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Maxwell House Commercial #1 (1954)

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Uploaded by on Apr 29, 2011

A quite sexist commercial for Maxwell House Coffee from the 1950s. It's "good to the last drop."

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Maxwell House is a brand of coffee manufactured by a like-named division of Kraft Foods. Introduced in 1892, 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.

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." During this time, Coca-Cola also used the slogan "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 21 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.

In 1942 General Foods Corporation, the successor to the Postum Company, began supplying instant coffee to the U.S. armed forces. Beginning in the fall of 1945 this product, now branded as Maxwell House Instant Coffee, entered test markets in the eastern U.S. and began national distribution the following year.

In 1966 the company introduced "Maxwell House ElectraPerk", developed specifically for electric percolators.

In 1969, General Foods in the UK launched granulated coffee. They used a pantomime stage format in the London Hilton for a show called "Once Upon a Coffee Time". In this story the weak "Prince of Powdah" and his mentor "Reschem" travel the world in search of blends. Meeting and falling in love with "Princess Purity", and fighting the dragon "Old Hat", the young man emerges as"Prince Granulo", heir to the Kingdom of Maxwell. This show was written by Michael Ingrams, produced by the Mitchell Monkhouse Agency and designed by Malcolm Lewis and Chris Miles of Media.

In 1976 the product was joined by "Maxwell House A.D.C." coffee, the name reflecting its intended use in automatic drip coffee makers such as Mr. Coffee, which were in the process of pushing aside traditional coffee-preparation methods. In 1972 the company had introduced "Max-Pax" ground coffee filter rings, aimed at the then still-strong market for drip coffee preparation. Although this method, too, has been eclipsed, the Max-Pax concept was subsequently adapted as Maxwell House Filter Packs (1989) for use in automatic coffee makers. By the 1990s formulations for specific preparation methods had been quietly discontinued. The brand is now marketed in ground and pre-measured forms, as well as in whole-bean, flavored and varietal blends. A higher-yield ground coffee, "Maxwell House Master Blend," was introduced in 1981 and "Rich French Roast," "Colombian Supreme," and "1892," a "slow-roasted" formulation, in 1989. In recent years the names of these products have been modified by the company to present a more "uniform" Maxwell House brand image.

Information courtesy of Wikipedia.

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  • Thanks for the info! :)

  • @fromthesidelines Thanks for the info! :)

  • Incidentally, instant coffee, as a whole, didn't really sell in large quantities until the mid-'50s. According to Vance Packard's "The Hidden Persuaders" (1957), there was a perception, before 1955, that women who made instant coffee were considered "lazy", or didn't care about the kind of coffee they served their husbands, family and friends. Maxwell House [and Nescafe] began to stress "real coffee flavor", "value" and "acceptability" in their ads, and sales rose as a result.

  • This is a 1954 commercial. pitched by one of the busiest announcers on TV in those days: Rex Marshall. He could also be seen selling Auto-Lite spark plugs and batteries on "SUSPENSE", Blatz Beer on "THE AMOS 'N' ANDY SHOW", and Camel cigarettes on John Cameron Swayze's "CAMEL NEWS CARAVAN".

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