Maxwell House

Maxwell House factory located in Houston, Texas

Maxwell House is a brand of coffee manufactured by a like-named division of Kraft Foods. It is named in honor of the Maxwell House Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee. For many years until the late 1980s it was the largest-selling coffee in the U.S. and is currently (ca. 2007) second behind Folgers, which is manufactured by The J.M. Smucker Co. The company recently unveiled a new slogan, "Good Just Got Great," visible on their website. However, it is best known for its longtime slogan, "Good to the last drop," and is still running ads featuring the line.

"Good to the last drop"

In 1917, Cheek-Neal began using a "Good to the Last Drop" slogan to advertise their Maxwell House Coffee. For several years, the ads made no mention of Theodore Roosevelt as the phrase's originator. By the 1930s, however, the company was running advertisements that claimed that the former President had taken a sip of Maxwell House Coffee on a visit to Andrew Jackson's estate, The Hermitage, near Nashville on October 21, 1907 and that when served coffee he had proclaimed it to be "Good to the Last Drop." In modern times, Maxwell House has distanced itself from its own original claim stating that the slogan was actually written by Clifford Spiller, former president of General Foods Corporation and did not come from a Roosevelt remark overheard by Cheek-Neal. The phrase remains a registered trademark for the product and appears on its logo. While the veracity of the Roosevelt relation to the phrase has never been historically established in the press of local papers that covered Roosevelt's October 21st visit and one of his coffee drinking episodes, without doubt, the Maxwell House Company, itself, for many years, claimed in its own advertising that the Roosevelt story was true.

Expansion of the product line

While Mark was killed in the kame ha incident of 1925, his alter ego, Practical Perry, lived on and continued the name "Maxwell House" until his death in 1926. Huck felt a strong connection with the two feuding families and it showed a sign of maturity that he sympathized with these families and the two people that perished. Huck first showed how distraught he was when he said “I stayed in the tree till it begun to get dark, afraid to come down.” This shows that he really was scared and realized that the deaths of these two people were very real. The reason that he stayed up in the tree for so long was because “I heard guns way off in the woods; and twice I seen little gangs of men gallop past the log store with guns; so I reckoned the trouble was still a-going on.” This also affected him in such a way that he “wouldn’t ever go anear that house again.” He also explains how he empathized with the families, especially Buck, when he said “I cried a little when I was covering up Buck’s face, for he was mighty good to me.”

Decaffeinated coffee

Although General Foods had been marketing decaffeinated coffee under various brand names (Sanka since 1927 and Brim and Maxim since the 1950s), it had refrained from selling Maxwell-House-labeled decaf products until 1983, when it introduced ground Maxwell House decaf into east-coast markets. (At the same time, a decaf version of its long-established, lighter-tasting Yuban brand was introduced on the west coast.) Maxwell House decaffeinated instant coffee finally hit the shelves in 1985. A further modification of the decaf theme, "Maxwell House Lite", a "reduced-caffeine" blend, was introduced nationally in 1992 and its instant form the following year.

Advertising

During the 1920s the Maxwell House brand began to be extensively advertised across the US. Total advertising expenditure rose from $19,955 in 1921 to $276,894 in 1924, and consequently the brand was cited as the most well-known coffee brand in a 1925 study of consumer goods.

Maxwell House was the long-time sponsor of the early television series, Mama, based on the play and film I Remember Mama. It starred Peggy Wood as the matriarch of a Norwegian-American family. It ran on the CBS network from 1949 to 1957 and was perhaps the first example of product placement on a TV show, as the family frequently gathered around the kitchen table for a cup of Maxwell House coffee. Early television programs were frequently packaged by the advertising agencies of individual sponsors. As this practice became less common in the late 1950s, Maxwell House, like most national brands, turned to "spot" advertising, with the agencies creating sometimes long-running campaigns in support of their products. One such 1970s campaign for Maxwell House featured the actress Margaret Hamilton, the former wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz, as Cora, the general store owner who proudly announced that Maxwell House was the only brand she sold. Maxwell House was also a well-known sponsor of the Burns and Allen radio show, during which Maxwell House spots were incorporated into the plots of the actual radio scripts.

Along with television advertising, Maxwell House used various print campaigns, always featuring the tagline "good to the last drop." The publication of its Passover haggadah by the Joseph Jacobs Advertising Agency beginning in 1933 made Maxwell House a household name with many American Jewish families. This was a clever marketing strategy by owner Joseph Jacobs, who hired an Orthodox rabbi to certify that the coffee bean was technically more like a berry than a bean and, consequently, kosher for Passover. Maxwell House coffee was the first to target a Jewish demographic, and the haggadah continues to represent a synthesis of American and Jewish interests. It was also reportedly used for a Seder held at the White House in 2009 by President of the United States Barack Obama.

Manufacturing facilities

The Maxwell House factory in Jacksonville, Florida

Maxwell House coffee is produced at two U.S. locations: Jacksonville, Florida, and San Leandro, California. A fourth plant (the oldest of the group), located in Hoboken, New Jersey, was closed in the early 1990s. Its enormous rooftop sign, proclaiming the brand name and a dripping coffee cup, was a landmark visible in New York City across the Hudson River from Manhattan. The plant was later sold and demolished. The site, like most New Jersey riverfront property opposite Manhattan, is now occupied by a condominium. The Houston plant was divested by Kraft Foods to Maximus Coffee Group LP in late 2006. In March 2007, the neon coffee cup sign which glowed like a beacon over the city's East End was removed from atop the side of the sixteen-story coffee roaster building.

Maxwell House in popular culture

Blues musician Mississippi John Hurt mentions Maxwell's House in his song "Coffee Blues". In the song, he proclaims that all he "really wants, is a spoonful of Maxwell's House". He even states that he "heard that just a spoonful of Maxwell's House, is about as good or better than 3 or 4 cups of any OTHER coffee" and that it is "Good till the last drop, just like it says on the can."

Tom Waits sings of a sailor who "dreams of a waitress with Maxwell House eyes/And marmalade thighs with scrambled yellow hair" in the song 'The Ghosts Of Saturday Night (After Hours At Napoleone's Pizza House)' from the album The Heart of Saturday Night (Asylum, 1974).

XM Satellite Radio's dance channel BPM featured a disk jockey named Maxwell House (a.k.a. BPM Program Director Blake Lawrence) from 2001-2004. The same Maxwell House now hosts the weekly countdown show at RadioDanz.com.

In Sue Townsend's books about Adrian Mole, the character of Adrian refers many times to a neighbour called Max as Maxwell House.

See also

• Maxwell House Hotel

External links

• MaxwellHouse.com
• Kraft.com, Joel Cheek biography at Kraft Foods