Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2005 - (Page 54)

Brightly colored coffee advertisements, such as the above early 20th century poster for Merchants Selected Pure Coffee, helped attract customers’ attention. Below, an early 20th century label for Luzianne Coffee shows how long this has been a popular product of the Reily Company. owned a small country store named Full Weight where he brewed coffee for his customers. His brew was so popular that he abandoned the store and opened a coffee company in 1919 which he called Community in honor of his customers. Community Coffee has grown into the largest familyowned retail coffee brand in the United States. Prior to World War II, New Orleans had numerous other coffee production companies with an abundance of individual labels. The Southern Coffee Mills — later acquired by IN BATON ROUGE, HENRY NORMAN “CAP” SAURAGE 54 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Fall 2005 today’s Reily Foods Company — produced the still available CDM brand. Other companies included Dixie Coffee Mills maker of Marathon, Crescent Coffee Mills makers of Jockey Club and Old Reliable, Charles Feahney the maker of Poydras Market, the Henry Lochte Co. marketer of Maid of Orleans and Sum-Good, and the Columbia Coffee and Syrup Company with Sum-Mo brand. The New Orleans Packing Co. sold Woman’s Club, while in Shreveport there was Suffragette from the Cuban Coffee Company. The colorful lithographed labels are not only attractive to look at, but provide a picture of life during the early 1900s. While some of these Honeymoon Coffee brands were pure coffee, many and Chicory was were for coffee and chicory a popone of numerous ular additive in many New brand names of Orleans coffees has been chicory. The American Local use of this root of the Coffee Company. Belgian endive has been credited to the Civil War with its accompanying port blockade and hard economic times that made coffee scarce; however, chicory was already being used. The Dutch may have been the first to use chicory as a coffee enhancer, but by the 19th century it was also used in Belgium and Germany. Supposedly Napoleon’s army took it to France where Parisians accepted it without hesitation. How it reached New Orleans is speculative, but French influence here is a logical reason for the area’s taste for chicory. Chicory was used to stretch coffee during hard times and the Civil War was just such a time — but whatever the reason New Orleans consumes more coffee and chicory than anyplace else in the country. One early player in providing ground coffee was the Pioneer Steam Coffee and Spice Mills founded in San Francisco in 1850. One of its young employees, James Folger, eventually bought the company renaming it J.A. Folger & Co. It expanded nationally with a processing plant in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1908 and later built one in New Orleans. Folgers has been owned by Procter & Gamble since 1963, and its plant in New Orleans is an important player both locally and nationally having been consolidated with the shuttered Kansas City facility. Folgers is the nation’s largest coffee company, and with sales of $390 million in 2002-03 it bypasses importers to deal directly with foreign exporters. Since 1993 New Orleans has been the home of the largest bulk coffee processing plant in the world. Silocaf is owned by Pacorini Group, a company founded in 1933 and headquartered in Trieste, Italy, with worldwide operations. Silocaf of New Orleans is located at the Nashville Avenue Wharf in the former Public Grain Elevator which was partially imploded in 1990 for redevelopment. Like Folgers, Silocaf is a modern giant that transports, unloads, stores and processes coffee without middlemen.

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2005

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2005 Contents Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Louisiana State Museum After Katrina and Rita Tabasco: Edmund McIlhenny and the Birth of a Louisiana Pepper Sauce Historic New Orleans Collection Louisiana Association of Museums New Orleans’ Coffee Connection No Man’s Land Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism Bookstand (Book Review by Thomas Uskali) Sound Advice (Music Review by Ben Sandmel) Forum (Commentary by Roy Blount, Jr. )

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2005

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.