Invention of the Coffee Break
The vending machine helped institutionalize that most venerated American tradition, the coffee break. The phrase was the 1952 invention of the Pan American Coffee Bureau. Supported by its $2 million a year budget, the bureau launched a radio, newspaper, and magazine campaign with the theme “Give Yourself a Coffee-Break—And Get What Coffee Gives to You.” The practice had begun during the war in defense plants, when time off for coffee gave workers a moment of relaxation along with a caffeine jolt.
While work time off for coffee had been virtually unknown before the war, 80 percent of the firms polled in 1952 had introduced a coffee break. Hospitals instituted them. After Sunday worship services, congregations met for a coffee break with their pastors. The coffee bureau launched a “Coffee Stop” campaign on the nation’s roads to encourage motorists to pull over every two hours for coffee as a safety measure.
Even General Dwight Eisenhower’s presidential campaign got into the act, using the coffee break idea for its Operation Coffee Cup, in which a “coffee party” introduced Ike to voters “on a cheerful, intimate basis.” As Look magazine noted, the coffee social trend was spreading. “Coffee and dessert boost attendance at town meetings; coffee parties raise funds for a symphony orchestra; coffees join teas as vehicles for parent-teacher conferences, spurred by the ease of serving instant coffee to large groups.” Now they didn’t have to bother with messy cream or milk. Instant Pream, a powdered milk product, provided the perfect tasteless mate to instant coffee. “No Waste, No Fuss,” its ads proclaimed.
The Boob Tube
Along with instant coffee and cream came instant entertainment. Though television had made its shaky debut just before the Depression, the new medium didn’t become commercially viable until after World War II. By 1952 TV reached 37 percent of the country’s living rooms. By the end of the decade virtually everyone in America watched television an average of six hours a day.
General Foods, which employed over 15,000 people and garnered over $500 million in gross annual sales by the late forties, was one of the earliest television advertisers, pushed by Atherton “Hobe” Hobler, still in charge at Benton & Bowles. Hobler, who had seen what radio did for Maxwell House, was sure television, with sound and sight, would have an even greater impact. He convinced General Foods advertising manager Charles Mortimer, who was soon to assume the presidency of the food conglomerate.
In 1947 Maxwell House Coffee sponsored Meet the Press in a changeover from radio to television. To advertise Sanka decaffeinated coffee, General Foods sponsored a radio and TV version of The Goldbergs, starring Gertrude Berg. Mrs. Goldberg and her clan provided an affectionate look at New York Jewish immigrant life in one of the first popular situation comedies. Looking out the window, Berg explained to the television audience that they could drink as much Sanka as they liked “because the sleep is left in.”
A 1950 survey of 4,300 television owners showed that TV had a “far stronger effect on food sales than any other commodity.” That same year Coca-Cola paid for a special with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, who had defected from Chase & Sanborn to the soft drink. Coke also sponsored a Walt Disney program, and in 1951, The Adventures of Kit Carson.
General Foods responded with Mama, starring Peggy Wood, based on the popular Broadway play I Remember Mama. At the end of each weekly show, the cast gathered in Mama’s kitchen for a cup of Maxwell House Coffee. That constituted the show’s only commercial, which became an integral part of the program. Mama ran for eight years, until videotape brought an end to live television drama.
In 1953 General Foods added December Bride, starring Spring Byington, to its lineup of Maxwell House-sponsored shows. When Nestlé ran TV spots offering free samples of Nescafé, more than 2 million consumers responded over an eighteen-month period.
The ailing Standard Brands couldn’t afford extravagant television advertising, dooming it to a small market share. In comparison to General Foods’ $27 million net profit in 1949, Standard Brands earned only $8 million. Maxwell House poured $2.5 million a year into advertising, while Chase & Sanborn spent just over $1 million.
The J. Walter Thompson admen were hamstrung not only by an inadequate budget but by Don Stetler, the shortsighted Standard Brands ad manager, who believed that coffee was strictly a local business. He canceled the Charlie McCarthy radio show and refused to run color ads in national magazines. In 1949 new president Joel S. Mitchell, a former Kellogg’s executive, took over and promptly fired the J. Walter Thompson agency, but a new ad agency didn’t help.
Hills Brothers also tried television in the early 1950s, with a blond woman in an evening dress preparing coffee for guests in her kitchen. To schmaltzy music a female voice sang about Hills Brothers, “the friendliest of blends.” Another commercial showed a stiff teenage couple. The boy, sporting a bow tie, opens a can of Hills Brothers and the girl smells it while the announcer intones: “Boy meets girl, girl makes coffee. Hills Brothers Coffee, of course.” The boy picks up a tray and offers it to others sitting in the living room. “Hills Brothers Coffee, the life of the party.” Even in 1951 such ads must have been perceived as fake and forced.
The Hills Brothers TV spots only ran in local markets. So far General Foods was the only coffee roaster with the funds and foresight to produce national television commercials. In addition to Mama and The Goldbergs, General Foods sponsored Captain Video and His Video Rangers, starring Al Hodge, who had been the superhero Green Hornet on radio. Atherton Hobler eventually convinced General Foods to devote 80 percent of its advertising budget to television.
Price Wars, Coupons, and Fourteen-Ounce Pounds
Due to high prices and the increasing popularity of instant coffee, roasters felt compelled to cheapen their brands, use price promotions, premiums, and money-back coupons, and cut quantity. Some regional roasters who supplied the restaurants and institutions began to sell coffee in fourteen-ounce packages, claiming that their coffee produced the same results as a full pound. On its hundredth anniversary, Folger’s advertised that consumers could use “one quarter less” of its blend because it was in some way richer. While one roaster denounced this trend as “disastrous,” he admitted that he too had succumbed. The result? They were all selling less coffee, and the consuming public was getting a diluted cup.
In Europe economizing on coffee wasn’t so much a matter of choice as necessity. By 1952 the French were importing 2.6 million bags of coffee, but over half were low-quality robusta beans from French colonies in Africa. As a result, France’s coffee, never known for its high quality, got worse. European home roasting declined as industrial roasters dominated the market. Still, most Italians bought whole-bean roasted coffee and ground it at home. Italian advertising promised “Paradise . . . in the cup,” but the blend consisted primarily of cheap Brazils and African robustas.
Neglecting a Generation
Even in destitute postwar Europe, a different American beverage was gaining popularity and stealing market share from coffee. On May 15, 1950, Time magazine’s cover featured a painting in which a smiling red Coca-Cola disk with a skinny arm held a Coke bottle to the mouth of a thirsty globe. The legend beneath read “WORLD & FRIEND—Love that piaster, that lira, that tickey, and that American way of life.” The editor of the National Coffee Association newsletter advised that the Time Coke article should be “required reading” for coffee men. He pointed out that a bottle of Coca-Cola cost over twice as much as a home-brewed cup of coffee. Yet soft drink sales were booming. Could coffee take a lesson from this carbonated caffeine delivery system?
A few months later, however, the same editor wrote: “The coffee trade of the United States has never been interested in this group [under 15] as a market . . . because too many parents would prefer their children’s beverage consumption to supplement their diet.” While coffee men were busy cutting prices and one another’s throats, diluting their beverage, and advertising coffee as a commodity, Coke and Pepsi were successfully p
romoting an image of youth, vitality, and as Time noted, the “American way of life.”
In 1950 U.S. coffee per-capita consumption began to fall, as soft drink popularity rose.81 That year the soft drink firms first reached parity with coffee in their advertising budgets: both beverages spent just over $7 million a year. But only two firms, Coke and Pepsi, dominated the fizzy drink industry, while coffee firms battled one another for their slowly dwindling share of the market. In 1953 tousle-haired, twenty-four-year-old crooner Eddie Fisher appeared in Coke Time on TV and radio. Meanwhile, most coffee ads featured harried housewives or hurried businessmen.
The Land That Smelled Like Money
High coffee prices had spawned a worldwide resurgence of coffee growing. “New coffee trees are being planted in almost every producing country in the world,” observed George Gordon Paton, the editor of Coffee Annual, at the end of 1950. “Will the world be ready to take this additional production?”
In the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, Australian Jim Leahy harvested his first coffee in 1952. While prospecting for gold in 1933, he and his two brothers, Mick and Dan, found not only gold, but a million New Guinea natives previously unknown to the outside world. Mick Leahy fathered Joe, a mixed-race child whom he abandoned when he returned to Australia, but Jim and Dan stayed on.82 After the war Jim experimented with a small plot of coffee in the Highlands, where conditions turned out to be perfect for high-quality arabica beans. His first big harvest came in just as prices skyrocketed, and a New Guinea land rush commenced. By 1955 there were seventy-six coffee plantations in New Guinea, fifty-five of them owned by Europeans. Astonished by the wealth they saw around them, natives too began to plant small plots.
In Brazil a new speculative frenzy took hold. “In Paraná,” other Brazilians observed with a shake of the head, “the craziness of the people is tremendous.” Swindlers sold nonexistent or useless land to eager but unwary jacús, yokels who had rushed to Paraná to make their fortunes growing coffee.83 In the six years since the U.S. Office of Price Administration had freed coffee prices, over 500,000 settlers had descended on Paraná.
In 1952 the American journalist Harold Martin flew to the frontier state of Paraná to research an article aptly titled “The Land That Smells Like Money.” “Over Londrina and beyond it for 100 miles a dry fog hangs in the air so thickly that at times it obscures both the noonday sun and the earth beneath,” Martin wrote. The destruction of Brazil’s forests continued apace in the grand old tradition of slash-and-burn. Towns of 15,000 people sprang up in areas that only a few years earlier had provided homes for jaguars, tapirs, monkeys, snakes, and parakeets.
The Paraná lands produced up to five times more coffee per acre than the tired São Paulo soils. The rich rolling plateau, well-watered and 2,000 feet above sea level, appeared to provide near-perfect coffee growing conditions, though periodic frosts posed a significant threat. No one worried about that in 1952, however. The first wave of coffee trees, planted five or six years earlier, were being harvested, and millions more had been planted in the new lands.
The United States encouraged the establishment of experimental agricultural research stations in Latin America. For the first time, scientific analysis of the soil and other methods applied for over a decade to U.S. corn, wheat, and fruit trees were suggested for coffee. Dr. William Cowgill, an agronomist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, worked in Guatemala and traveled as a consultant throughout Central America, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.
In 1950 Cowgill coaxed one of his prize coffee trees to produce an astonishing fourteen pounds of cherries, compared to the average one pound per tree. The specialist said that most coffee planters simply followed tradition and didn’t know what they were doing. Cowgill suggested eliminating shade trees, increasing fertilizer and pesticide applications, and planting coffee trees much closer together.
Coffee research stations also had begun in Colombia, Costa Rica, and Brazil, where Latin American scientists were studying crossbreeding to create hybrid strains as well as studying plant diseases and pests. The most promising Brazilian discovery, named Mundo Novo, was “found” rather than intentionally crossbred. A traditional arabica tree, it proved somewhat resistant to disease, matured in three rather than four years, and produced abundantly.
The Rockefellers threw the weight of their money into such ventures, determined to secure a place for U.S. business in Latin America. Nelson Rockefeller founded the International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC) after the war and in November 1950 created the IBEC Research Institute (IRI). The following year young plant scientist Jerry Harrington moved to São Paulo, intent on discovering a cure for the decline in coffee production there. The IRI men brought the yields up somewhat, but something was missing. The trees still lacked the color and vigor of trees growing on the virgin soil of Paraná.
The Great Fourth of July Frost
As the cherries ripened on those vigorous young Paraná trees in June 1953 during Brazil’s winter, it appeared that the world would finally have a bumper crop. For seven previous years, world production had lagged behind consumption. In March, President Eisenhower lifted the coffee price ceiling imposed by the Korean War and the selling price edged up a few cents. U.S. coffee men hoped that a substantial crop finally would allow a price decline.
On the night of July 4, an unusually cold air mass moved up from the Antarctic and fell on southern Brazil. By noon the next day, many trees had been killed outright by the severe frost. In other cases the leaves had withered and the beans blackened on the branches. As it became apparent that the Brazilian harvest was several million bags short of predictions and that the following year promised a poor harvest as well, coffee futures ratcheted up.
In January 1954 roasted coffee broke the crucial psychological barrier of $1 a pound. Once again housewives, politicians, and the media turned accusatory. U.S. News & World Report noted that consumers wondered “why, when many kinds of farm products are going down in price, coffee prices are the highest in history and are shooting up further.” Restaurants that had raised prices from a nickel a cup to 10 cents during the last crisis now boosted it to 15 cents or even a quarter. Coffee consumption in New York City dropped 50 percent in a few weeks. Movements for “coffee holidays” sprang up across the country.
Postum sales soared, instant coffee thrived, and chain stores began using coffee as a loss leader. A newspaper offered a pound of free coffee with each new subscription to raise readership, while a used car dealer with a sense of humor offered a free car with each package of $600-a-pound coffee.
President Eisenhower ordered the Federal Trade Commission to investigate coffee prices. In February the U.S. House of Representatives commenced coffee hearings, while the Senate assigned two committees to look into the matter. Maine senator Margaret Chase Smith submitted a resolution suggesting that Communists must be behind the coffee price hike. She wanted to ban coffee imports from Guatemala, where, she asserted, “the Communist movement has gained such economic and political strength.”
Gustavo Lobo, the new head of the New York Coffee and Sugar Exchange, defended himself in front of several committees. “Today,” he told Senator George Aiken’s committee, “the very mention of the word ‘coffee’ is quite likely to bring about irrelevant discussions, hasty conclusions, and ill-considered action.” The exchange did not set prices, he explained. It only recorded them. Yes, there was speculation, but that was a necessary function of any commodity exchange. Lobo denied that anyone was reaping enormous profits from coffee. Veteran coffee brokers Chandler Mackay, Leon Israel, and Jack Aron agreed with Lobo. “I would say the jobber [wholesaler] tries to get 1 percent [profit],” Israel testified, “and is happy to get one-half of 1 percent.” The politicians remained skeptical. By summer, roasted coffee had risen to $1.35 a pound.
In Newsweek Henry Hazlitt noted that congressmen were happy enough to enjoy their 75-cent martinis and to seek ever higher butter prices by holding 264 million pounds off the market. “C
ould it be that this strange contrast has anything to do with the fact that coffee growers don’t vote in [their] district, while dairy farmers do?” A Christian Century editorial added, “Americans who grumble may . . . begin to understand how our own agricultural policies look to poor and hungry people in the rest of the world.” These voices of reason were lost, however, in the screams of outrage over purported manipulation and speculation.
In Costa Rica President José Figueres noted that even in that coffee-growing country, domestic coffee cost 90 cents a pound, while the average citizen’s income was a tenth of his U.S. counterpart. The Brazilian government flew four U.S. housewives down to Paraná to see the frost damage. In March their pictures among the Paraná coffee groves appeared in the American media. There they were, dressed in middle-class fifties dresses, surrounding a very spindly, very dead coffee tree. The ladies were impressed with the destruction and promised to report back favorably to American housewives. “We are going to keep our friendship, and it is not going to dissolve in a cup of coffee.” The FTC and congressional committees continued their investigations, determined to blame someone for high prices.84
A CIA Coup in Guatemala
After the 1944 overthrow of Guatemalan dictator Ubico, new president Juan José Arévalo finally abolished “vagrancy” laws and other forms of forced labor, and the state assumed ownership of the coffee plantations that had been expropriated from Germans during the war. Arévalo had not attempted any agrarian reform, however, even though plantations larger than 1,100 acres—accounting for only 0.3 percent of the number of farms—contained over half the country’s farmland.
Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World Page 28