History and culture
The history of instant coffee
Multiple inventors developed soluble coffee processes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; instant coffee saw mass adoption during the two World Wars, when it was distributed as part of military rations.
Each section below is labelled by how well-established its claims are — look for the label under each heading.
Early soluble coffee processes
Disputed among historians · late 19th to early 20th century
Several inventors in different countries are documented as having developed early soluble ('instant') coffee processes around the turn of the 20th century. Priority claims for who first invented a commercially viable process are disputed between multiple figures and patents from this period, and no single account is universally accepted as definitive.
Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica coffee and coffeehouse history entries; The World Atlas of Coffee
Wartime adoption
Documented history · 1914–1945
Instant coffee is documented as having seen large-scale production and distribution during the First and Second World Wars, when its shelf stability and ease of preparation made it well suited to military rations, significantly expanding its consumer market afterward.
Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica coffee and coffeehouse history entries; The World Atlas of Coffee
Kato and Washington: the two early American products
Documented history · 1899–1918 · United States
The account in a 1922 trade history, written while the people concerned were still in business, gives a clear sequence for the United States. A Japanese chemist working in Chicago, Sartori Kato, produced a soluble coffee about 1899; it was first sold to the public at the Pan-American Exposition in 1901, and a United States patent on the concentrate and its process was granted in August 1903. Separately, George Washington, born in Belgium to English parents and then living in Guatemala City, devised a soluble coffee about 1906 that was ready for market in 1909; a company was formed in 1910 and sold it first as Red E coffee. His process was kept secret and never patented. Several other American brands followed between 1912 and 1918. This establishes who was selling soluble coffee early in one country. It does not settle who invented it, because other countries have their own claimants and this source was written from New York.
Sources: All About Coffee
The First World War made it an industry
Documented history · 1917–1919 · United States
The same history is explicit that 'it was the World War that brought soluble coffee to the front'. Soluble coffee was added to the American army's reserve ration early in the war, and after experiments with sticks, tablets and capsules it was packed in small envelopes. By late 1918 the army's requirement had been set at tens of thousands of pounds a day, and a company was organised that year specifically to supply troops overseas. After the armistice that capacity turned to the civilian market, with the original patent licensed to other firms. The Second World War repeated the pattern on a larger scale, which is outside what this source, published in 1922, could record.
Sources: All About Coffee
Related
Preparation traditions
How this history is practised today, in CoffeeHQ's international preparation atlas.
Where it was drunk
The institutions this history runs through, in CoffeeHQ's coffeehouse-history layer.
- The Korean dabang — The Korean coffeehouse of the twentieth century — a tearoom by name that ran on coffee, incubated modernist writers under colonial rule, became a music venue with a resident DJ in the 1970s, and was largely finished off by vending machines and espresso chains.