Coffee Ads from the Past: 15 Classic Commercials and Where to Watch Them

A funny thing has happened to old television commercials. Twenty years ago they were the throwaway content you left the room during. Today they are some of the most-watched videos on YouTube, with millions of views on jingles your parents could probably hum from memory. Coffee advertising in particular got bigger budgets than almost any other consumer category for most of the twentieth century, which means there is a deep well of vintage ads still living online for anyone who wants to fall into the rabbit hole.

The quiz below started as a memory test when this article was first written. It still works as one, but the real reward now is that almost every commercial has been preserved on YouTube. Each answer below has a search link so you can watch the actual ad. The first ten are the original quiz. The five after that cover newer territory, because the ads from the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s are now squarely in nostalgia range too.

The original ten

How many can you identify before scrolling down to the answers?

1. Good to the Last Drop.
2. Everything you love about coffee.
3. We’ve secretly replaced the coffee with…
4. Mrs. Olsen
5. Celebrate the moments of your life.
6. The best part of waking up (extra credit if you can hum the jingle)
7. Our House
8. Fill it to the rim.
9. Cora
10. Juan Valdez

Answers and history

1. Good to the Last Drop. (Maxwell House)

Quite possibly the single most recognizable coffee ad slogan in American history. Maxwell House has been using it since 1917, and the company spent decades claiming the slogan was coined by Theodore Roosevelt after he drank a cup at the Maxwell House Hotel in Nashville. Historians have since cast significant doubt on the Roosevelt origin story, but the slogan stuck and is still a registered trademark of Maxwell House, now under the Kraft Heinz umbrella. Watch vintage Maxwell House commercials on YouTube.

2. Everything you love about coffee. (Sanka)

Sanka was one of the first decaffeinated coffees marketed on an international scale. The bright orange label became so synonymous with decaf that to this day, the decaf coffee pot in most American diners has an orange handle. For a stretch in the 1970s and 1980s, Sanka ads featured Robert Young (better known as television’s Marcus Welby, MD) touting the healthful benefits of drinking decaf. The “everything you love about coffee, without the things you don’t” tagline ran for years. Watch Sanka commercials on YouTube.

3. We’ve secretly replaced the coffee with Folgers Crystals.

The famous Folgers campaign where an off-camera host would announce that a fancy restaurant’s coffee had been swapped for Folgers Crystals, and the patrons would dutifully praise the cup without realizing. The campaign ran from the 1980s into the 1990s and became one of the most parodied ad formats in television history. Watch the original ads on YouTube.

4. Mrs. Olsen (Folgers)

The second Folgers reference on the quiz. Mrs. Olsen, played by actress Virginia Christine, was the face of Folgers from 1965 through 1977. The Swedish neighbor who stepped in to rescue every wife who could not make a decent cup ran for so long that she became a household reference outside the ads themselves. Watch Mrs. Olsen commercials on YouTube.

5. Celebrate the Moments of Your Life. (General Foods International Coffees)

General Foods went after the “girl talk over a hot cup” market with their International Coffees line in the 1970s and 1980s. The tagline appeared over commercials of women catching up in cozy kitchens with lines like “it’s like when you eat chocolate and your boyfriend eats a peppermint, and you kiss.” The product still exists under the Maxwell House International brand. Watch on YouTube.

6. The best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup. (Folgers)

The third and most-enduring Folgers reference on the quiz. The jingle was written in 1984 and has now run for over forty years across multiple recordings, including versions sung by Aretha Franklin and Rockapella. It is arguably the most successful coffee jingle of all time. Hear the jingle on YouTube.

7. Our House (Maxwell House)

Maxwell House licensed the Madness song “Our House” for a campaign in the late 2000s, with employees singing reworked lyrics in front of the Maxwell House plant. The new tagline was “Make your house a Maxwell House.” The campaign was widely considered a creative high point for the brand after years of conservative advertising. Watch the Our House ads on YouTube.

8. Fill it to the rim. With Brim. (Brim Decaffeinated Coffee)

Brim was General Foods’ answer to Sanka in the decaf market. The “Fill it to the rim” campaign featured a hostess pouring coffee and the guest demurring with “only half a cup for me.” The solution was Brim, the decaf you could fill to the rim without getting kept up all night. Brim was discontinued in the United States in the mid-1990s but the slogan still surfaces in trivia. Watch Brim commercials on YouTube.

9. Cora (Maxwell House)

Played by Margaret Hamilton, better known as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, Cora was the proprietor of a rural general store who “only sells one brand of coffee.” The Maxwell House campaign ran from 1976 into the early 1980s and was the company’s direct counter to the Mrs. Olsen ads at Folgers. Watch Cora commercials on YouTube.

10. Juan Valdez (National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia)

The face of Colombian coffee since 1959, when the Doyle Dane Bernbach ad agency created him to distinguish 100% Colombian coffee from blended supermarket brands. Three actors have played the character: Jose Duval (1959-1969), Carlos Sanchez (1969-2006), and Carlos Castaneda (2006 to present). The character now has his own coffee shop chain. Watch Juan Valdez commercials on YouTube.

More ads you might remember

If you grew up in the 1980s, 1990s, or early 2000s, the ads below are now firmly nostalgia territory too. None of them are likely to surface in conversation, but all five drove serious cultural moments in their time.

11. Peter Comes Home for Christmas (Folgers)

First aired in 1985, this is the single most beloved holiday coffee commercial ever made. Peter returns home for Christmas, sneaks into the kitchen at dawn to start a pot of Folgers, the smell wakes his little sister, and she runs downstairs whispering “Peter, you’re home!” Folgers brought it back nearly every Christmas season for over thirty years. Watch the original Peter ad on YouTube.

12. Taster’s Choice Couple (Sharon and Tony)

A landmark in coffee advertising. Starting in 1990, Nestle launched a serialized romantic storyline between two neighbors who kept borrowing coffee from each other. The campaign ran for eleven episodes across multiple years and became appointment viewing, with viewers actively waiting for the next installment. It is widely cited as the first piece of serialized fiction in American TV advertising. Watch the Sharon and Tony saga on YouTube.

13. Hills Bros. Coffee

The brand with the distinctive man-in-a-yellow-robe trade character (officially called the “Taster”) who has been on Hills Bros. cans since 1906, making him one of the oldest continuously-used American advertising characters. The brand’s 1980s TV campaign leaned heavily on rich romantic imagery and that elegant trade character. Watch Hills Bros. ads on YouTube.

14. Yuban “How Much Coffee Goes Into Coffee”

Yuban marketed itself in the 1980s and 1990s with the angle that it was “100% premium coffee beans” while implying that competitors were mixing in lesser fillers. The campaign was effective enough that it actually changed how American coffee companies talked about their sourcing. Watch Yuban ads on YouTube.

15. Suntory Boss Coffee (Tommy Lee Jones)

Not American, but worth mentioning for anyone who watched Lost in Translation and wondered where the joke came from. Suntory’s Boss canned coffee in Japan has been advertised by Tommy Lee Jones playing an alien who comments on the strangeness of human behavior. The campaign has run for over fifteen years and includes more than 40 commercials. Watch the Tommy Lee Jones Boss commercials on YouTube.

Why coffee advertising mattered

Coffee was a workhorse product category for American television advertising for most of the twentieth century. Before specialty coffee shops turned coffee into a lifestyle purchase, the supermarket aisle was where the real money was made, and brands fought hard for shelf space and customer loyalty. The interesting wrinkle is that all of this advertising was for what we would now consider mediocre coffee: commodity-grade beans, roasted dark to mask defects, packaged in cans that were not particularly fresh by the time they reached your kitchen. The transformation of American coffee taste over the last twenty years is the reason most of the brands above no longer have the cultural footprint they once did.

Editor’s notes: reader questions answered over the years

This article has been collecting comments since 2008, and some of you asked about specific ads or campaigns that never got a proper answer. Going back through the thread, here are the ones I can identify. If you came here looking for one of these and never got a reply at the time, thank you for your patience.

Elizabeth G. (2008) asked about a sublime late-80s commercial with a train running through the Andes and the song “La Colegiala,” wondering if Juan Valdez was in it. You were so close, Elizabeth. The ad is the 1981 Nescafé Gold Blend campaign, not Juan Valdez. The song is “La Colegiala” by Walter León, a Peruvian musician, and the spot was filmed on the trains running through the Colombian Andes. It is one of the most beloved coffee commercials ever made in the UK and Europe, and the song became a worldwide hit specifically because of this commercial. Watch it on YouTube here.

John A. (2008) asked about the top three coffee brands of the 1970s. For ground roast coffee: Maxwell House was the consistent #1, Folgers was #2 (and overtook Maxwell House on the West Coast by the late 70s), and Hills Bros. held a solid #3. In the instant coffee market, Sanka and Maxim were the dominant names, with Nescafe and Folgers Instant rounding out the top tier. Coffee market share data from that era was tracked by Maxwell House’s parent company General Foods, and the numbers shifted year to year but those five names ran the category.

Jay Weaver (2009) remembered Brim Decaffeinated Coffee as a grain beverage. Close, but Brim was actually decaffeinated regular coffee, not a grain beverage. You were thinking of Postum, which was a wheat-bran-based coffee substitute made by Post Cereals (later General Foods). Postum was discontinued in 2007 but was actually brought back in 2013 by a smaller company and is still available today. Brim itself was discontinued in the US around 1995. Dick Davala correctly pointed this out in his 2010 follow-up.

Elaine (2009) asked about Butter-Nut coffee. Real brand, Elaine. Butter-Nut was a regional roast brand, owned in its later years by Coca-Cola Foods, with strong presence across the Midwest from the 1940s through the 1980s. The TV ads in the 70s and 80s emphasized the smooth, mellow flavor and used the line “Butter-Nut, the very best of the coffee bean.” The brand still exists in limited markets under different ownership, but you do not see it in national distribution anymore. Vintage Butter-Nut spots on YouTube.

Susan Helmer (2010) wondered if Pernell Roberts (Adam Cartwright on Bonanza) ever played Juan Valdez. No, Susan, he did not. The three actors who have played Juan Valdez are Jose F. Duval (1959-1969), Carlos Sanchez (1969-2006), and Carlos Castaneda (2006 to present). Pernell Roberts did appear in food and beverage commercials after Bonanza ended (and during his run on Trapper John, M.D.), so the confusion makes sense. He may have done a coffee ad for a different brand, but never the Colombian campaign.

Diane S. (2011) was driving herself nutty trying to remember the brand behind “Welcome Pilgrim, your search has ended.” E S guessed Martinson’s Coffee in their reply, and E S was right. Martinson’s was a New York City coffee brand founded in 1898, and the “Welcome Pilgrim” line was their long-running tagline in the late 60s and early 70s, tied to the brand’s heritage and its Brooklyn-Italian roasting roots. The brand still exists today under different ownership and the slogan is still occasionally used in their marketing.

Grant Varga (2012) remembered the jingle “Savarin instant, nice and hot, tastes like it came from a coffee pot.” Real jingle, Grant. Savarin Instant ran that campaign in the late 60s and 70s, and you have a good memory because most people only recall the “El Exigente” mascot from the regular Savarin ads. El Exigente (played by Carlos Montalbán, brother of Ricardo Montalbán) was The Demanding One who would test taste a cup before approving Savarin coffee. Mindleton and Myles figured out the El Exigente connection in their 2010 thread above.

Cat (2012) went looking for the Maxwell House commercial with the line “be a good little Maxwell housewife.” Dave linked a third-party archive in his 2013 reply, which is the best surviving reference. The specific spot Cat described is genuinely hard to find on YouTube, even now. Maxwell House ran many similar commercials in the late 60s with that condescending-husband framing, and most of the surviving uploads are near-misses rather than the exact one. If you find a clean copy, send it to us.

June (2012) remembered Maxim Coffee with Patricia Neal. Real campaign, June. Maxim was a freeze-dried instant coffee from General Foods in the late 60s, and Patricia Neal (who had won the Best Actress Oscar in 1963 for Hud) became the face of the brand. The hook of the campaign was that Maxim was the first freeze-dried instant that “tastes like roasted coffee,” which was a real technical leap in instant coffee at the time. The campaign ran from roughly 1967 into the early 70s. Find the Patricia Neal Maxim spots on YouTube.

Liz Black (2017) asked about Moccona coffee ads where guests would crash through doors and windows after tasting a non-Moccona cup. Moccona is the Douwe Egberts brand from the Netherlands, and the ad campaign you remember ran in the UK and Australia from the 80s through the 2000s. The premise was always the same: a hostess serves what looks like Moccona to a sophisticated dinner party, the guests realize it is not Moccona, and chaos ensues. The Australian versions in particular are wonderfully theatrical. Moccona ads on YouTube.

Frequently asked questions

What was the first nationally advertised coffee in the United States?

Maxwell House gets the honor for being the first coffee brand to advertise nationally with a coordinated campaign, starting around 1907. Their “Good to the Last Drop” slogan launched in 1917 and they were among the very first food brands to use radio advertising in the 1920s.

Is the Mrs. Olsen actress still alive?

Virginia Christine, who played Mrs. Olsen in Folgers commercials from 1965 to 1977, passed away in 1996. She had a long film and television career before becoming Mrs. Olsen, including roles in Some Like It Hot and the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Who played Juan Valdez originally?

The original Juan Valdez was actor Jose F. Duval, who played the character from 1959 to 1969. Carlos Sanchez took over from 1969 until 2006, becoming the longest-serving Juan Valdez. Carlos Castaneda has played the role since 2006 and continues today.

Are any of these coffee brands still around?

Most of them, in some form. Maxwell House, Folgers, Sanka, and Hills Bros. all still exist as supermarket brands, though most are now owned by larger food conglomerates rather than the original companies. Brim was discontinued in the US in the mid-1990s. Yuban is owned by Kraft Heinz. Taster’s Choice is still made by Nestle.

What is the most awarded coffee commercial of all time?

The Folgers “Peter Comes Home for Christmas” ad from 1985 has won more awards and been honored more times than any other single coffee commercial. It has been ranked on multiple “best holiday ads of all time” lists, and the format has been referenced and parodied in countless other commercials in the decades since.

Vintage ads have become a real form of cultural archaeology. If you have an hour to lose, search YouTube for any of the campaigns above and follow the rabbit hole. Half of American twentieth-century pop culture is in there, and most of it was paid for by a coffee company.