Maxwell House
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| Subsidiary | |
| Industry | Beverage |
| Founded | 1892 |
| Headquarters | Tarrytown, New York |
| Parent | Kraft Foods |
| Website | maxwellhousecoffee |
Maxwell House is a brand of coffee manufactured by a like-named division of Kraft Foods. Introduced in 1892 by wholesale grocer Joel Owsley Cheek (1852-1935), it was 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 United States. The company's slogan is "Good to the last drop", which is often incorporated into their logo and is printed on their labels.
In 1884 Joel Cheek moved to Nashville and met Roger Nolley Smith, a British coffee broker who could reportedly tell the origin of a coffee simply by smelling the green beans. Over the next few years, the two worked on finding the perfect blend, and in 1892 Cheek approached the food buyer for the Maxwell House Hotel and gave him 20 pounds of his special blend for free. After a few days, the coffee was gone, and the hotel returned to its usual brand until hearing of complaints from patrons and others who liked Cheek's coffee better, the hotel bought Cheek's blend exclusively.
Inspired by his success, Cheek resigned from his job as a coffee broker and formed a wholesale grocery distributor with partner John Neal, the Nashville Coffee and Manufacturing Company, specializing in coffee with Maxwell House Coffee, as it came to be known, as the central brand. Later, the Nashville Coffee and Manufacturing Company was renamed the Cheek-Neal Coffee Company. Over the next several years, the Maxwell House Coffee brand became a well-respected name that set it apart from the competition.
In 1915 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 when served coffee, he proclaimed it to be "good to the last drop". During this time, Coca-Cola also used the slogan "Good to the last drop". Later, Maxwell House distanced itself from its original claim, admitting that the slogan was 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 of the product and appears on its logo.
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