A grocery salesman, a coffee broker and a Nashville hotel.

Maxwell House began with Joel Owsley Cheek, who was born in Burkesville, Kentucky, in 1852 and, English Wikipedia says, taught school for two years before travelling Tennessee and Kentucky as a salesman for a wholesale grocery firm. In 1884 he moved to Nashville, where he met Roger Nolley Smith, a British coffee broker who was said to be able to tell where a coffee came from by smelling its green beans; the two spent the following years working on a blend, according to English Wikipedia, citing Mary Cross’s 2002 book A Century of American Icons.

In 1892 Cheek offered the food buyer at the Maxwell House Hotel twenty pounds of that blend for free. The same account says the hotel went back to its usual coffee when the sample ran out, heard complaints from guests, and then bought Cheek’s blend exclusively; after six months it agreed to let him name the coffee after it. The hotel itself, English Wikipedia says, was begun in 1859 by Colonel John Overton Jr., named for his wife, Harriet Maxwell Overton, and opened in 1869 as Nashville’s largest hotel; it was destroyed by fire on Christmas night 1961.

Cheek’s business was first called the Nashville Coffee and Manufacturing Company and later the Cheek-Neal Coffee Company, after his partner John W. Neal, whom Houston History magazine described in 2013 as a lawyer in a grocery firm. In 1928, The New York Times reported that the sale of Cheek-Neal to the Postum Company had been approved; English Wikipedia puts the price at $42 million, and Houston History at more than $40 million. Postum renamed itself General Foods in 1929. Cheek died in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1935.

A slogan with a contested origin story.

The brand’s line is “Good to the last drop.” English Wikipedia says Cheek-Neal began using it in 1915, citing The Coastal; its article on Joel Cheek gives 1917. For several years, it says, the advertisements made no mention of Theodore Roosevelt. By the 1930s, however, ads claimed that the former president had been served Maxwell House on a visit to Andrew Jackson’s home, the Hermitage, near Nashville, on 21 October 1907, and had pronounced it good to the last drop. Houston History calls this “company lore.” English Wikipedia, drawing on Tennessee History for Kids, says local press coverage of that visit quoted Roosevelt saying something different — “This is the kind of stuff I like to drink, by George, when I hunt bears” — and that the company later acknowledged the slogan was written by Clifford Spiller, a former president of General Foods. Even so, a 2009 television commercial featured the Roosevelt re-enactor Joe Wiegand telling the story. The phrase is a registered trademark, and English Wikipedia says it often appears in the logo and on the labels.

The brand also sponsored broadcasting. English Wikipedia lists the radio programme Maxwell House Coffee Time, broadcast from 1937 to 1949 with Fanny Brice as Baby Snooks and, at other times, George Burns and Gracie Allen; the CBS television series Mama (1949–1957), whose family gathered round the kitchen table over Maxwell House; and a 1970s campaign in which Margaret Hamilton played Cora, a shopkeeper who sold no other coffee. In 1942 General Foods contracted to supply instant coffee to the US armed forces, and Maxwell House Instant went on national sale in 1946. English Wikipedia says the brand was the best-selling coffee in the United States for nearly a hundred years, until the late 1980s.

The most unusual piece of print is the Maxwell House Haggadah. Introduced in 1932 by Joseph Jacobs Advertising to promote kosher-for-Passover coffee, it was handed out with coffee purchases; the agency had an Orthodox rabbi rule that the coffee bean was more like a berry than a bean, and so not kitniyot, The New York Times reported in 2011. It has been printed every year since, apart from a wartime break caused by paper shortages. Its cover, once a “dull green,” turned azure in the 1960s and carried the “Good to the Last Drop” logo, according to the historian Carole Balin; in 2011 a new, gender-neutral English translation by Henry Frisch replaced the archaic “thee” and “thou,” and President Barack Obama’s White House Seders from 2009 to 2016 used it. By April 2020, Eater reported, more than 60 million copies had been distributed.

Brands from the coffee-growing and coffee-drinking Americas.

The seven brands in this group all sell coffee, and they come from four countries of the Americas: Café Bustelo, Community Coffee, Folgers and Maxwell House from the United States, Juan Valdez from Colombia, Café Britt from Costa Rica, and Pilão from Brazil. Each guide follows its own name back to where it started and forward to whoever owns it today, rather than treating the group as one story.

A coffee brand’s identity is usually carried by a name, a pack and a promise about the cup, and the beans behind it may have been grown far from where the name on the front was roasted. That makes the plain questions behind each name worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, where its coffee is bought, and where it is actually roasted and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its coffee comes from and where it is roasted — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Bay Street, Jacksonville, to two owners.

Maxwell House is roasted in Florida. The Coastal reported in 2019 that Cheek-Neal opened a plant on Bay Street in Jacksonville in 1910 and built a larger one nearby in 1924, “the plant that still exists today,” and that it had become the last remaining Maxwell House plant in the United States; English Wikipedia describes it as the single operating plant for the North American market. Other plants have closed. The one in Hoboken, New Jersey, whose rooftop sign of the brand name and a dripping coffee cup could be seen from New York across the Hudson, was set to shut in 1990, UPI reported that June. In Houston, Houston History says, Maxwell House moved into a former Ford Model T plant in 1946 and in 1988 added a sixteen-storey tower with a neon cup sign; Kraft sold the plant to Maximus Coffee Group in 2006, and the Houston Chronicle reported in 2018 that it would close. The San Leandro plant in California closed in 2016, according to English Wikipedia.

The owners changed too. Philip Morris bought General Foods in 1985 and combined it with Kraft as Kraft General Foods, and the Kraft Foods name returned in 1995, English Wikipedia says. When Kraft Foods Inc. split in 2012, the rights to Maxwell House were divided: Kraft Heinz, formed in 2015, owns the brand in North America, and JDE Peet’s owns it in the rest of the world. Kraft Heinz announced plans in September 2025 to separate into two companies; its board paused that work in February 2026, and in May 2026 the company said the timing and completion of the proposal remained uncertain. The US website, maxwellhouse.com, now redirects to a Kraft Heinz brand page selling ground, instant and pod coffee under the “Good to the last drop” line. In September 2025 Kraft Heinz briefly renamed the coffee “Maxwell Apartment” for National Coffee Day, selling it only on Amazon as a twelve-month “lease” and calling it the first rebrand in 133 years.

For a design guide, Maxwell House shows how a hotel’s name, a six-word slogan and a blue-covered book handed out at the grocery store can carry a coffee for more than a century. Compare Gevalia, another coffee name split between two owners, and Douwe Egberts, the Dutch roaster at the root of JDE Peet’s. For this guide we use deep blue, azure and roast brown with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Maxwell House’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.