I wanted to write about an interesting journal I have been investigating. The Tea and Coffee Trade Journal, also known as the Tea & Coffee Journal and the Tea, Coffee, and Sugar Journal, began publishing in 1901. Looking at issues from 1925 it was clear the journal covered more than just tea and coffee because there were articles on cacao, sugar, syrups, flavorings, and sometimes even spices. It was filled with ads and articles that featured images of people working, association members, places where crops were grown and processed, and events.
This journal, like many trade journals, was intended for businesses and people in the trades. There were advertisements for publications like Uker’s Tea & Coffee Buyers Guide and companies that made equipment, such as Jabez Burns, a manufacturer of coffee roasting machines. I particularly liked ads for the can companies, Columbia Can Company and General Can Company. There were ads for various tea and coffee companies, traders, and companies like Lipton Tea, Maxwell House, and WR Grace. There were also ads for items, such as chinaware and aluminum measuring spoons, and the companies that made them, like Fargo Aluminum, Miller Fibre Products, and Passaic Metal Wear Co.
While I will be publishing two additional posts, one focusing on coffee and cacao and one on tea, I wanted to start with a quick look at some of the other content. The journal featured several regular columns, including “Practical Retail Grocer,” “Price Current,” and “Mainly About People.” Regular columns looked at the trade in New York, Chicago, New Orleans, and other cities. They also regularly published information on intellectual property concerns, such as new and pending patents and trademarks, as well as a monthly “Statistical Trade Record,” which included import data on coffee, tea, cocoa/cacao beans and spices and export data on coffee, spices, flavoring extracts, peanuts, and prepared or manufactured cocoa/chocolate. Beyond the data in the Price Current column, many of the articles also included statistics. One chart in the July issue had wholesale coffee, tea, and cacao bean prices from 1890-1924.
I wanted to briefly mention the sugar industry-related content because the Library of Congress Business Section has a guide on the sugar industry. The magazine included a regular Sugar Industry column that covered a variety of topics. The August 1925 issue published information on American sugar promotion and brief bits on the Canadian sugar trade and other foreign sugar trade concerns, like the high cost of German sugar. A little chart, with a few statistics from Willett & Gray on U.S. sugar consumption from 1915 to 1925, indicated that in 1915, the total tonnage consumed was under 4 million tons, while by 1925 it was under 5 million tons.
The flavoring and extract industry content was interesting because it illustrated something I had never thought about — where the companies, in an industry I hadn’t considered, looked for information and news. The journal included a regular “Flavoring Extract Trade,” column with information on companies and the industry as a whole. Looking at the columns from 1925, the October issue featured a chart with chemical analysis information for vanilla and other flavoring extracts, organized by brand and manufacturer. The July column reported on the Flavoring Extract Manufacturers Association’s annual convention and included a list of the new officers and the members in attendance, which provided a quick list of some companies in the industry at the time. The August column had a brief addendum on the convention, which examined a paper delivered by C.B. Gardner on the adulteration of vanilla extract.
My goals for these deep dives into specific trade journals have been to provide more information about these publications for anyone who wants to determine if a journal can help them and to show that these types of journals are good for more than just researching an industry. They can also provide additional avenues for researching people and places, beyond the more common newspapers or history books. This has been just a taste of the Tea and Coffee Trade Journal, so keep your eyes open for further posts!
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