Mr. Coffee - History

History

Vincent Marotta, Sr. and Samuel Glazer founded a company in Cleveland, Ohio focused on coffee delivery called North American Systems (NAS) in the early 70's. At this time, Marotta had an idea to create an automatic drip coffeemaker. Marotta and Glazer hired two former Westinghouse engineers, Edward Able and Erwin Schulze to engineer the idea. In 1972, the Mr. Coffee brand drip coffee maker was made available for home use. Unlike later models, this original offering with its distinctive yellow and white gingham decal used gravity to immediately pull water through a heating section and allowed to drip freely into carafe below. Later units used thermosyphons (similar to the principle operating geysers) to carry water up from a reservoir as it reached boiling point in the lift tube, identical to the percolator principle but without the endless recirculation and reheating of the coffee.

In 1973, Marotta convinced former baseball player Joe DiMaggio to become an advertising spokesman for the brand. This coffee maker revolutionized coffee and sold more than one million units by April 1974. Prior to this machine, coffee was primarily made in a percolator which often gave it a bitter and burned flavor. The new Mr. Coffee machine produced a much more uniform brewing temperature which resulted in a much better flavor.

A succession of products from 1992–1995, the Potato Perfect, the Mr. Coffee Juicer, Food Dehydrator by Mr. Coffee, Breadmaker by Mr. Coffee, and Mrs. Tea Hot Tea Maker, contributed about one-third of Mr. Coffee’s total annual sales of $174 million by 1995. In the 1980s, Mr. Coffee endured a leveraged buyout and two significant changes in ownership before being acquired by Health O Meter Products, Inc. (eventually known as Signature Brands USA) in 1994.

In 1995, a variation was produced by the same company for tea called "Mrs. Tea". The machine differed from the Mr. Coffee branded appliance only in detail as the company claims the drip process works equally well for tea as for coffee, although the result is often a darker, samovar type of tea.

In 1998 Sunbeam Corporation (eventually known as American Household, Inc.) purchased Signature Brands (Health o Meter and Mr. Coffee). In January 2005, Jarden acquired American Household, Inc.