staff and food, staying to open stores in the Midwest.
In 1878 Hartford officially took over the operation, while Gilman retired. Hartford expanded, supervising over two hundred stores by 1901, in addition to sending over 5,000 peddlers in standardized red-and-black A & P wagons to deliver directly to the home. Gradually, under the direction of George H. Hartford’s sons George L. and John, the company offered other groceries as well. Aping Arbuckle, the A & P offered premiums and trading stamps to lure consumers. By 1907 A & P’s sales had reached $15 million a year.
The older, more conservative brother, “Mr. George,” as he was known by employees, minded the books. He also cupped the coffee and tea samples every afternoon at 3:00, continuing this task into his nineties. The flamboyant “Mr. John” drove the company’s marketing and expansion. It was he, for instance, who sent out red and gold coaches drawn by a team of eight horses decorated with spangled harnesses and gold-plated bells. The local citizen who came closest to guessing the correct weight of the team won $500 in gold.
In 1913 John Hartford introduced the company’s first “Economy Store,” which was strictly cash-and-carry—no deliveries, no phone orders, no premiums. By cutting out wholesalers, the A & P could sell quality food at low prices with no frills. In an incredible entrepreneurial burst, John Hartford opened 7,500 such stores (approximately seven a day) between 1914 and 1916—and then weeded out over half of them. Seeking a kind of brand recognition for the stores themselves, he standardized their architecture and layout so that he could reputedly find the coffee in any store blindfolded. Each store required only one employee-manager. At a time when most city dwellers spent nearly half their salaries on food, the new A & P’s were wildly successful.31
After a run-in with Cream of Wheat, which refused to sell to A & P if the chain sold it below the retail price, John Hartford increasingly relied on the firm’s own brands, some known as Ann Page products. Through a wholly owned subsidiary, the American Coffee Corporation, he placed his own coffee buyers in Brazil, Colombia, and elsewhere, purchased directly, roasted the beans, and provided grinders in each store, where he sold Eight O’Clock Coffee, along with Red Circle and Bokar, his premium grade.
The Premium Peddlers
While the A & P wagon men gradually gave way to that firm’s economy chain stores, other door-to-door salesmen, particularly those of the Jewel Tea Company, challenged branded coffee. In the late nineteenth century quite a few small-time businessmen eked out a living by delivering bulk-roasted coffee by horse-drawn wagon. These wagon men plied their trade primarily in major cities, where deliveries could be made close to one another. In 1899, when Frank Skiff, having saved $700, quit his regular sales job to deliver tea, coffee, and spices on his own, he was just one of several hundred such peddlers serving Chicago and its suburbs. Nor was his Jewel Tea Company unusual in offering premiums to customers, who earned a certain number of coupons with each purchase and could eventually trade these for selected household goods.
The next year Skiff’s brother-in-law, Frank Ross, joined him at Jewel. Then in 1901 the enterprising Ross had a fateful encounter with a Mrs. Scannon, who answered the door with a hot tea kettle in hand. Ross barely got to begin his sales pitch. “Get off my porch or I’ll scald your eyes out!” she threatened. It turned out that Mrs. Scannon had saved coupons for nearly a year in order to earn a coveted rug. But just when she was ready, her wagon man went out of business. Consequently, she held a low opinion of such schemes.
Thinking quickly, Ross yelled from the safety of the sidewalk, “What would you say if I told you I’d leave these beautiful Haviland plates today and you could be using them while you traded them out?” Thus began the phenomenally successful “advance premium” program. In 1916, fifteen years after offering its first advance premium, the Jewel Tea Company, now selling a variety of household goods, went public with a $16 million capitalization. The company boasted 850 thriving wagon routes serving 2 million families, a huge coffee roasting plant in Chicago, and an elaborate sales hierarchy based on the front-line wagon men who visited each customer every two weeks. About half of the company’s income stemmed from coffee sales.
The company’s success inspired imitation and competition. By the time Jewel offered common stock to the public, there were four hundred similar firms; ten of them, like Jewel, had gone national. The Interstate Grocer estimated in 1915 that the “peddlers,” as retailers contemptuously called the wagon men, had snagged 60 percent of their coffee business.
The coffee roasters were just as unhappy as the retail grocers, since the Jewel Tea Company and its imitators roasted their own coffee, thus capturing a major portion of the trade.
The Institutional Niche
Those who retailed their coffee directly to consumers received the greatest publicity and battled for grocery or pantry shelf space. But other regional roasters specialized in providing coffee for hotels, hospitals, restaurants, private clubs, and steamship lines. Known as institutional roasters, they too were fiercely competitive. Frederic A. Cauchois of New York, for example, provided his freshly roasted Private Estate Coffee daily in dated bags by a wagon route. Any beans that remained after two weeks were taken back in exchange for fresh product. Cauchois preached the drip brewing method and provided his clients with fine Japanese paper filters and urns that were inspected once a week. By 1904 he had established roasting plants in Philadelphia, Washington, Pittsburgh, and Chicago, in addition to New York City.
Other institutional roasters maximized profits by selling all coffee grades in bulk. Eastern European immigrant Philip Wechsler thrived by loaning money to others who wanted to open restaurants, hotels, cafeterias, and luncheonettes, taking a brokerage commission, charging 6 percent on loans, and encouraging the new businesses to buy his coffee.
In Chicago, Harry and Jacob Cohn, two Lithuanian immigrants, founded their own coffee companies in the first part of the century. Older brother Harry founded Superior Tea & Coffee Company in 1908 with his cousin Walter Katzoff. After working at Superior for a while, Jacob Cohn started Continental in 1915. While his older brother specialized in home deliveries, Jacob chose the institutional route, delivering to restaurants and cafeterias. He sold restaurant owners brewing equipment virtually at cost and gave them free urn bags and cleaners. Superior, too, eventually switched to restaurant service, and the companies became fierce institutional competitors, expanding from the country’s center in an effort to best each other. Meanwhile, in California, Roy and Frank Farmer started Farmer Brothers.
Sexy Coffee?
The stodgy coffee men were slow to learn from the razzle-dazzle salesmanship of competitors such as Jewel and Postum. By 1907 it was clear that advertising and salesmanship had become increasingly important components of any thriving American business. The Tea & Coffee Trade Journalran an editorial about the difficulties in locating good salesmen. “There are men with the indescribable knack which enables them to sell anything from a gold brick to a cake of soap, but there is no outward sign by which they may be told.”
Yet an article a few years later in the same journal criticized exactly such a coffee salesman, who admitted that he knew nothing about his product. “I have never made a cup of coffee in my life. . . . What I do is sell labels, cans, [and] canisters—but most emphatically do I not sell coffee.” A former insurance salesman, this man knew human nature. “I pick up a label,” he continued, “and tell about it being a thing of beauty and a joy forever, and I get the name on the dotted lines and get out.” If a dealer had the temerity to request a sample of the coffee, the salesman would “gently but firmly insinuate that it is presumptuous on his part to request to see samples of my world-renowned and old-established brands.”
It is of course understandable that true coffee men would be horrified by such a cavalier attitude. Without a decent product, this flash approach would not produce a loyal customer. Yet in this infancy of modern capitalism, the coffee men needed to embrace the new hucksterism in order to sell their brown beans.
Most coffee roasters struggled to understand new marketing methods. They observed, for instance, that milk sales went up at a Boston sales counter when the drink was poured by a sexy young woman. “She was a comely, buxom lass with brown hair, liquid brown eyes and a complexion which would make a ripe peach want to hide itself,” a coffee journal reported. Yet few coffee ads attempted any form of sex appeal for the traditional, dignified beverage. One that did, albeit in an awkward, school-boyish fashion, was widely criticized. A 1912 ad for Satisfaction Coffee depicted a can with female legs fleeing from a pursuing male. “Worth running after any time,” read the text. “Always pure. Never sold in bulk.” This ad was, noted a trade journal, “in questionable taste.”
In 1909 Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung arrived at Clark University in Massachusetts to deliver lectures that had a profound effect on the American psyche. Soon coffee men were wondering how to “get into people’s minds” to influence their buying decisions. Five years later Dr. Hugo Muensterberg, a Harvard psychology professor, lectured on the topic “Applying Psychology to Business.” He made extraordinary—and frightening—claims. “Business men will eventually realize that customers are merely bundles of mental states and that the mind is a mechanism that we can affect with the same exactitude with which we control a machine in a factory.”
When advertising experts from outside the industry tried to tell the roasters what to do, the coffee men didn’t listen. At their 1915 convention the roasters heard from “sales counselor” St. Elmo Lewis, who told them that a negative, defensive campaign never worked. “You won’t get far by calling the substituters liars.” Instead he wanted the roasters to promote cooperative advertising. They should create a substantial ad fund to bring the industry out of the “stone age of advertising.”
The next year H. H. Clark, an advertising man, wrote an article for a coffee trade journal emphasizing that the retailer could no longer be held responsible for pushing a particular brand. “It is sold to the consumer not by a man behind the counter, but by a chap sitting in some office possibly a thousand miles removed from the actual sale—plotting the advertising.” Clark pointed out that American per-capita consumption had dropped from nearly thirteen pounds a year in 1901 to less than ten pounds. He too exhorted them to band together for cooperative advertising.
Clark pointed to Postum’s success. C. W. Post had begun with all the odds against him, trying to sell a coffee substitute universally despised as the “war coffee” of the 1860s. Yet Post had succeeded through consistent, persistent advertising. Clark then outlined a specific campaign, including a seal of quality from the National Coffee Roaster Association to be sold ten labels for a penny to raise funds for cooperative advertising that would include billboards, streetcar placements, dealer displays, newspaper ads, and direct-mail fliers.
Only the bigger roasters with broader vision and an ambition to achieve national distribution actually mounted effective ad campaigns. These roasters and their brands—Hills Brothers, MJB, Folger’s, Cheek-Neal’s Maxwell House, Chase & Sanborn, Arbuckle—were destined to dominate the U.S. coffee trade.
Hills Brothers Fills a Vacuum
With Arbuckle controlling cowboy country and most of the East, three brands, all located in San Francisco, sparred for control of the Pacific Coast’s coffee business. While James Folger had secured a head start in 1849, Hills Brothers and MJB were challenging the older roaster by the turn of the twentieth century.
Like the Folgers, the Hills brothers came from New England. Their father, Austin Hills Sr., born in Rockland, Maine, in 1823, built clipper ships. In 1863 he joined several other Maine friends in search of the fabled California gold. Failing to strike it rich, he settled for a job as foreman of a San Francisco shipbuilding company. He left his wife and two sons back in Maine, fetching them only in 1873, when his older son and namesake, Austin Herbert Hills, was twenty-two, and Reuben Wilmarth Hills was seventeen.
Three years later the siblings went into partnership as Hills Brothers in a stall at San Francisco’s Bay City Market, selling butter, eggs, and cheese. In 1881 they bought a retail coffee store, the Arabian Coffee & Spice Mills. They roasted coffee in front of the store, knowing that the drama and smell would lure customers. A handbill the next year proclaimed their product “THE FINEST COFFEE in the WORLD!” adding, “Our Coffee is Roasted on the Premises Every Day, in Full View of the Customer.” In addition to coffee, they sold tea, spices, and flavoring extracts. Reuben took charge of the coffee side of the business, while his older brother Austin continued to sell dairy products.
The 1880s brought high coffee prices, and by 1884 A. H. and R.W. (as the budding businessmen preferred to be called) had abandoned retail sales in favor of the wholesale business. Around 1886 R.W. adopted cup testing, which had been pioneered on the Pacific Coast by fellow San Francisco coffee man Clarence Bickford. Like a wine taster, the coffee cupper slurped in an explosive burst, swirled the beverage thoughtfully in his mouth, then spit it into a nearby spittoon. This cupping ceremony survives to this day as one of the more serious—and humorous to observe—rituals in the trade.
In 1897 an itinerant artist stopped by the Hills Brothers store. R.W. suggested that he draw a figure to represent their Arabian Roast Coffee, as it was known then. The resulting figure, a turbaned, bearded Arab in a flowing robe, has sipped Hills Brothers Coffee ever since, even though Mocha as a preferred brand had begun to fade by the turn of the twentieth century, and most of the Hills Brothers beans arrived from Central America and Brazil.
During the Spanish-American War, Hills Brothers sold huge amounts of butter to the U.S. Army for use in the Philippines. Preserved in brine, its taste left a good deal to be desired. In 1899 R.W. stopped in Chicago during a transcontinental trip to ask Norton Brothers, who made their retail dispensers for bulk coffee beans, if they could suggest a better method for packing butter. It happened that Norton Brothers had just perfected a vacuum-packing process. It worked, preserving butter without having to pickle it.
R.W. knew that once roasted, coffee staled quickly due to exposure to air. Would vacuum packing work for coffee too? It did. Hills Brothers quickly negotiated a contract for exclusive rights to the Norton process on the Pacific Coast for a year. It would be thirteen more years, however, before another San Francisco firm adopted the vacuum pack, and the rest of the country took much longer.
The original Hills Brothers vacuum pack, marketed in July 1900, bore the exaggerated claim that its Highest Grade Java and Mocha Coffee would “KEEP FRESH FOREVER IF SEAL IS UNBROKEN.” Though this claim wasn’t true, vacuum packing did distinctly improve the quality and freshness of the product.
The vacuum pack allowed Hills Brothers coffee to spread far more quickly throughout the Pacific Coast area, arriving just in time to service another gold rush generation in the Klondike. Soon Hills Brothers Coffee had reached virtually everywhere west of the Rocky Mountains.
The Hills brothers recognized early the importance of promotion and advertising. At an 1898 “pure food” show in San Francisco, for instance, R.W. had a sample Burns roaster installed, instructing the staff to “roast it full up” for the aroma. R.W. and Mr. Snell, the firm’s first advertising director, wrote alliterative copy for a 1910 poster, enticing customers with the “peculiar, penetrating, persistent flavor of skillfully blended, rare, old coffee.” R.W. chose the color red as the most attractive and attention grabbing, naming it Red Can Brand, his top-of-the-line ground coffee. By 1912 the firm also packed brands named Caravan (Mocha), Santola (Mocha substitute), Timingo (East Indian), and Saxon (peaberry).32 At the 1915 Universal Exposition, Hills Brothers mounted an impressive exhibition in which visitors could see coffee roasted, poured into packages, and vacuum packed, all through a glass port.
An unassuming, taciturn man, R.W. Hills believed in delegating responsibility and encouraging his employees to invent better machinery and packing methods. He trusted his motivated employees to work hard. But R.W. also suffered from periodic bouts of depression. “It is wonderful the way the business is growing,” a happy employee once commented. “Yes, but it means we must watch our step,” the boss replied. “We can lose it easier than we can get it.” Nor did Hills boast unduly of his accomplishments. “I believe that success in business is fifty per cent judgment and fifty per cent propitious circumstances.”
MJB: Why?
A third San Francisco coffee firm soon battled for supremacy with Hills Brothers and Folger’s. In 1850 seventeen-year-old Joseph Brandenstein fled Germany, avoiding military conscription while seeking his fortune in California’s gold fields. Instead he was robbed in the mining country and wound up in San Francisco with a partner selling leaf tobacco and cigars. He had eleven children (by his wife, that is—he also had a mistress). His three oldest sons, Max, Mannie, and Eddie, joined forces in 1899 to form a tea, coffee, and spice firm, with younger brother Charlie joining later. M. J. Brandenstein & Company (named for Max) was truncated to MJB. The firm quickly shot to prominence in the California coffee world under Mannie’s astute leadership.
His daughter, Ruth, described Mannie Brandenstein as a “super-salesman, raconteur, and would-be actor.” A short, slight, prematurely bald man, Mannie appeared to be the exact opposite of R.W. Hills in many ways. While Hills traced his American roots to the Pilgrims, Brandenstein was a loud, brash, second-generation immigrant whose toupee had a tendency to slip sideways when he became excited. Both men, however, knew their coffee. In 1913 Mannie was the first to adopt the vacuum can pioneered by Hills Brothers.
Brandenstein christened his first brand Climax Coffee. A large four-color poster featured a sultry young woman reclining in bed, holding her morning cup of coffee, with a contented, satisfied smile on her rosebud lips. Below her was printed the single, bold word CLIMAX. During the raunchy mining era, such a racy approach might have been appropriate, but Brandenstein soon toned it down. He had to come up with something else to grab the public’s attention. Taking his cue from C.W. Post, whose mysterious “There’s a Reason” sold Postum, Brandenstein made MJB famous with the simple word “WHY? ” that ended every advertisement. “Why the WHY?” asked his daughter. “What’s the difference, as long as people ask?” her father answered. “That makes sales.”33
Brandenstein used electricity to highlight his shop window displays in 1906, the letters MJB pulsing with light and messages such as “Most Juvenating Blend” and “Most Joyous Breakfast.” By 1909 Brandenstein was placing ads in national coffee trade journals emphasizing the firm’s “special pride in importing and handling the best cupping coffees procurable.”
Brandenstein chose a force of effective salesmen. On July 3, 1910, he took one such eighteen-year-old salesman, Sandy Swann, to Reno, Nevada, where a much-publicized prizefight attracted huge crowds lusting to see the “Great White Hope,” Jim Jeffries, beat the upstart black fighter James Johnson. The night before the Fourth of July bout, Brandenstein and Swann painted “MJB COFFEE WHY?” in white lettering on hundreds of Japanese fans. Then, late at night, they painted giant green footprints leading from the railroad station to the arena. Between the steps were big white question marks and the mysterious letters MJB. The fight proved anticlimactic. Johnson easily defeated the out-of-shape Jeffries. Fortunately for Brandenstein, it was a very hot day, so a sea of fans waved in the audience asking, “MJB COFFEE WHY?”
Using reverse psychology, Brandenstein often would bring in three grades of coffee beans on trays for a prospective customer. He would put the most expensive grade on a simple tray on a shelf in the corner of his office. He put the cheaper beans on a fancy tray. “I put the cheapest on my desk practically under his nose,” Brandenstein explained to his daughter. “Then I point to the fancy tray on my desk and tell him here are beans that will suit his price.” Immediately, the customer’s eyes would wander to the other trays. “How about those beans?” he would ask. “Oh, those are top quality beans, way beyond your price.” And of course those were the beans the customer bought.
With enterprise, energy, and showmanship, along with a quality product, Mannie Brandenstein thus earned MJB Coffee a firm place in the West Coast coffee world.
The Great San Francisco Earthquake
The San Francisco firm pioneered by Jim Folger in the 1850s continued to thrive, despite the increasing competition. In 1889 Folger had died at fifty-one of a coronary occlusion. His son, James A. Folger II, twenty-six, who had been working for the firm for seven years when his father died, took over. Under his direction Folger’s specialized in bulk roasted coffee, delivered to grocery stores in sacks or drums.
In 1898 Folger hired Frank P. Atha, who soon became the company’s top salesman. In 1901 Atha suggested a Folger’s coffee outlet in Texas, where he faced the difficult task of introducing an unknown, relatively expensive product. Freight charges from the west to the east were higher than the other way around, and Arbuckles’ Ariosa already held a dominant position in Texas. Atha decided to push his highest-quality Golden Gate Coffee, offering an exclusive dealership to a grocer in each area. He made a virtue of the fact that he could not afford to compete with the Arbuckle premiums, coining the slogan, “No prizes—no coupons—no crockery—nothing but satisfaction goes with Folger’s Golden Gate Coffee.” Frank Atha perched on the high seat of the grocer’s delivery wagon, chatting with housewives and giving away free coffee samples. He also designed and installed window displays for stores. By his third year he had hired two additional salesmen.
In San Francisco James Folger II built a five-story factory near the piers. Completed in 1905, it was held in place by pilings driven deep into the muddy Bay floor, since it rested on newly created land, once part of Yerba Buena Cove. The next year, in the early morning hours of April 18, 1906, the Folger building was the only coffee structure to survive the famous earthquake and fire. While the rest of San Francisco burned, U.S. Marines set up headquarters in the Folger building and pumped water from the Bay. Folger’s maintained “a rushing business during and just after the great conflagration,” according to a contemporary account. To his credit, James Folger maintained his old prices.
Hills Brothers and MJB were not so fortunate. Both of their factories burned to the ground, though they quickly rebuilt and commenced roasting again. MJB received an advance payment of nearly $15,000 for an order from Kamikowa Brothers, a local Japanese-owned firm that showed its faith in the coffee company. “Japanese understand earthquakes,” their telegram read.
Chase & Sanborn: Tally-Ho
On the East Coast, Chase & Sanborn continued aggressively marketing its Seal Brand. Caleb Chase and James Sanborn, then in their sixties, retired in 1899, passing the reins to partner Charles Sias. The “Barnum of Coffee,” Sias loved a spectacle. A tall man, he wore a long purple coat that flowed behind him in the wind as he drove to work in his tandem horse-drawn buggy, known as a tally-ho. When automobiles later took over, Sias bought a fleet of foreign cars, including a Renault manned by a footman and chauffeur.
In 1900 Sias issued a little booklet, After Dinner Tricks and Puzzles With Your Seal Brand Coffee, an ingenious collection of thirty-six brainteasers. How many hard-boiled eggs can a hungry man eat on an empty stomach? Answer: One only, for after eating one, his stomach would no longer be empty. The same booklet featured a racist illustration of a black man with huge lips and one eye closed in an exaggerated wink, holding a scroll advertising Chase & Sanborn, “the aristocratic coffee of America, surpassing all others in its richness and delicacy of flavor.” An even worse caricature from 1898 showed an old black man with gaping mouth and various missing teeth saying, “My missus says dar’s no good coffee in these yer parts. Specs she’ll change ’er mine when she drinks SEAL BRAND.”
Sias also appealed to the sexism of the era—an approach to selling coffee that would set a tone for the century. He praised the housewife as “the chiefest charm and ornament” of the dinner table, because “a meal is always a feast with a lovely woman at the head of the table.” And what better way to guarantee the crowning success of the meal than with Chase & Sanborn coffee—“delicious, aromatic, the odor of which is as of some rare incense from unseen censers swinging through the room.” Following this religious reference, the copywriter waxed even more biblical: “Verily, the woman who can make a happy table for her husband is not only a housekeeper—she is a husband-keeper as well.”
Chase & Sanborn, which already had roasting plants in Boston, Montreal, and Chicago, thrived in the first decades of the twentieth century without having to resort to giveaways. Over half of the firm’s sales derived from its cheaper brands. In 1906 Chase & Sanborn’s Western trade expanded, in part owing to the influx of coffee-loving Scandinavians. The following year Chase & Sanborn erected a new Montreal factory, to be run entirely by electricity. Business was expected to triple.
Joel Cheek Creates Maxwell House
After attending college, Joel Owsley Cheek went to Nashville, Tennessee, in 1873 to seek his fortune. Hired as a traveling salesman, or drummer, for a wholesale grocery firm there, he moved back to his home state of Kentucky to open new territory, generally riding on horseback from one general store to another.
Young Cheek made his first sale to a grocer—a relative—who asked him which coffee was best. In this rural area people still bought their coffee beans green for home roasting. The salesman naturally recommended his most expensive brand, though he didn’t really know anything about the relative merits of the beans he sold. That night, his conscience bothering him, Joel Cheek roasted samples of each type on his mother’s kitchen stove and decided that one of the cheaper brands yielded a more flavorful brew. The next day he went back to the grocer and explained why he would send the less expensive variety instead.
Experimenting with coffee samples, Cheek discovered that some origins offered superior body, others flavor, and still others “kick” (acidity). By mixing them he sought to find an optimal blend. The years slipped by, with the drummer a welcome visitor in the isolated Kentucky valleys. Married in 1874, Cheek sired eight sons and one daughter.
In 1884 the family moved to Nashville, where the successful salesman became a partner in the firm, now called Cheek, Webb & Company. There he met and befriended Roger Nolley Smith, a British coffee broker who had operated a plantation in Brazil and could reputedly distinguish between Colombian, Mexican, or Brazilian coffee simply by sniffing the unroasted beans. Together, Cheek and Smith worked on a three-country blend, with the cheaper Santos providing a base and two milds lending more flavor and acidity.
By 1892 Cheek believed he had found the perfect blend. He approached a Mr. Bledwell, the food buyer for the Maxwell House, a prestigious Nashville hotel. Cheek persuaded him to take twenty pounds free on a trial basis. After several days the coffee was gone, and the hotel went back to its former brand. When Bledwell heard complaints, he asked the chef whether there had been any change in brewing methods. No, the chef said, Cheek’s blend was just better coffee. From then on, the Maxwell House bought Cheek’s beans, granting his request to name the blend after the hotel following a six-month trial.
Forty-year-old Joel Cheek quit his job in 1893, going into partnership with John Norton to begin a wholesale grocery firm specializing in coffee. In 1900 they were joined by John Neal, a fellow Kentuckian who had once sold for Cheek. The following year Norton departed. Cheek and Neal formed the Nashville Coffee and Manufacturing Company, specializing in Maxwell House Coffee. They eventually changed their corporate name to the Cheek-Neal Coffee Company and established a highly successful business throughout the Nashville area. In 1905 they opened a roasting facility in Houston, Texas. Five years later they built a new plant in Jacksonville, Florida, followed by another in Richmond, Virginia, in 1916. One by one, six of the eight Cheek sons joined the firm.
The elder Cheek proved to be a promotional and advertising genius, as his push to associate his coffee with a socially prominent landmark indicated. Beginning in 1907, his ads used plenty of white space with tasteful illustrations. One spot featured a coffee cup at the top with steam wafting out of it, labeled “The Cup of Quality.” The main copy read: “EVERY HOUSEWIFE who has a knowledge of coffee value will appreciate the rare quality of Maxwell House Blend. It is marketed strictly on its merits and is backed by one of the most complete coffee establishments in the world.” The snob appeal of a high-quality brew worked particularly well to differentiate Maxwell House in the South, where cheaper blends cut with Rio and cereal traditionally predominated.
That same year, President Theodore Roosevelt visited the Hermitage, the famed Nashville resort, where he had a cup of Maxwell House Coffee. “Good,” the ebullient Roosevelt supposedly pronounced. “Good to the last drop.” Years later Joel Cheek would make the slogan synonymous with Maxwell House Coffee. In 1908 an ad appeared in the Nashville City Directory boasting that the coffee “was served to President-elect Taft and a thousand guests at Atlanta” in addition to refreshing Teddy Roosevelt at the Hermitage. To hammer home the socially upscale message, the advertisement showed a gigantic woman in an evening gown serving herself an outsized cup of coffee from the top of the Maxwell House Hotel.34
Cheek noted the article on the “comely, buxom lass” who sold so much milk. He hired Edna Moseley, a soft-spoken southern belle, to demonstrate the virtues of Maxwell House Coffee at state fairs below the Mason-Dixon Line. “Miss Moseley,” noted the Tea & Coffee Trade Journal, “seems to have a happy faculty of making friends as well as customers of all visitors to her booth.”
Like its competitors, the Cheek-Neal Coffee Company also put out many lower grades of coffee—over fifty brands—including chicory blends. In 1910 the company was fined for “adulteration and misbranding” of coffee containing 10 percent chicory. There was a strip label across the lid reading “Golden Hours Blend, coffee and chicory,” but the print was minuscule, whereas the principal label proclaimed in large type, “Cheek & Neal Cup Quality Coffee.”
The legal loss had little effect on the firm. By 1914 the sixty-one-year-old Joel Cheek had become a very wealthy man. He was elected vice president of the National Coffee Roasters Association (NCRA). Amid all the pompous, backbiting, and long-winded speakers at the annual conventions, his voice stood out for its passion and generosity. Cheek made it clear that he favored honesty but that his famous blends didn’t always cost him all that much. “The various grades of coffee you roast can be made to yield certain results in the cup that will cheapen the cost,” he explained. “If you don’t know that, you ought to get busy and learn it, because if you don’t, you will have a hard road to travel.”
While Cheek believed in the profit motive, he claimed not to extort money at others’ expense. “Any transaction between me and my fellow man that has not the moral in it on my part to profit him, is an immoral transaction.” He conveyed what appeared to be a real concern for the traveling salesman, explaining that he had been on the road himself for twenty-eight years. “Bear with him in his weaknesses and shortcomings. Encourage him as much as you can. Two of the very best men I had were going to the devil from strong drink, and I saved them by treating them kindly, talking to them and pleading with them and for them, and I am proud of that record.”
In his 1915 NCRA speech, Cheek encouraged his audience to find “hearts in us big enough to feel that we want to help everyone, even to the porter in the basement, or the fellow on the top roasting floor.” He reiterated that it wasn’t enough simply to employ people. “You love them, you love their families, you are part of them.” Cheek said that he cherished as his greatest compliment the time an employee stood up at a meeting and said, “We have no boss, we have a father sitting down there at the end of the table, and you all know it.”
Cheek echoed the paternalism of his era, of course, but among all the coffee men’s speeches of that period, his words stand out for their seeming sincerity.
Gift, Guest, or Yuban?
In 1910 Arbuckle Brothers’ Ariosa brand accounted for one out of every seven pounds sold in the United States. But old John Arbuckle and his nephew, Will Jamison, recognized that their market share was eroding, due to increased competition from other brands. Most major competitors offered a cheap glazed coffee in direct imitation of Ariosa. Like Arbuckle, the wagon men offered premiums. People seemed to want the convenience of preground coffee rather than the whole bean. In addition, the national taste in coffee was improving, eschewing Rioy blends such as Ariosa. Even aggressive promotions to reinvigorate Ariosa sales failed.
In March 1912, John Arbuckle died at the age of seventy-four, leaving an estate valued at $20 million. Arbuckle had provided “floating hotels” for the homeless, brought “fresh air” children from New York City to his New Paltz farm, and planned a refuge for the handicapped, along with numerous other philanthropies. He died without a will—surprising for such a pragmatic businessman. The business, along with his New Paltz farm, eventually devolved to his nephew, Will Jamison, and to Arbuckle’s two sisters, Mrs. Robert Jamison and Christina Arbuckle.35
Jamison recognized that something had to be done about the erosion of Ariosa’s market share. He came out with a ground coffee, but he also decided on a more radical departure. Like Joel Cheek, he would offer a high-end coffee, a top-quality brand to appeal to refined tastes. Cautiously, the company approached an advertising firm for help in naming and launching the new brand. Up until this time Arbuckle Brothers had relied primarily on word-of-mouth, cheap prices, and premium coupons to sell its coffee.
Jamison and his executive, G. H. Eiswald, hired the J. Walter Thompson Agency (JWT), where dynamic young creative types sought to bring research, psychology, and a “scientific” approach to advertising. In 1912 JWT’s Stanley Resor and his top copywriter, Helen Lansdowne, arrived from the company’s Cincinnati branch to take over the Manhattan operation. One of their first tasks was to create a campaign for the new Arbuckle blend. It was not really new, they learned, but had been the preferred personal drink of John Arbuckle, who had given the blend as a Christmas gift to a limited circle of acquaintances.
In November 1912 Resor wrote a fourteen-page letter outlining the JWT approach to the campaign for what he provisionally called Aro Coffee. Could Aro dominate the national coffee market, just as Ivory Soap, Crisco, Royal Baking Powder, Uneeda Biscuit, Cream of Wheat, and Baker’s Chocolate had already done? What were the characteristics of those brands? Resor ticked off five factors. Such a product featured (1) high quality, (2) absolute uniformity, (3) an easily remembered name and trademark, (4) wide distribution, and as a result, (5) the product’s purchase becomes “an unconscious act—a national habit.”
The new Arbuckle offering apparently would have no problem with the first two items. Arbuckle already had an excellent distribution network, though Resor acknowledged that the finer grocers, such as Park & Tilford, and chain stores, such as A & P, would resist Aro, preferring their own brands. “The only force which can overcome this resistance of the dealer is consumer demand in large enough volume,” the adman noted. Unfortunately, although the Arbuckle offering might be superior, “the product itself lacks any radically different features.” Therefore, the advertisingmust prompt the crucial consumer demand; it must appeal to emotions more than intellect. Resor quoted the philosopher-psychologist William James: “Our judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on the feelings the things arouse in us.”
Resor recognized that the ads must appeal primarily to women, who bought most food and coffee. “Even before a woman tastes it, she will have made up her mind that it is unusually good and that it is the coffee she has been looking for.” Coffee offered a fertile field for such advertising, Resor argued. “The fact that people spend an amount of money for coffee out of proportion to their incomes . . . in spite of the high costs and the sensational advertising done by Postum” boded well for Aro.
Addressing the all-important “name that will wear,” the Arbuckle men suggested that the new brand be called Arbuckle’s Christmas, Gift, or Guest Coffee, but Resor and his colleagues convinced them that such a generic name would never do. Besides, few people asked for Ariosa. Because the coupons were signed “Arbuckle Bros.,” most consumers thought of the cheap brand as “Arbuckle’s” and JWT didn’t want the new brand to cannibalize Ariosa sales or be pulled down by its low-class image. How they finally arrived at Yuban isn’t clear. One story has it that it was a truncation of “Yuletide Banquet.” It is likely, however, that it was simply created as an aristocratic-sounding nonsense title.
Resor next outlined the qualities of the container. It should be attractive, distinguished, and memorable. “The air-tight, sealed package, which is broken by the woman herself,” would help by “creating the idea the coffee contained inside is absolutely untouched and fresh.” He capped his appeal on the final page. “Advertising is an economical selling method that has been evolved to meet new merchandising conditions. Placing merchandise on the dealers’ shelves is not selling.” Rather, newspapers, magazines, billboards, streetcars, and other advertising media offered ways to make a direct appeal to the consumer. The time was ripe for a national coffee campaign, as evidenced by “the growth of the package idea in all lines and even the intermittent, irregular advertising done by coffee roasters.”
During the summer of 1913 the Arbuckle management tested JWT, approving a $74,000 ad campaign for the metropolitan New York market for newspaper ads, billboards along commuter railways, and subway signs. Over Thanksgiving, the first double-spread advertisements hit twelve New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut papers. Yuban was touted as “the Private Coffee of the Greatest Coffee Merchants,” the blend formerly reserved “for their personal and gift use” at Christmas. Yuban produced “the choicest, most delicious cup of coffee which can be secured, regardless of cost.” The ad ended with the promise that by December 1 “your grocer will be prepared to supply you with this famous coffee.”
JWT printed a list of some 2,500 retail outlets that had already agreed to supply Yuban, inviting the public to call on these grocers. Any dealer who ordered at least twenty-four pounds of the new coffee could supply JWT with names and addresses of 150 regular customers who then received a direct-mail appeal for Yuban, listing that grocery outlet. Twenty-five well-trained salesmen fanned out to sell the trade on “Yuban—The Arbuckle Guest Coffee,” as the coffee-colored label identified it. For the special introduction, Arbuckle made it possible for the retailer to sell Yuban for 35 cents a pound, about the same price as higher-class bulk coffee.
Within ten weeks Yuban outsold any other packaged coffee in New York. In February 1914 JWT ran a full-page ad in the New York papers boasting that over 5,000 grocers in the metropolitan area stocked Yuban. The artwork depicted three high-society women, complete with ostrich-feather hats, taking coffee at a dining room table. “Your guests will be quick to appreciate Yuban,” the caption noted. “Its distinct individuality, its liquor, its aroma, its flavor make it stand out from all other coffees.” Customers reported, the ad continued, that “Yuban is coffee as they have imagined it—that it has the flavor they have wanted for years.” JWT rolled out a similar campaign in Chicago, with equally gratifying results.
As a reporter noted, the newspaper copy, streetcar signs, bill posters, and window displays were carefully designed to convey “this Yuban atmosphere of refinement and ‘class.’” Yet it soon became clear that snob appeal wasn’t limited to the upper crust. Within a week of Yuban’s first advertisement, grocers in African American sections of Brooklyn were breaking down 35-cent pound packages into 10-cent units—all that the customers could afford.
The (Slow) Rise of Women
Though Stanley Resor took most of the credit for the phenomenally successful Yuban campaign, he did not write the copy. Helen Lansdowne did. In fact, the enterprising young woman had written all of his ads back in Cincinnati, where she had begun her advertising career in 1904 at the age of eighteen. Resor made sure she followed him to the New York office. There, she noted years later, “I supplied the feminine point of view. I watched the advertising to see that the idea, the wording, and the illustrating were effective for women.” In 1911 she had been the first woman to attend a Procter & Gamble board meeting, to discuss the marketing of Crisco. “The success of the J. Walter Thompson Company has been in a large measure due to the fact that we have concentrated and specialized upon products sold to women,” she said. “In grocery stores, department stores, and drug stores, the percentage of sales to women is especially high.”
In 1917 Stanley Resor married Helen Lansdowne. As JWT copywriter James Webb Young later observed, Resor himself “had no real flair for advertising,” whereas Mrs. Resor “was an A-number 1 advertising man.” She also hired other women—Ruth Waldo, Augusta Nicoll, Aminta Casseres—as JWT copywriters.
On one level these advertising women made their living by appealing to the sexism of the era, convincing women that their social status and marriage depended on using the correct brand of coffee, facial cream, or cooking oil. On another they clearly represented a new breed of woman who stood for her rights. Mrs. Resor marched in the huge 1916 Suffragette Parade along with several other JWT women.36
Although Lansdowne and her colleagues were making their mark on coffee advertising and marketing, women were far slower to break into the coffee business itself, other than as overworked, underpaid menial labor. At least two women did, however, break into the roasting world. In 1911 Indianapolis-based Sarah Tyson Rorer’s stoic middle-aged visage stared from packages of Mrs. Rorer’s Own Blend Coffee. For a brief period she advertised heavily in trade journals. “Instead of asking you to sell Mrs. RORER’s COFFEE in place of some other, we’ll show you how to sell it where you’re not selling anything now.” If grocers would “just make up your mind to PUSH it,” they would find it profitable. For a time Sarah Rorer’s coffee achieved decent distribution in the East and Midwest, but without the marketing clout of an Arbuckle, her “cooperative” plan failed, and her coffee and face soon disappeared.
Alice Foote MacDougall, on the other hand, achieved wealth and fame through her perseverance as a coffee roaster and, eventually, coffeehouse owner. In 1888 she married Allan MacDougall, fourteen years her senior and an up-and-coming coffee importer on New York’s Front Street. When nineteen years later he died of throat cancer, he left the forty-year-old mother with three young children and $38 in the bank.
Standing less than five feet tall and afflicted by insomnia, an aversion to food, and what she herself called “hysteria,” she decided to forge ahead in coffee, since she knew something about it and considered it a clean, self-respecting business. She leased a small office at 129 Front Street and had stationery printed for A. F. MacDougall. “I did not deem it expedient to proclaim myself a woman by my full signature,” she wrote in her 1928 autobiography. Even so, she couldn’t hide her gender on Front Street, where she encountered overt hostility. The first importer she approached refused to sell coffee to her. Still, she later admitted, “there was a certain zest in invading this very special district where men ruled supreme and where the mighty pulse-beats of a world at work could be distinctly felt.”
At last she secured a supply, mixed her blend, and wrote five hundred letters to friends and relatives explaining her troubles and asking them to purchase her coffee. As she gradually built the business, she sent out one hundred new letters every day. Her insomnia came in handy, since she frequently rose at 6:00 A.M. and didn’t arrive home until 8:30 P.M. By 1909 she was grossing $20,000 a year, but her net profit was only 4 cents a pound. Still, she persevered. “I believe the only way to conquer is to walk where the battle rages most fiercely, and fight, fight, fight until you win,” she wrote. “It is this kind of determination that man has acquired through long generations, and the woman who is to conquer in the business world must acquire it too if she is to succeed.”
She also needed discerning taste buds, a lively imagination, and sales instinct. Determined to train her palate, MacDougall cupped samples, slowly learning to distinguish “the flavor of flat-bean Santos, of Peaberries, of Maracaibos old and new, Buchs, and Bogotas, and my eye at the same time was learning the differences in appearance of the green berries.” She delighted in promoting her Emceedee brand (M.C.D. for “MacDougall”). “Are you entirely contented with your present dealer?” she queried. “Is his aim to make money for himself, or to protect your best interests? Does his quality always satisfy? MINE DOES.” She explained that her price was set barely above cost. “No middlemen, no commissions. I buy here at first hand and deliver to you direct. . . . I buy green coffee. I know just how to blend it, just how to roast it, just how to ship it to you, so as to give you a more delicious drink at the price you want to pay than anyone else.” She offered a money-back guarantee.
Her private and mail-order customers had a disheartening way of going south for the winter and to Europe in the summer, so MacDougall turned to institutions: clubs, hotels, hospitals, and colleges. She repeatedly had to fend off lechers. At one point the steward of a gentleman’s club locked her in his tiny office, their knees almost touching. “A sardonic smile was on his lips. His small black eyes glistened in a quite tormenting way, and for several minutes he plied me with questions, personal and impertinent.” Angry, she demanded—and got—his coffee order and her freedom.
Curiously, this indomitable, tiny woman called herself an “anti-feminist.” She did not think women should be allowed to vote. And her ultimate advice to women who wanted to go into business was: Don’t do it. It’s too hard. “If I had my way, all women would be ornamental,” she declared. Nonetheless, she decided to “utilize the great wave of feminine emotion” called forth by the women’s movement and in 1912 began using her full name, Alice Foote MacDougall. When her son, Allan, who had joined her in the business, left to fight in World War I, she employed fifteen people.
By the time of the Great War, the world’s attitudes and ways of doing business were swiftly changing. The conflict, though failing to make the world safe for democracy, hastened other changes—women’s suffrage, alcohol prohibition, industrialization, automation, corporate mergers—and it proved to be a catalyst for change in the coffee industry as well.