“The golden path to health”: marketing Postum as a cure for coffee abuse in early twentieth-century Sweden

ABSTRACT

Throughout the early twentieth century, the widespread growth of coffee drinking in Sweden led for calls by health reformers, doctors and scientists to implement measures to curtail what they deemed “coffee abuse.” Debates about the dangers of coffee took place in Swedish Parliament and trickled out into the popular press. It was not long before canny manufacturers saw an opportunity to capitalize upon this, introducing coffee substitutes onto the Swedish market. One of the most popular brands was the roasted wheat bran drink Postum. This article seeks to investigate the early marketing practices of Postum in Sweden and how the brand used advertisements to exploit the public’s growing fears around coffee and put itself forward as a viable substitute that was essential for good health. Using a dataset of 200 advertisements published in Svenska Dagbladet between 1926 and 1940, it demonstrates how Postum skewed scientific/medical knowledge on caffeine to their advantage, urging consumers to buy Postum to protect themselves against neurasthenia, insomnia and digestive disorders. In doing so, Postum went far beyond its role as a drink, instead tapping into discourses of wellbeing, morality and productivity, which remain a central part of food marketing today.

KEYWORDS:

• Postum
• coffee
• coffee surrogates
• Sweden
• advertisements
• marketing
• health
• neurasthenia
• insomnia
• digestive disorders

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The most notable experiment was carried out on two twins condemned to death. One was made to drink three pots of coffee per day for the rest of her life, while the other was to drink the same amount of tea. Two physicians were appointed to supervise the experiment and report its findings to the King. The experiment was a failure, however, with both doctors and the King dying before it was completed. Of the twins, the tea drinker ended up being the first to die (Sempler 2006).

2. Post also developed the breakfast cereals Grape Nuts (in 1897) and Post Toasties (in 1911).

3. Information gathered through a comprehensive study of advertisements in the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper archive.

4. The “insomniac” had emerged as a distinct pathological and social archetype in the UK and the USA in the late nineteenth century, while “insomnia” became a recognized term in 1908 following the publication of Insomnia and Nerve Strain by Henry Swift Upson. However, its widespread use in medicine did not take place until the 1930s, especially in Sweden.