MaxwellHouse Original 2011

Maxwell House is a brand of coffee manufactured by a like-named division of Kraft Foods. Introduced in 1892, it is named in honor of the Maxwell House Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee. For many years until the late 1980s it was the largest-selling coffee in the U.S. and is currently (ca. 2007) second behind Folgers, which is manufactured by The J.M. Smucker Co. The company recently unveiled a new slogan, "Good Just Got Great," visible on their website. However, it is best known for its longtime slogan, "Good to the last drop," and is still running ads featuring the line.

In 1917, Cheek-Neal began using a "Good to the Last Drop" slogan to advertise their Maxwell House Coffee. For several years, the ads made no mention of Theodore Roosevelt as the phrase's originator. By the 1930s, however, the company was running advertisements that claimed that the former President had taken a sip of Maxwell House Coffee on a visit to Andrew Jackson's estate, The Hermitage, near Nashville on October 21, 1907 and that when served coffee he had proclaimed it to be "Good to the Last Drop." During this time, Coca-Cola also used the slogan "Good to the last drop". In modern times, Maxwell House has distanced itself from its own original claim stating that the slogan was actually written by Clifford Spiller, former president of General Foods Corporation, and did not come from a Roosevelt remark overheard by Cheek-Neal. The phrase remains a registered trademark for the product and appears on its logo. While the veracity of the Roosevelt relation to the phrase has never been historically established in the press of local papers that covered Roosevelt's October 21 visit and one of his coffee drinking episodes, without doubt, the Maxwell House Company, itself, for many years, claimed in its own advertising that the Roosevelt story was true. In 2009, Maxwell House ran a commercial with Roosevelt repriser, Joe Wiegand telling the "Last Drop" story. The Theodore Roosevelt Association, an organization dedicated to preserving Roosevelt's history and heritage, has paper evidence backing up the story.