I was just reminiscing tonight about the 1960s and food and drink. But the following has got me stumped, so I turn to you, dear friends, to see if you can help.
My folks had a particular brand of coffee they drank. Here’s all I remember.
It was ground coffee.
It was in a blue can.
It was opened by a key that you broke off the bottom of the can, and then wrapped a metal seal around the key as you circled the can.
It was not Maxwell House.
Any help here? I’ve googled like crazy and nothing comes up. I’ll know it immediately if someone says it.
My mind immediately went to Yuban, but apparently that was a false alarm. A Google image search shows no blue cans. I can easily picture a dark blue coffee with a short name in orange sans serif type, but I don’t trust my mind on this matter.
In those days pretty much every coffee was sold ground, in a can, and the can had the snap-off key on the bottom to wind up the metal tear-strip to open the can. There really were no other packaging options.
So that part is no help.
Some googling images of old coffee cans shows Maxwell House and Chase and Sanborn as the two biggies for blue cans. I was a kid in that era and those two are also the ones that leap to my mind; no others.
Google says Sanka sometimes had a partly blue can as well. Sanka was pretty much the only decaf possibility in those days so if the OP remembers the parents did decaf that’d be a big clue towards Sanka.
I was hoping to google up a coffee can collectors’ site, but that idea was crowded out by all the links to Etsy where someone is selling old cans.
Of course in addition to the national brands there were some regional brands and some national grocery chains even had own-brand coffee. Kroger is one such that Google says came in a partly blue can.
if the OP can recall the name of the parent’s favorite grocery store(s) that might be a good search term to refine by.
Looking for “vintage coffee can blue” on Bing and looking at the images that show up, the following brands seem to have blue, or predominantly blue cans (that aren’t Maxwell House):
Well, you can store your bolts (and colored pencils, and buttons and dog treats) in the newer plastic coffee cans, but don’t try to bake pumpkin bread in one.
Coffee cans are for unsorted nuts and bolts. If you want to keep them in order you attach baby food jar lids to the bottom of a shelf and keep them in the handy little glass jars.
I recall you could get beans fresh ground at the grocery store and take them home in a heavy duty paper bag. But otherwise, didn’t all the ground coffee come in cans like that with the key?
Thank you for all the responses. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen it yet.
I grew up in Los Angeles, in the Windsor Hills area. Big damn city. My mom shopped at a store called Food Fair and also a tiny little local market that no one will ever hear of called Jack’s Market on La Brea.
Not only thaty, but you could use the coffee can as a cake pan and make cake in your Rival CrockPot ™ slow cooker. I never tried it myself because who wanted to spend six hours cooking a cake that came out looking like a coffee can.
One day, you’ll pick up the can, and wammo bolts everywhere. Give me the old metal can anyday for heavy metal.
