Buffalo (1901)
Instant coffee
For a city that gave us the quintessential bar food, not much happened in Buffalo in 1901. Outside of a presidential assassination, that is.
When the anarchist Leon Czolgosz fatally shot President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition, it had an almost immediate effect on Fair attendance. Like McKinley, it never recovered.
This lack of interest is a shame, as something pretty incredible was unveiled in Buffalo: instant coffee. It was the brainchild of the Japanese chemist Satori Kato. That April, he’d submitted his patent for soluble coffee. He’d already perfected his dehydration process for tea when a U.S. importer asked him to apply it to coffee.
Unlike those in the U.S. who’d tried before him, Kato had devised a method to prevent the rancidity that typically occurred during the transport and storage of other inventors’ products. His process removed the fats and fiber, isolated the oil, and then mixed it with a fat-free aqueous extract. In addition to Kato making his instant coffee shelf-stable, he preserved the aroma indefinitely.
In hopes of becoming the next big thing, the nascent Kato Coffee company set up a sampling station in the Manufacturers Building. It hoped its mail-order tablets would appeal to a diverse audience, including housekeepers, bachelors, soldiers, sailors, explorers, travelers, and hunters.
In its marketing materials, Kato-brand coffee was pitched as a way to quickly enjoy a less bitter, less caffeinated coffee. Apparently, the doctors of the time viewed cups of Joe as “the arch enemy of the nerve system.” This view is why Kato Coffee pitched itself as a more healthful java, especially since it required less sugar to mask the normally astringent taste of coffee at the time.
The company even submitted its product to the independent Columbus Food Laboratory for testing to reinforce its purity claims. A lab report summary was printed on the back of the artful handouts Kato Coffee distributed at the Fair. Sadly, all of this effort was for naught. Kato Coffee was another casualty of Czolgosz’s bullet.
Interestingly enough, a different hail of bullets ultimately led to instant coffee's success as a category. NESCAFÉ, which utilized a different dehydration process and came in a powdered form, was included in the emergency rations of every U.S. soldier during World War II. Once the war ended, NESCAFÉ was distributed in relief packages across the devastated swathes of Europe and Japan.