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

by Mark Pendergrast

  In 1912 the New York Coffee Exchange appointed a three-man committee to study robusta. They concluded that, even in comparison to low-grade Santos, robusta was “a practically worthless bean,” and they banned it from the exchange. They were particularly concerned that Javanese robusta might be labeled Java, which traditionally meant the finest arabica growths.

  Although some robusta plants briefly were exported to Brazil, that country swiftly moved to ban them, fearing the importation of the leaf rust spore, which had yet to reach the Western Hemisphere’s coffee. Elsewhere, however, particularly where hemileia vastatrix had rendered other coffee problematic, robusta plantations popped up, since the Dutch provided a market for the beans. In India, Ceylon, and Africa, the sturdy robusta plant thrived on abandoned tea or coffee plantations, or in hot lowlands where coffee had never grown before.

  Between Cancer and Capricorn

  Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee, now exported a negligible amount of the bean, largely due to graft and corruption extending from King Menelik down to the country’s customs agents, and the situation in Yemen wasn’t much better. Harrar and Mocha still produced some of the world’s best beans, but they were notoriously variable in quality. By this time Jamaica’s Blue Mountain coffee was famed for its full-bodied flavor. Although the British consumed mostly tea, they also appreciated the finer coffees of the world, taking most of the Blue Mountain as well as a majority of the high-quality Costa Rican crop. Americans as well as Europeans prized the sweet, rich flavor of the coffee grown in the Kona district of Hawaii.

  Gradually coffee reached other mountainous regions around the world, located between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. The British encouraged the infant industry in British East Africa, soon to be known as Kenya and Uganda. Coffee had to come full circle, back to Africa. Even though arabica coffee originated in nearby Ethiopia, the seed was imported by missionaries from the island of Réunion (formerly Bourbon) in 1901, followed by imports of Jamaican Blue Mountain stock. Despite the arrival of leaf rust in 1912, the coffee exports from British East Africa doubled each year until World War I delayed developments. After the war, Kenyan and Ugandan planters—all white—continued to expand coffee growth, encouraged by new British-built railways.

  Brazil nonetheless continued to dominate the coffee industry.

  9

  Selling an Image in the Jazz Age

  Professor Prescott speaks of the influence of coffee as a “beneficent exhilaration” and as tending to increase the power to do muscular work as well as the power of concentration in mental effort. . . . In a sad world, and especially in a country like ours, recently and constitutionally deprived of wine . . . the function of coffee in bringing serene delight is an important one.

  —Boston Transcript (newspaper), October 18, 1923

  While coffee-growing countries vied to supply their share of caffeine to the industrialized countries of the North, the jazzed-up North Americans entered a golden age of hustle in which business, advertising, and consumption defined a decade. Coffee emerged as a widely accepted drink, and it fueled the energetic decade of the twenties.

  Prohibition and the Roaring Twenties

  During World War I the American temperance movement had persuaded Congress that the use of grain to make alcohol was an unpatriotic waste of potential food. Along with long-term pressure from the temperance movement, this argument pushed the legislature to pass the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1917, prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States. In January 1919 the amendment was ratified by the states and went into effect the following year, along with the Volstead Act to enforce it. Most coffee men rejoiced, assuming that their beverage would replace booze as the preferred pick-me-up on social occasions. “I believe there are great possibilities in coffeehouses succeeding the saloon as a community center,” one roaster said.

  Coffee consumption did climb slowly throughout the 1920s. “Prohibition has created a situation favorable to increased consumption of coffee,” wrote William Ukers in the Tea & Coffee Trade Journal. “While the coffeehouse idea has not expanded as rapidly as some anticipated, nevertheless coffee cafes and lunch counters have supplanted hundreds of saloons.”42 Changing eating habits also helped, as light midday meals at luncheonettes and soda fountains brought requests for a sandwich and a cup of coffee. Some factories began to offer free coffee as a work incentive. As Americans became ever more mobile on expanding roadways, they chose coffee as the drink for driving. The truck stop meant the coffee stop. “The 2,000,000 American soldiers who went overseas,” Ukers continued, “and there had their coffee three times a day, learned to have a keener appreciation of coffee’s benefits, and since returning to civilian life are using it more than ever before.”

  Yet the most positive influence was probably the first national advertising campaign. Funded by the Brazilian growers via a domestic tax on every exported bag but executed by N.W. Ayer, an American advertising firm, the campaign got under way in 1919 with spots in popular weekly magazines. Most of the ads were bland and predictable. “Your Uncle Sam provided his boys with COFFEE.” Coffee was “the drink of intellectuals.” All ended with the slogan, “Coffee—the Essential Drink.”

  After a New York roaster complained that the ads were “spineless, supine and too damned dignified,” the copy became a bit more aggressive, fighting back at Postum and other coffee bashers. “It is so easy to get false notions, but—of course COFFEE is Healthful.” Ads were placed not only in women’s magazines but also in medical journals. “Don’t Take the Joy Out of Breakfast,” the coffee men begged doctors. “Yet isn’t that just what you are doing when you unreservedly rule Coffee from the dietary of every patient?” The joint advertising committee even produced generic ads meant to help individual roasters. “Good coffee means _______ brand of coffee. It is fresh and clean—with a fine full body and a rare, rich fragrance. You’ll be much taken with the taste!”

  The content of the advertising probably didn’t make as much difference as its repetition and visibility. At least there finally was national advertising for coffee—even if financed by growers in another country. The first year, the Brazilians paid $250,000 for the magazine and newspaper spots, while the U.S. coffee men contributed only $59,000, enough to finance a film, The Gift of Heaven, depicting coffee cultivation and consumption, which was shown in some two hundred theaters across the country and donated to colleges and high schools. They also developed a kit aimed at fourth, fifth, and sixth graders—for suggested use in geography, history, foods and cookery, school assemblies, and even English composition—hoping to indoctrinate young children with coffee’s virtues. A Coffee Club monthly newsletter presented the latest-breaking (favorable) coffee news, along with a cartoon featuring the exploits of Kernel Koffee, a combination tycoon-southern gentleman. “Men of affairs talk business over their coffee,” he explained. “It gives them inspiration.”43

  The national advertising campaign helped boost coffee’s image and sales, but the Brazilians objected that although they were paying for the ads, none so much as mentioned Santos or Rio coffees. Brazil thereafter began receiving plugs in the promotional copy, even though that country’s coffee generally lowered the quality of a blend. In addition, few roasters donated money toward the campaign, even though it benefited them. In an effort to punish nonparticipating roasters, newspaper ads were limited to regions whose roasters had contributed money. Consequently, ads appeared in only thirty-six states in 1921. The joint publicity committee of the National Coffee Roasters Association drafted an appeal to the much-hated peddlers, chain stores, and mail-order coffee companies. “This campaign is yours as much as any other coffee interest’s. You have shared in its benefits.”

  The twenties also witnessed the coffee industry’s first effort to sway public opinion with commissioned scientific research. In 1921 the National Coffee Roasters Association hired MIT professor Samuel C. Prescott to review existing studies on coffee’s health
effects, as well as to conduct his own experiments. After three years his “dispassionate study of the vast literature on the subject,” combined with his “long-continued studies,” led him to conclude (not surprisingly) that “for the overwhelming majority of adults, Coffee is a safe and desirable beverage.” Prescott also asserted that coffee “whips up the flagging energies [and] enhances the endurance.” It was useful as an antiseptic and “an encourager of elimination.” The association’s joint publicity committee trumpeted Prescott’s conclusions (omitting mention of coffee’s diuretic effects) in newspaper ads that reached 15 million readers countrywide. Reporters and food writers across America picked up the Prescott story, often adding favorable editorial comments.

  One indication of just how much the public attitude toward coffee had changed in twenty years was the decline in Postum sales. Vicious anticoffee ads in the grand tradition of C.W. Post no longer worked. In 1924 Postum hired the Erwin Wasey Agency to take over from the old in-house agency. New ads featured radiantly healthy, happy people enjoying the drink. “It is not an imitation of coffee or anything else,” the 1924 copy proclaimed in the Saturday Evening Post. “It is an excellent drink in its own right.” At the same time, account executive John Orr Young junked the old “There’s a Reason” slogan as old-fashioned and silly. The new ads temporarily halted Postum’s sales decline, but the drink would never again challenge coffee’s supremacy.

  The Coffeehouse Resurgence

  Owing to Prohibition, positive publicity, and a public eager to socialize, coffeehouses opened throughout the twenties in major U.S. cities. A 1923 New York Times feature article announced a “Coffee-Drunken New York.” The subtitle explained, “That’s Why It Is So Relentlessly Tense, or, So to Say, Jazzed Up.” Coffee officially entered—and helped to create—the jazz age. The article stated, “The number of men and women who breakfast on nothing but coffee is increasing. And there is an all-day call for coffee as a pick-me-up after moments of stress in business.”

  That same year the U.S. per-capita consumption of coffee rose to thirteen pounds—the figure had hovered around ten or eleven pounds for years—with Americans consuming half of the world’s supply. “You’re the cream in my coffee,” crooned a popular 1928 love song. “You will always be my necessity, I’d be lost without you.” By that time coffee indeed had become a staple of American life.

  Having clawed her way into the man’s world of coffee roasting, Alice Foote MacDougall made her fortune during the twenties with her coffeehouses. Just before Christmas 1919 she opened the Little Coffee Shop in Grand Central Station. At first, in her tiny twelve-by-sixteen-foot space, she sold only whole coffee beans—and not very many of them. Then she added a huge electric percolator to entice potential buyers with the aroma. Seeking to create “a place of rest and beauty, a little haven to entice the weary commuter to sit down,” she began to sell coffee by the cup at tiny tables.

  Then one blustery February day in 1921, MacDougall had an inspiration. “As I entered the Grand Central, I found the huge corridors packed with a damp mass of miserable humanity.” She called her apartment and ordered her waffle iron and ingredients, and placed a small sign in the window, WAFFLES. She gave them away, charging for the coffee only. The following Saturday she tried it again but this time charged for the waffles. “Almost before we realized it, we were serving coffee and waffles every day, and all day, and turning people away by carloads.”

  In 1922 MacDougall opened a second coffeehouse on Forty-third Street and served 250 customers the first day. She hired black women to cook the waffles at each table, “suggesting the Southern-waffle, colored-mammy, log-cabin idea.”44 Soon she added sandwiches and then “all the delicious foods we could think of.”

  By March 1923 MacDougall’s coffeehouse was serving three full meals to capacity crowds, but she was exhausted from eighteen-hour days and took a European vacation. “Soon the beauty of Italy and of the gentle laughing Italian people overflowed my senses and life began anew.” Back in New York, MacDougall rented an adjoining store, doubling her seating capacity less than a year after opening. The new space was narrow, long, and eighteen feet high. Inspired by Italian walls, “broken and crumbling with age . . . every crack filled with tiny vines or baby flowers,” MacDougall transformed the high wall of the annex, and the space below became a small Italian courtyard, or cortile, which is what she renamed the restaurant. She made her coffeehouses “places of rest for New York, as Italy had been a soul-reviving experience for me.”

  At the end of the year, with business booming, MacDougall opened a third coffeehouse, the Piazzetta, on West Forty-third Street, based on a little square in Naples. The fourth, the Firenze, opened on Forty-sixth Street in 1925, imitating Florence. In 1927 she opened her fifth and largest coffeehouse, the Sevillia, on West Fifty-seventh Street, signing a million-dollar lease for the property ($50,000 a year for twenty years). By the time she published her autobiography in 1928, MacDougall’s coffeehouses employed 700 people, served 6,000 customers a day, and grossed $2 million a year. The following year she opened her last coffeehouse on Maiden Lane. Though MacDougall’s extraordinary success was unusual, many other coffeehouses also opened in major American cities during the decade.

  Eight O’Clock Rocks and Jewel Shines

  While coffeehouses thrived during the twenties, so did direct coffee sales to consumers, with A & P leading the way. During World War I John Hartford opened hundreds of stores. After the war the pace quickened, with thousands of new stores. Overall sales rose from $193 million in 1919 to $440 million in 1925, by which time there were 14,000 A & P stores across the United States.

  A & P had become the largest chain of stores in the world. The Hartford Brothers decentralized into six divisions, each with its own president and staff organization. A central purchasing office oversaw subsidiary corporations. Berent Johan Friele ran the American Coffee Corporation, the coffee-buying arm of the company. A German-schooled Norwegian, Friele was raised in his family’s coffee business. While working on the export side in Brazil, he did some work for A & P. In October 1919, at the age of twenty-four, he was hired full time to supervise A & P purchases in Brazil. Over the next two decades Friele became the most powerful and knowledgeable coffee buyer on earth. By 1929 A & P sold over a billion dollars’ worth of groceries, with coffee—ground fresh at the checkout counter—its best seller.

  The Jewel Tea Company also thrived during the twenties, though the company had nearly gone bankrupt at the beginning of the decade. In 1916, with 850 wagon routes and a net profit of $1.4 million the previous year, the company had embarked on a major expansion program, more than doubling the number of wagon routes and opening three new coffee-roasting plants. Just after the gigantic Hoboken, New Jersey, plant—intended to supply most of the coffee for Jewel—went into operation, the U.S. War Department commandeered it for war production. At the same time, with so many young men at the front, Jewel had difficulty finding appropriate new wagon men.

  In 1918 profits fell to a mere $700,000, and in 1919 the company lost $1.8 million. With the company failing, founders Frank Skiff and Frank Ross retired, and thirty-six-year-old John M. Hancock, who had served as a naval purchasing agent, led a financial retrenchment. In 1922 Hancock, newly elected president, hired his old navy buddy, Maurice H. Karker, as the Jewel general sales manager.

  Hancock and Karker lit an inspirational fire under the company. Net profits grew to $624,000 in 1923 and $855,000 in 1924. That year Hancock left to join Lehman Brothers, and Karker took over. By 1926 he had pushed profits to $1.2 million, and the last horse-drawn wagon had been replaced by a delivery truck.

  Perhaps more than any other coffee business, Jewel profited from the motorization of America, though during the twenties the incredible transformation wrought by the automobile affected every business. Villages once had prospered only along railroad tracks. They now formed at the confluence of roadways. Along these newly paved roads sprung up filling stations, hot dog stands, coffee sh
ops, restaurants, and campgrounds—all more places to buy and drink coffee. A more mobile nation could drive more easily to a chain store for bargains, even if it meant spending more on gas, but the better roadways and growing suburbs also allowed Jewel drivers to cover new fertile ground.45

  In 1929 construction began for Jewel Park, the future company headquarters, on two hundred acres in Barrington, a rural community near Chicago. A planned community would surround the plant, with low-cost homes for Jewel employees. By the end of the decade, Jewel had rebounded brilliantly, with $7 million in assets, 1,200 motor routes, 2,400 employees, and nearly a million faithful customers. Coffee provided over half of the sales for the company, with the Hoboken roasting plant capable of turning out 150,000 pounds a day. Jewel had become a fixture in the lives of loyal customers, while every employee was indoctrinated in the “Jewel Way,” exhorted to think like the salesman who said, “If I can get to the point where somebody will refer to me as a typical Jewel man, I’ll feel perfectly satisfied.”

  The West Coast Brands Move East

  In San Francisco, which now specialized in the higher-quality Colombian and Central American mild coffees, Hills Brothers, Folger’s, and MJB continued to battle for supremacy while expanding their sales territories toward the east. Following Hills Brothers, MJB and Folger’s finally had adopted the vacuum can. Folger’s Golden Gate Coffee even began to appear in a red can like Hills Brothers. “These red containers make a striking display. They attract attention,” advised a 1920 Folger’s letter to dealers. The memo itself attracted the attention of H. G. “Gray” Hills, the son of original founder A.H. “Some nerve,” wrote Gray Hills in the margin of the letter he pasted into the Hills Brothers scrapbook.