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

by Mark Pendergrast

  By the end of 1937 Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy drove the Maxwell House Show Boat off the air. In 1938 Maxwell House sponsored Fanny Brice as the hysterical Baby Snooks, along with an entire stable of MGM stars, twenty-two of whom appeared on the first show, including George Murphy, Buddy Ebsen, Sophie Tucker, Judy Garland, Jeannette MacDonald, and Allan Jones. In addition to being good to the last drop, Maxwell House now boasted of its “Friendly Stimulation” and “Radiant Roasting.”

  Coffee Brutes and Bruises

  The battle for coffee market share in the United States intensified in the mid-1930s with attack ads. Chase & Sanborn’s print assaults escalated. “Stale Coffee loses flavor . . . is nervously irritating,” an ad proclaimed late in 1934. A cartoon strip provided a dramatic—and alarming—illustration: “Here’s your coffee, dear,” a wife says to her scowling businessman husband over the breakfast table. “I thought we were too old to play mud pies,” he growls. Flinging the hot coffee at her, he yells, “What did you put in it this time? Bricks or gunpowder? See how you like it!” She cries, “Oh, you brute! I’m all black and blue.” In the final two frames she wears a catcher’s mask and holds a shield while offering him a cup of Chase & Sanborn. “The grocer said no husband would ever throw a cup of dated coffee,” she observes anxiously. “I’ll soon find out.” The husband loves it. “Take off the mask, darling. Your grocer knows his coffee. This is too fresh and good to waste a drop.”

  Wives, hoped J. Walter Thompson admen, would purchase Chase & Sanborn in hopes of avoiding such confrontations; or perhaps the ad appealed to men—emasculated and powerless during the Depression—who could at least feel that they were asserting themselves at home through their choice of coffee.63

  Hills Brothers Coffee ads weren’t quite so negative or violent, but they were equally sexist.64 “Block That Kick,” a 1933 ad headline read. “If His Royal Highness, the husband of your house, starts to kick about the coffee—block it at once with Hills Bros. Coffee.” The ad went on to assure the housewife that “there’s nothing that soothes the savage masculine heart more quickly than steaming cups of this magnificent brew.”65 Trying to lure back consumers who were buying bargain brands, the company instituted a Coffee Floaters campaign to stop “floating” from one brand to another. “I’m tired of this confounded changing of coffees, Mary,” a husband yells. The solution is to stick with Hills Brothers, which according to the ad, “actually made more delicious cups” than the cheaper brands.

  To halt sliding sales—particularly after Maxwell House lowered its price by a nickel—Gray Hills reluctantly authorized spot radio ads in 1934, featuring an orchestral “hit of the day” and a human interest skit about Coffee Floaters. That same year the company established a beachhead in New York City in some two hundred stores, sending a half-pound sample to each customer on a grocer’s list. They did not advertise in the papers or blanket the city as they had in Chicago, however, and Red Can failed to capture the East Coast market. Nonetheless, total sales for the year came back up over 30 million pounds and continued to grow throughout the decade. By 1939 Hills Brothers was selling over 60 million pounds a year.

  General Foods’ Postum ads reverted to their roots. Roy Whittier of Young & Rubicam created a cartoon strip featuring “Mr. Coffee Nerves,” a villainous character who caused innumerable problems until Postum banished him, foiled again. Ovaltine, another health drink made of eggs, barley, and malt extract, also sought to woo coffee drinkers.

  The two major decaffeinated coffees were Kaffee-Hag and Sanka. Kellogg’s Kaffee-Hag offered a cartoon strip with Artful Annie, a maid who couldn’t stand her mistress’s erratic performance at the wheel. “Please, Miss Mary, it’s all that coffee that makes your driving so nervous.” Without her knowledge, Annie substituted Kaffee-Hag. As a result, Miss Mary drove smoothly. Other Kaffee-Hag ads warned against “COFFEE HEART,” “URIC ACID,” “NEURITIS,” and “COFFEE SLEEPLESSNESS.” “Does your heart pound and act up? See your doctor. But don’t rebel when he says, ‘No Coffee!’”

  Sanka, owned by General Foods, didn’t employ such overt scare tactics, but its advertising too was negative toward coffee. One ad featured an illustration of an apple. “In it, there are SEEDS. Nobody eats them. They do not make the apple taste better. . . . This is a COFFEE BEAN. In it, is CAFFEIN. Caffein has as little to do with the goodness of coffee as do the seeds with the goodness of the apple. So we take the caffein OUT of SANKA COFFEE. The PUNGENT AROMA remains.” In 1939 General Foods bought Kaffee-Hag, giving it sole possession of the small American decaf market.

  When the Tea & Coffee Trade Journal asked members of the trade for suggestions on increasing coffee consumption, over half answered that false and misleading advertising should be stopped. “We feel that one large coffee firm, in particular, has said so much about the bad effects of coffee that many consumers . . . are giving up coffee in favor of other beverages,” one respondent observed. He of course was referring to Chase & Sanborn.

  Those other beverages were likely to be soft drinks. Indeed “the competition feared most by coffee [is] Coca-Cola,” wrote a Business Week reporter in 1936. “In the South Coca-Cola is sometimes a breakfast drink and now the practice of a ‘coke’ and a cruller in the morning is invading New York.”

  In addition, coffee was seasonal. “The drop in coffee sales from winter to summer is startling,” a 1932 survey noted. “As a mid-morning and mid-afternoon drink,” one speaker at a 1938 coffee convention admitted, “[coffee] has been almost completely replaced by other rapidly growing beverages.”

  For Better, For Worse

  Due to the increasing popularity of the vacuum can and ads about stale coffee, more consumers were learning that fresh-roasted, fresh-ground coffee really was ideal, and that coffee should be kept in a cool, airtight container and used quickly. Most important, the percolator was increasingly displaced by the infinitely preferable drip method or the newly popular vacuum coffeemaker. Glass Silex vacuum brewers appeared in upscale restaurants and kitchens, where the dramatic brewing method—in which water from a lower container boils into a higher one, only to be sucked back through the coffee when a partial vacuum ensued—could impress the bridge club.66

  Surveys during the Depression showed that a growing number of households were switching from perk to drip and vacuum methods. Still, 40 percent of those surveyed used an inadequate amount of coffee, regardless of their brewing habits. Many roasters, including Maxwell House, took advantage of the situation to advertise different grinds for different methods (coarse for percolator, medium for drip, and finer for vacuum), while others, such as Hills Brothers, advertised the “Correct Grind” for all methods.

  The net effect, according to former advertising copywriter Helen Woodward, was simply to confuse the consumer. “The housewife experiments with percolators, with drip coffee, with Silex machines, and still most of the time the coffee isn’t right,” Woodward wrote in 1937. “She is battered and bewildered by new packages and new brands, by advertising.”

  In general, the Depression had a paradoxical effect on coffee quality in the United States. Due to lower prices and better education, consumers were developing an appreciation for the finer coffees of the world, such as Colombians and Kenyans. They also took greater care to avoid stale beans, utilize a proper grind, and brew by drip or vacuum pot. At the same time, fierce competition caused many roasters to cut corners in order to lower costs. They made their low-end blends with inferior beans, and after roasting intentionally added back the chaff to the grind.

  Hammering the Chains

  Jewel Tea, A & P, and other chains were thriving. Due to Jewel’s direct home delivery, promoted through advanced premiums that kept customers hooked, the firm rarely advertised other than through Jewel News, its newsletter. The company couldn’t resist bragging in the Chicago papers when the Depression-era popularity of negative ads reached its peak. “We have never joined the Coffee Knockers Circus,” Jewel piously advised readers. “Frankly, we don’t know
of any coffee so poor that it will make a man desert his family, horsewhip his wife, or shoot his stenographer.” But of course Jewel Coffee “will give you a new idea of just how good a cup of coffee can be.”

  Jewel had its share of troubles in the early 1930s, when retailers and roasters lobbied for local ordinances to keep the wagon men from stealing their coffee business. The first legislation banning out-of-town solicitation was passed in Green River, Wyoming, and such laws subsequently came to be known collectively as Green River Ordinances. To get around them, the company arranged for customers to “invite” Jewel men into their homes. At the same time, fearing that the wagon routes might have to be abandoned, company president Maurice Karker diversified in 1932 by purchasing seventy-seven Loblaw stores in the Chicago area, along with four others from another chain. The company added more outlets to the newly named Jewel Tea chain of retail stores over the years.

  As it turned out, Jewel successfully fought the ordinances in court, and national legislation never materialized. The company added branches in San Antonio, Houston, and Sacramento. By 1936 Jewel operated a fleet of 1,500 delivery vehicles serving over a million customers in 6,000 U.S. communities. The wagon men appeared every two weeks, always at the same time on the same day of the week.

  “Why worry about the competition of advertised brands,” a Jewel executive told the wagon men, “when one can prove to his customer that she pays for the advertising—which goes into her waste basket; she pays for the can—which goes into her alley; she pays for the aroma—which goes into the air?” Instead, he asserted, Jewel offered fresh coffee for the same price and threw in a useful premium as well.

  The most serious competitor to Maxwell House and Chase & Sanborn was still A & P, whose brands accounted for 15 percent of all U.S. coffee consumption. A & P sold three brands of coffee, Eight O’Clock, Red Circle, and Bokar, increasing in quality in that order. Bokar offered a truly superior cup, “vigorous and winey,” composed only of high-grown milds. Whole roasted beans were “ground before your eyes,” as an ad asserted, right in the store. Moreover, all the A & P brands sold for 12 to 20 cents less per pound than most competitors. The company sponsored the fifteen-minute Coffee Time, featuring Kate Smith belting out her hits three times a week, and advertised in local papers. The firm’s entire $6 million annual advertising outlay was paid by kickback “advertising allowances” from other national brands. In fact, the firm didn’t need much promotion beyond its own stores and low prices.

  In 1929 company sales had topped $1 billion dollars for the first time, and A & P was sitting on nearly $41 million in cash and government bonds. During the worst years of the Depression, from 1929 through 1932, A & P earned over $100 million in after-tax profits.

  The Hartford brothers nevertheless watched with concern as their sales slipped by the mid-thirties, challenged by the rise of the supermarket. In 1930 Michael Cullen, a former A & P executive, opened a gigantic food store in Jamaica, Long Island, calling it King Kullen, the Price Wrecker. In 1933 the Big Bear Supermarket chain opened in an abandoned five-story factory building, offering at-cost groceries to attract shoppers to the other departments, such as a bakery, delicatessen, auto parts shop, shoe repair, and barber. Other grocery outfits quickly followed suit, including the Streamline markets of Pittsburgh.

  These new supermarkets challenged A & P, Kroger, and Safeway chains. Whereas the older chains had offered discount goods without home delivery, the supermarkets slashed prices even further by giving shoppers baskets to pick their own purchases off shelves. They also offered free parking to the automobile-driving public. In 1936, with company sales dropping to $800 million, John Hartford of A & P finally convinced his conservative brother, George, to begin closing smaller, unprofitable stores while opening 100 new, big self-serve supermarkets. By 1938 the company had opened over 1,100 supermarkets, each designed to snare at least a 25 percent market share in its area, while the total number of stores had been whittled from nearly 16,000 to 10,800.

  The real challenge to A & P and other grocery chains came from a different direction, however. The surge of chain store growth in the 1920s and 1930s brought protests from independent grocers and druggists. One Indiana legislator thundered that the chain stores were “sapping the life-blood of prosperous communities and leaving about as much in return as a travelling band of gypsies.” A Montana senator prophesied that “this nation will soon be converted into a plutocracy where a few supremely rich men will rule.” Anti-chain store legislation proliferated on the state level after 1931, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that special taxes against chains were constitutional. Thirteen states enacted such legislation in 1933 alone.

  While the Roaring Twenties had crowned the American businessman king, the Great Depression dethroned him. A vociferous new consumer movement surfaced. In 1933, 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs became a best seller. “In spite of the loud cries of rage and pain from small merchants,” the authors wrote, “no action is taken to block the gradual displacement by A & P and Woolworth and other chain stores, of small retailers in America.” Business Week, certainly pro-business, observed in the mid-1930s that “six years of abnormality have shaken the national admiration for bigness, both in men and in corporations.”

  To combat this anti-big business movement, the chains and department stores formed the American Retail Federation in 1935 under the direction of a former Kroger executive. The new association backfired when it was labeled a “superlobby” for the chains, and a congressional investigation subsequently looked into chain store operations. Committee chairman Wright Patman of Texas launched a personal anti-chain crusade that would last for three decades. In an address to the Associated Coffee Industries of America, Patman called the chains “an unholy alliance of tremendous concentrated wealth and enormous influence.”

  Patman’s congressional investigation uncovered the inner workings of A & P, which admitted to receiving $8 million annually in so-called advertising allowances and brokerage fees. To ensure their products received prime shelf space, General Foods paid a total of $360,000 a year to A & P, without specifying how much applied to Maxwell House. Standard Brands paid nearly $100,000 annually for Chase & Sanborn’s advertising allowance. The testimony revealed that A & P extracted an extra 5 percent discount on top of the bulk discounts they already received.67

  The Robinson-Patman Act, intended to eliminate such advertising allowances and other “discriminatory” price breaks for the chains, became law in 1936, though it proved difficult to interpret. John Hartford’s lawyers told him that the Robinson-Patman Act was so vaguely worded that he could safely resume demanding advertising allowances and brokerage fees. He did. In addition, he began to feature A & P’s own brands of coffee and bread more prominently in advertisements. In 1937 the company published Woman’s Day, a new monthly magazine that charged over $1,000 a page for a Maxwell House ad.

  As a result of lobbying from small businessmen and the Anti-Monopoly League, in 1935 the California legislature passed an anti-chain act. The only way to avoid its implementation was to invoke a state referendum, which required over 115,000 signatures on a petition, or 5 percent of the voters. The chains banded together and hired the advertising firm Lord & Thomas. Through radio programs, newspaper ads, booklets, posters, speeches, and essay contests, they spread the message that Proposition 22, the chain store tax, would increase food prices. The catchy slogan, “22 Is a Tax on You!” became the battle cry. As a result, the tax was defeated in 1936 by a narrow margin.

  Wright Patman sponsored even harsher federal anti-chain legislation in 1938. His bill proposed a progressive tax that for A & P would have totaled $471 million, dwarfing the company’s earnings for the year, which were barely over $9 million. It truly was a “Death Sentence Bill,” as the media promptly dubbed it. Patman campaigned hard for his tax, attacking the fortune amassed by brothers John and George Hartford.

  The Hartfords struck back by hiring public relations counsel Carl Byoir and his firm. In 1939 A &
P ran “A Statement of Public Policy,” a two-page advertisement, in 1,300 papers. George and John Hartford could “retire without personal or financial inconvenience and live very comfortably if chain stores were put out of business,” the lengthy ad explained. But 85,000 A & P employees would lose their jobs. Consumers would be denied prices 25 percent lower than the average individual grocer offered. Such a loss would mean that “in millions of homes they would have to leave meat off the table another day a week,” not to mention more expensive coffee. In addition, 8 million farm families would be harmed, since 30 percent of their produce was sold through chain groceries.

  The campaign succeeded. Carl Byoir organized A & P-funded false front organizations, such as the National Consumers Tax Commission and Business Property Owners. During congressional hearings, the public relations men orchestrated an impressive parade of 150 witnesses—farmers, manufacturers, organized labor, marketing authorities, consumers—to testify in favor of the chains. Patman’s bill died in 1940.

  The European Coffee Scene

  During the 1920s and 1930s the European coffee industry developed along parallel lines to that in the United States, but with far less centralization, hype, or price wars. Northern European consumers in general (in Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland) drank more coffee per capita than their American counterparts and demanded higher quality. The French, Italians, Portuguese, and Spanish enjoyed darker roasts that hid some of the bitter-tasting robustas they now added to the arabica beans. The farther south, the darker the roast tended to be, so that southern Italians nearly turned their beans to charcoal, while northern Italians enjoyed a moderate roast. Throughout most of Europe, the superior drip method predominated. Many housewives still roasted green beans at home.