coffee, Nestle, and WWII

There was a time when I started my day with coffee in my early 20s. If I didn't drink coffee, my brain didn't feel like working. I especially love-and-hated instant coffee. I often drank instant coffee because I didn't have money but I wanted to drink coffee. Although the taste was not so good, instant coffee served as a wake-up call for the sleeping brain.


When and how was instant coffee made? How did it imported into Korea?

The fundamental concept of instant coffee was first invented in 1901 by Japanese-American scientist Satori Kato. He developed a water-soluble coffee. However, it did not gain popularity due to its lack of taste, as many of the coffee flavors disappeared during the production process. 

A few years later, Belgian scientist George Washington marketed an instant coffee branded as 'Red E Coffee' in 1909. Since then, Red E Coffee has been popular in the American instant market for about 30 years as a gift or outdoor activity. 

In 1929, a bank name “Banque Française et Italienne pour l’Amerique du Sud, French and Italian Bank for South America” commissioned Nestle from Switzerland, to develop a new coffee to dispose of the beans piled up in every Brazilian coffee farm.

In the early 19th century, Nestle, who had the experience of developing milk powder, which was made into a powder by evaporating moisture from milk, became interested in keeping coffee fresh for a long time and began a full-scale research.



Swiss chemist Max Morgenthaler, a researcher at Nestlé, finally developed a form of coffee almost similar to today's coffee using a “spray drying technique” after eight years of devoting. The world's first instant coffee that can preserve the coffee aroma was born. 

On April 1st, 1938, Nestlé launched an instant coffee brand called NESCAFE in Switzerland, gaining huge popularity. However, as World War II broke out soon after, Switzerland, which was a neutral country, became increasingly isolated and its sales volume dropped sharply to 1/10 of the previous year. To escape the fire of war, Nestlé had no choice but to transfer many of its employees to a branch in Connecticut, the United States. This is where unexpected business opportunities arose. Nescafe, which was not widely known in the United States, was selected as an item for the U.S. military's combat food(field ration). One million boxes of Nescafe produced at a U.S. factory were distributed to the military and sold a year's worth of sales within two months of its release, and during the war, this new instant coffee exploded in popularity as a favorite drink to raise the spirits of U.S. and allied soldiers throughout Europe and Asia.


In the wake of World War I, the United States paid significant attention to "field ration(combat food)." A field ration is a type of prepackaged military ration designed to be easily and quickly prepared and consumed in the field, in combat, at the front line, or where eating facilities are otherwise unavailable. A field ration is one of the important munitions that raises soldiers' morale and affects their victory or defeat in battle. What the United States paid attention to for field ration was “canned food”.

Commonly called "C-Ration," the U.S. military's combat food consists of two cans and one accessory pack, one can of which contains cooked meat or a mixture of meat and vegetables, while the other can contains bread and instant coffee. With the spread of this standardized C-Ration, the U.S. soldiers were able to eat nutritious food even in poor conditions, especially in fierce fighting at the end of World War II.

Coffee was the most popular content in C-Ration. Thanks to instant coffee, which is easy to boil in battlegrounds and can be stored for a long time, the U.S. military was able to maintain excellent combat capability in World Wars I and II and the Korean War.


Below image is one-cut cartoons drawn by an American cartoonist named Bill Mauldin

from Bill Mauldin's <Up Front With Willie and Joe>.

"you know, I'm useless if I don't drink coffee in the morning, "
The person who has to drive is dropping all the matches and drinking coffee. The military officers in the back wait for him in the car. 

William Henry Mauldin(Bill Muldin) was an American editorial cartoonist who won two Pulitzer Prizes for his work.  Bill Muldin joined the 180th Infantry Regiment of the U.S. Army in the 1940s at the age of 19. As a graduate of Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, he used his talent to work as a cartoonist for the Army Weekly Newspaper after joining the army. He created cartoon characters Willie and Joe to create one-cut satirical cartoons about the lives of World War II soldiers. 

He became famous for his satire paintings and later addressed political and social issues. In 1958, he won a second Pulitzer Prize for his cartoon, "I won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and what are your sins?" The man in the painting, wearing glasses, is a Soviet writer, Boris Pasternak in a concentration camp. Boris Pasternak wrote a novel Doctor Zhivago. 



“I won the Nobel Prize for literature. What was your crime?”, October 30, 1958
Ink, crayon, and white out over pencil
Published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 30, 1958