I never drank the stuff much but knew lots of people that did. And in the 70’s and 80’s they advertised the absolute living shit out of it. I’m not kidding, you couldn’t watch TV for 10 minutes without being bombarded by one of it’s commercials.
Plus it was the brand of decaf used in quite a few restaurants I frequented back in the day.
Then one day, poof, it was gone without a trace. Not much on the web to explain it’s disappearance.
Just wondering.
I still remember their (terrible) slogan: “Fill it to the rim. With Brim.”
As for the disappearance, the article says just this:
But those are just coffee makers with the name on them, not the Joe itself.
Still wonder why it was in everyones face for 2 decades and then completely dropped off the planet.
I guess that if a product is not going too well you can try advertising like mad. If that doesn’t work, you drop it.
I had assumed the ads drove someone postal and they murdered everyone associated with the brand.
Or it was just terrible coffee.
The other major brand of decaf was Sanka. Apparently it’s still around but like Brim I haven’t seen in years. Both brands in the 1980s were owned by General Foods, which also owned Maxwell House. In the mid-1980s, General Foods started marketing a decaf coffee under the Maxwell House brand and it seems that the other two brands were de-emphasized.
Freeze-dried coffee was a trend that ended when home coffeemakers became ubiquitous.
In addition, manufacturers started realizing that it was easier to create a variety of a successful brand than to come up with a new brand. It’s easier to promote one brand – Maxwell House – than several (an ad for regular Maxwell House will put the name in front of consumers, including those who drink decaf). So other brands were phased out.
Brim was made by General Foods who were acquired by Kraft. Kraft made Maxwell House and the new company did not need two low end coffees competing against each other so the ended the less popular brand.
yeah, this. the last person I knew who drank instant coffee was my grandmother.
I’m not understanding why the hatred for the slogan, unless it was just overused.
It was a brilliant slogan. It told people that they didn’t have to limit their coffee drinking because of caffeine. They could fill the cup with decaf and not have it affect them. That was better for the customer and also encouraged them to empty the jar more quickly, selling more product. All without a lengthy explanation.
Only a couple of other slogans were that ingenious. “Smirnoff leaves you breathless” came close: you could drink vodka at lunch and not have telltale alcohol breath. “Take Two Alka-Selzter” was in Brim’s league. You only needed one, so the only reason to take two was to benefit the company’s bottom line.
some people say Sanka to mean any decaf coffee. Their color was orange and even now a lot of places use a pot with an orange holder for decaf.
In 1983 General Foods introduced decaf Maxwell House and decaf Yuban. They also had Sanka, which was only decaf. At that point there really wasn’t any need for Brim, or Maxim, their other decaf brand.
I’m not a coffee drinker but IIRC Yuban was supposed to be a premium coffee, while Maxwell House was an everyday drink. Sanka would have its own niche, so Brim and Maxim would have needed their own niches and/or price points. It’s possible to have too many only slightly different products competing for shoppers - just ask General Motors.
It spilled over the rim of my tolerance - especially the giggle that followed every iteration of the slogan.
OP as a general question would make for a good IMHO game. (Basically I’m saying this too pre-corral anecdotes on other cases. :))
pkbites, do you mind if I xpost OP as a reference to kick off such a thread?
Maybe the phenomenon of having special brands of decaf-only coffee, like the phenomenon of having special brands of diet-only cola (i.e. Tab), died out.
The slogan must not have been that great because I didn’t realize that it implied this nor that Brim was decaffeinated.
What annoyed me about the slogan is that it seemed redundant. A brim is a rim.
If you’d watch an ad you’d probably realize this. A typical ad would have someone taking a half cup of coffee. Another person would question this and, when told that caffeine kept the drinker awake, would explain that Brim was decaffeinated. The drinker wold then say, “Then fill it to the rim with Brim.”
Here’s a typical example, for instance. Until this thread, I had completely forgotten about the existence of Brim, but once I saw the name, the slogan came right back to me.
Let’s move this discussion of coffee to the Cafe.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator