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 advertising must 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 n
onsense 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 mi
ddlemen, 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.
Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World Page 17
