‘Mr. Coffee’ Vincent Marotta, dies aged 91

Mr. Coffee

Flags are flying at half-mast outside the fictional World Coffee Press towers today as we pay tribute to Mr. Coffee, Vincent Marotta, who has died at the age of 91.

With the help of his business partner and a couple of engineers, Vincent Marotta set out to create the ultimate coffee maker, one simple machine that could create a great tasting cup of coffee and remove the decade-old reliance on percolators and, heaven forbid, instant.

“Being utilitarian,” he told Forbes back in 1979, “I liked the idea of a coffeemaker that is used just about every day. So I did read and research.”

The rest, as they say, is history.

Marotta unveiled the world’s first electric drip coffee machine in 1972 and used his experience as a real estate developer to market and sell the unit.

The story goes that a couple of months before the machine was officially made available for sale, Marotta and a colleague attended the Chicago Housewares Show in a bid to promote it. Marotta sung its praises, showed it in action and left the City of Broad Shoulders with 5,000 orders

With Mr Coffee’s popularity beginning to take off, Marotta and his business partner, the late Samuel Glazer, managed to talk the baseball Hall of Famer and New York Yankees legend Joe DiMaggio into becoming the face of an advertising campaign.

By 1979 revenues were touching $150 million and around 40,000 units were being manufactured a day. According to reports, Mr. Coffee accounted for half of the domestic coffeemaker market at the turn of the 1980s, despite attempts by more established companies to capitalise on its popularity.

Mr Coffee changed how coffee was made. The appliance – which originally sold for $40 ($228 today, accounting for inflation) – set the standard and became the blueprint for all future machines: In 1991, a Consumer Reports survey found that 90% of coffee-drinkers consistently used a drip-style maker.

“You know, I gotta tell you from the bottom of my heart, no bull **** at all, when I was developing Mr. Coffee, I never thought this coffeemaker would be the greatest success in the appliance industry this century,” he famously said.

Marotta sold Mr Coffee’s parent company, North American Systems Inc., in 1987 for $182 million.

3287862374_5487349731_o

photo: hyoin min (Creative Commons)

header: Porsche Brosseau (Creative Commons)

  • Tweet

Comments ( 0 )

    Leave a Reply