Tarrytown, NY – The Association Between Maxwell House and the Passover Haggadah

Tarrytown, NY – In advertising these days, a long-lasting relationship between a client and an agency is one that continues for three or four years. But a leading coffee brand and its agency are closing in on nine decades.

Since 1923, Maxwell House coffee has been using Joseph Jacobs Advertising in New York as its agency to reach the Jewish consumer market. Maxwell House is believed to be the first mainstream product to have aimed pitches at Jewish shoppers, making it perhaps the pioneer of what is known today as multicultural marketing.

So venerable are the ties between Maxwell House and Jacobs Advertising that they go back to the brand’s original owner, the Cheek-Neal Coffee Company of Nashville.

Why was a Southern-based marketer appealing to Jewish customers then? One reason is that in 1921, Cheek-Neal opened a factory in Brooklyn.

Cheek-Neal was acquired in 1928 by the Postum Company, a predecessor to General Foods. In 1989, General Foods was merged with Kraft Foods to form Kraft General Foods, known since 1995 as Kraft Foods.

The relationship between Maxwell House and Jacobs Advertising is usually in the spotlight this time of year for a promotion that predates the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. But this year is special, as an article in The New York Times pointed out on Saturday, with some new touches in the long-running tradition.

In 1932, Maxwell House began publishing a Passover Haggadah, the book that is read at the Seder table to retell the story of the exodus from Egypt. The Haggadot (the plural of Haggadah) are given away in supermarkets and grocery stores with a purchase of Maxwell House.

It is estimated that more than 50 million Maxwell House Haggadot have been published, making it by many accounts the most widely distributed and used in the world.

Several of the covers described the Haggadah as “compliments of the coffees of Maxwell House” or “brought to you by Maxwell House.”

“When it first began, three owners ago, it was about introducing ourselves,” says Becky McAninch, senior brand manager on Maxwell House coffee at the Kraft Foods office in Tarrytown, N.Y.

Joseph Jacobs Advertising immediately proved its value to Maxwell House when they began working together in 1923 on “targeting the Jewish consumer,” says Elie Rosenfeld, chief executive at the agency.

The founder, Joseph Jacobs noticed that coffee sales among Jews fell considerably during Passover because they believed the coffee bean was a legume and thus not kosher for Passover, Mr. Rosenfeld says.

In stores in Jewish neighborhoods, he adds, the grocers would set the coffees aside during Passover and not sell them.

The agency hired an Orthodox rabbi who declared the coffee bean was “actually a berry or a fruit,” he adds, and therefore acceptable under the holiday’s dietary strictures.

Ads were run in newspapers read by Jews like The Jewish Daily Forward, which proclaimed the rabbi’s certification that coffee was O.K. to drink during the eight days of Passover.

The creation and distribution of the Haggadah that started nine years later was an effort to dispel whatever remaining doubts there were about the status of coffee.

The idea was that Maxwell House would tell Jewish shoppers that “we’re so much a Passover coffee that we’ll give you the Seder, almost,” Mr. Rosenfeld says.

In fact, the ad in the new Haggadah describes Maxwell House as “the original Passover coffee.”

According to news reports, President Obama used the Maxwell House Haggadah at Seders at the White House in 2009 and 2010.

It is also popular at the Rosenfeld house, says Mr. Rosenfeld, who is an Orthodox Jew.

Read full article in NY Times