Häagen-Dazs
Sometimes all it takes is one brilliant idea. Reuben Mattus (1913-1994) was a Polish immigrant who began his career peddling his family’s ice cream from a horse-drawn wagon. After more than 30 years of selling his wares on a small scale to restaurants and stores in the Bronx, Reuben noticed something about American consumers. They wanted good ice cream, but they also wanted something exotic.
So Reuben put on his thinking cap and came up with the name “Häagen-Dazs” for his new line of premium, high-fat ice cream. Although it sports an umlaut and sounds Scandinavian, the name “Häagen-Dazs” is pure nonsense — it doesn’t actually mean anything in any known language. But consumers took the bait, and “Häagen-Dazs” was an immediate hit with everyone (except dieters, of course). An ironic footnote: Hedging his bets after he sold Häagen-Dazs to Pillsbury in 1983, Reuben Mattus went on to develop and market “Mattus’ Lowfat Ice Cream.”
Maxwell House
Joel Cheek was a little obsessed with coffee. Working as a traveling salesman, Cheek sold a variety of groceries, but it was with coffee that he spent his spare time, trying different mixtures and convinced that eventually he would come up with a better blend than those on the market.
Apparently, Cheek was right. In 1892, Cheek convinced the management of one of Nashville’s best hotels, the Maxwell House, to give his latest blend a try. The reaction of Maxwell House guests to the new coffee was so enthusiastic that the hotel owner decreed that no other brand be served in his dining room, and Maxwell House brand coffee was born.
A few years later, in 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt was staying at The Hermitage, the historic Nashville residence of Andrew Jackson. Served a cup of Maxwell House coffee, Roosevelt proclaimed it “Good to the last drop,” thereby providing Cheek and his company with an endorsement to die for and a slogan still used by Maxwell House today.
A minor and not entirely serious ruckus, however, erupted at the time when a few pundits pointed out that the standard meaning of “to” in such a context was “up until,” raising the question of what was wrong with that last drop in Roosevelt’s cup. Only when a Columbia University English professor was enlisted to testify that “to” in this case could also mean “including” did the pundits quiet down and drink their coffee.
Grape Nuts
It’s not made from grapes and it contains no nuts. So what’s up with Grape-Nuts cereal? It all goes back to C. W. Post’s ideas about what was wrong with the average human diet.
In 1892, Charles William Post, then only 38 years old, was concerned about his health, especially his chronically upset stomach. So he checked himself into the Battle Creek Sanitarium (run by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, of Kellogg Cereals fame) in Michigan. During his stay, Post became convinced that Kellogg’s “pure food” theories were correct, and after leaving the sanitarium set up his own medical boarding house and farm and set about developing a line of healthy grain-based foods.
Post’s first product was Postum, a wheat-based coffee substitute, followed in 1897 by Grape-Nuts, a blend of wheat and malted barley cereals (that just happened to make use of the wheat bran removed in the manufacture of Postum). Post marketed both Postum and Grape-Nuts under the slogan “There’s a Reason,” and though he never specifically explained what that reason might be, he did include a copy of his healthy-eating tract “The Road to Wellville” in each box of Grape-Nuts. Post’s pamphlet, not surprisingly, advised people to drink lots of Postum, fill up on Grape-Nuts, and think positive thoughts.
Though Postum has remained largely a niche product in the years since, Grape-Nuts have been a consistently strong seller in the highly competitive breakfast cereals market. As for the odd name, Post once explained that “grape sugar” was formed during the baking process, and the finished cereal had a “nutty” taste. Voila (more or less), “Grape Nuts.”