Instant Failure

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 President William McKinley was fatally shot by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz 11 days into the Pan-American Exposition, it had an almost immediate effect on fair attendance. The biggest tourism draw in Buffalo ended up not being the fair, but the hospital where McKinley succumbed to his wounds on September 14th. 

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 been awarded the 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 devised a method to prevent the rancidity that typically occurred during the transport and storage of other inventors’ products.

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 sold 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.