Flashback Friday — "Good to the Last Drop"

Blog post by: Katie Long, Intern at Baer Performance Marketing
 
The most famous sip of coffee ever taken was “Good to the Last Drop”…
We are all familiar with the famous tagline from Maxwell House, the comforting commercials, that picture a hot cup of coffee on a cold morning, ahhh…makes you want to go brew a cup just thinking about it, huh? But did you know that this simple tagline comes with quite a history lesson?
So, where did the phrase originate from? None other than our former US President, Theodore Roosevelt, who, while on a visit to Andrew Jackson’s estate, The Hermitage, near Nashville Tennessee in 1907 was served a cup of Maxwell House coffee and proclaimed it to be “good to the last drop”.
At the time, Maxwell House was made by a Nashville company called Cheek-Neal. The Maxwell House brand had originally been named for a hotel in downtown Nashville that was called the Maxwell House Hotel.
 Ten years later, in 1917, Cheek-Neal began using the “Good to the Last Drop” slogan to advertise Maxwell House Coffee. For several years, the ads made no mention of Teddy Roosevelt. But by the 1930s, the company was running advertisements that claimed the famous origin of the tagline was, in fact, true.

Though this origin has been debated, it was attested to by a college student who witnessed it and who went on to become president of the Tennessee State Historical Society. The Theodore Roosevelt Association, an organization dedicated to preserving Roosevelt’s history and heritage also has paper evidence backing up the story.