1933 - Food And Drink

Food And Drink

Ritz crackers are introduced by National Biscuit Co. and will be the world's largest-selling crackers within 3 years. Crisper and less fluffy than soda crackers. They are butter crackers made with more shortening, no yeast, spread with a thin coating of coconut oil and sprinkled with salt after baking. Nabisco bakes 5 million of the new crackers; by 1936 production will be at the rate of 29 million per day.

Chocolate-chip Toll House cookies are created at Whitman, Mass., by innkeeper Ruth Wakefield (née Graves), who figures that semi-sweet chocolate-bar pieces dropped into cookie batter will melt in the oven and thus save her the time and trouble of melting them separately beforehand. The chocolate stays firm and the cookies turn out to be delicious. Wakefield and her husband, Kenneth, bought the inn, built in 1709, 3 years ago, and opened a restaurant. Nestlé Corp. will start distributing chocolate "morsels" for inclusion in homemade Toll House cookies beginning in 1939 and will acquire rights to the Toll House name.

Ford Motor Company's Industrialized American Barn at the Chicago fair demonstrates margarine made from soybeans. Ford chemical engineer Robert Boyer, 34, has developed soy plastics for horn buttons, gearshift handles, and control knobs and is working on ways to substitute soybean forms for conventional foods (see 1937).

Kraft Miracle Whip Salad Dressing is introduced by National Dairy Products. A spoonable product with a unique taste, it combines the best features of two existing products, boiled salad dressing, which is usually homemade, and mayonnaise, creating a new product category. Fancy cooks have for years gone to great labor to make boiled dressing for use on coleslaw, fruit salads, and the like; Miracle Whip will come to be used on sandwiches, tomatoes, and the like and will grow to outsell mayonnaise in the United States.

Typical U.S. food prices: butter 28¢/lb., margarine 13¢/lb., eggs 29¢/doz., oranges 27¢ /doz., milk 10¢/qt., bread 5¢ per 20-oz. loaf, sirloin steak 29¢/lb., round steak 26¢, rib roast 22¢, ham 31¢, bacon 22¢, leg of lamb 22¢, chicken 22¢, pork chops 20¢, cheese 24¢, coffee 26¢, rice 6¢, potatoes 2¢, sugar 6¢.

The wholesale price of sugar falls to 3¢/lb. on the New York market; Puerto Rico has widespread hunger as wages are reduced (see 1920).

More than 11 percent of U.S. grocery store sales are made through 18,000 A&P stores (see 1929; 1937).

Canned pineapple juice is introduced to Americans at the Chicago World's Fair. Dole experimented with pineapple juice as early as 1910, but without a process to rupture pineapple cells and release their flavor and aroma the product was poor. Two Dole engineers developed such a process last year, increasing recovery of juice from the fruit and opening up new horizons for pineapple growers and canners.

Sunsweet Prune Juice—the first commercial prune juice—is introduced by the Duffy-Mott Co. under an agreement with Sunsweet Growers (see 1932; apple sauce, 1930; apple juice, 1938).

Congress legalizes sale of 3.2 beer April 7 and the first team of Clydesdale horses to promote Budweiser Beer appears a day later (the eight bay-colored Clydesdales used to pull the Budweiser Wagon are the idea of Augustus Busch II, whose Anheuser-Busch has survived Prohibition by producing commercial yeast and sarsaparilla).

Brewing Corp. of America is founded by Cleveland entrepreneurs who take over an abandoned auto plant with money received in the liquidation of Peerless Motor Co. They will introduce Carling's and Black Label beers next year.

The prohibition against sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States that began early in 1920 ends December 5 as Utah becomes the 36th state to ratify the Twenty-First Amendment repealing the Eighteenth Amendment after an estimated 1.4 billion gallons of hard liquor have been sold illegally. Former speakeasy hostess "Texas" Guinan has died of an internal infection at Vancouver, British Columbia, November 5 at age 49, leaving an estate of only $28,173, although she is known to have banked well over $1 million in the mid-1920s (see 1922). Twenty-two states and hundreds of counties remain dry by statute or local option, some states will permit sale only in stores controlled by a state monopoly (Pennsylvania will open the first state package store January 2 of next year), but U.S. per-capita consumption of beverage alcohol will increase in the next decade to 1.54 gallons per year, up from .90 gallons during Prohibition, and will rise in subsequent years to more than 2.4 gallons.

Repeal finds roughly half the whiskey aging in U.S. rack warehouses owned by National Distillers (Old Grand Dad, Old Taylor, Old Crow, Old Overholt, Mount Vernon).

Brewery trucks roll out December 5 with barrels bound for taverns, restaurants, hotels, and the like (most beer is still sold by the glass); only 31 U.S. brewers are ready to ship beer as Prohibition ends, but more than 100 new breweries will open in the next year (see cans, 1962).

Repeal of Prohibition dampens the boom in most soft drinks and in ice cream sodas.

7-Up is promoted as a mixer for alcoholic beverages by Charles Grigg of St. Louis, who renames his Lithiated Lemon and sells 681,000 cases of the soft drink (see 1929).

Coca-Cola sales tumble to 20 million gallons of syrup (2.5 billion drinks), down from a 1930 peak of 27.7 million gallons (3.5 billion drinks). A new automatic fountain mixer introduced by Coca-Cola Co. at the Chicago fair mixes the exact amounts of syrup and carbonated water, eliminating the chance of error by a counterman.

Pepsi-Cola is acquired by Loft candy store chief Edward Guth, who begins to market the drink in 12-ounce bottles (see 1920; Mack, 1934).

The E. and J. Gallo winery founded at Modesto, Calif., will become the largest U.S. wine maker. The father of Ernest Gallo, 24, and his brother Julio, 23, has committed suicide 6 weeks earlier after killing their mother with a shotgun. The two brothers have learned about winemaking from a book in the public library and they sink their savings of $5,900 into an operation that will grow to mammoth proportions.

Grape production in the Chautauqua-Erie grape belt of New York State declines precipitously as the repeal of Prohibition reduces consumer demand for grapes to be used for home wine making.