Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
ener, Hershey purchased 65,000 acres of land and financed the building
of a large sugar refinery in Cuba.
13
Bitter-tastingtropicalcommoditieswerenottheonlyoneswhosecon-
sumptionintheUnitedStateswascloselyassociatedwithsugar:California
canneries used refined sugar as a preservative for peaches, pears, grapes,
and other fruits that were packed in a sugary syrup. In addition, citrus
growers favored varieties of oranges—one-fifth of which were destined
for juice production by the 1930s—with high sugarcontents.
14
Finally, ba-
nanas entered U.S. diets as a mildly sweet ''fresh fruit''; their few popular
uses in cookery and baking were confined largely to sweet breads, pies,
and ice cream desserts. Starchycooking bananas, or plantains, did not ac-
quire mass appeal in the twentieth century United States. Sweetness, then,
was a common denominator among this otherwise mixed set of food and
beverage commodities for which mass markets emerged in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries.
A second common denominator was mass advertising and product
branding. From a comparative perspective, the U.S. banana companies'
decision to brand Cavendish bananas in the late 1950s was rather de-
layed. As early as 1865, the Arbuckle brothers sold packaged coffee beans
throughout the United States under the brand name Ariosa. Califor-
nia fruit packers began shipping their delicate products in crates featur-
ing colorful labels in the 1880s. The California Fruit Growers' Exchange
adoptedtheSunkistnamein1908andsubsequentlybeganwrappingindi-
vidual oranges in tissue paper stamped with the Sunkist label. In 1912,
the California Associated Raisin Company introduced Sun-Maid raisins.
By that time, grocery shoppers could find Domino sugar on the shelves
along with products such as Quaker Oats, Nabisco's Uneeda Biscuits,
and Kellogg's Toasted Corn Flakes. According to historian Susan Strasser,
manufacturers used brand names in order to foster customer loyalty and
diminish the ability of wholesalers and retail grocers to steer shoppers
toward competitors' products.
15
Brand names were only one form of advertising. Public exhibitions
(including World's Fairs), pamphlets, recipe booklets, billboards, and
newspaperand magazine advertisements were other forms of mass media
used to promote products in the early twentieth century. Eventually,
radio and television would become key media foradvertisers.The United
Fruit Company and its subsidiaries took advantage of all of these media,
printing text-heavy informational pamphlets in the 1910s, shifting to bill-
boards,recipebooklets,andmarketingstudiesinthe1920s,andlaunching
''The Chiquita Banana Song'' on the radio during the 1940s. California
