Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World

by Mark Pendergrast

  Post took a private train from California to Minnesota, where Mayo Clinic doctors would operate on him. After routine, successful surgery, Post returned to Santa Barbara, where he fell into a deep depression, seldom leaving his bed. “There is a taste of Heaven in perfect health,” Post once observed, “and a taste of Hell in sickness.” On May 9, 1914, Post sent his wife to conduct some business. He told his nurse, “I am very nervous. My mind is perfectly clear but I cannot control my nerves.” Then, at the age of fifty-nine, C. W. Post, the multimillionaire health guru, dismissed his nurse, placed a shotgun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

  Some believed that his wife, nearly thirty years younger than Post, had been unfaithful and that Post had committed suicide upon discovering it. More likely, the man who was worth $20 million upon his death chose to exit the world due to a bruised ego. Mental discipline, Postum, and Grape-Nuts had not made him well, as his book title so brazenly had proclaimed him to be. Post died, but his fortune, and Postum’s anticoffee advertising, survived him. His daughter, Marjorie Merriweather Post, and her second husband, the financier E. F. Hutton, were to continue the business and expand it substantially—creating General Foods and, ironically, purchasing Maxwell House Coffee in 1928. Post must have rolled over in his grave—or perhaps laughed with glee that his daughter was making money from the drug drink he secretly enjoyed.

  PART TWO

  CANNING THE BUZZ

  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

  Growing Pains

  [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 Journal ran 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 wil
l 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.