LION COFFEE TRADING CARDS

Today we find coffee roasters and specialty coffee shops everywhere. It was not always so. Originally coffee beans were sold raw or green and the “lady of the house” would have to roast her own in frying pans. In 1864 the LION Coffee Co. was in Toledo where they were in the business of roasting and blending the beans for different flavors. After the beans were roasted they were placed in 1# bags with a LION Trademark, creating their own trademark and sold to grocery stores. The packaged roasted beans were either ground by the store or with an “at home” coffee grinder. Later in 1882 LION Coffee was owned by Woolson Spice Company located on North Summit Street in Toledo. Mr. Alvin Woolson started putting trade cards with each coffee purchase. The advent of improved color printing techniques in the late 1800s allowed the merchant to print an advertising card with an attractive color picture on one side and an ad for the product on the back. The pretty picture was an incentive to buy the product. Mr. Woolson also devise the idea of having the purchaser of Lion Coffee cut out and save the lion’s head logo from the coffee bags and mail a given number of these to the company for a premium. With collectable trade cards and premiums, along with quality coffee, Woolson Spice was roasting a million pounds a week and was by 1895 perhaps the second largest coffee company in the world. The lions head premium idea brought such an overwhelming response, with daily sacks of mail arriving, it nearly bankrupted the company.

The Waterville Historical Society was pleased to have Jimmy Blouch of Littleton, Co. donate his collection of trade cards. They were collected by Fannie Catherine Merifield (1844-1934) of Waterville, Jimmy Blouch’s great-grandmother. We have now put some of the Lion Trade Cards on our PastPerfectOnline site at https://watervillehistory.pastperfectonline.com/Search?search_criteria=Lion&onlyimages=false or come up to the Wakeman Archives to view all of the Lion Trade Cards we have in the collection.

To learn more about the “Amazing Story of Lion coffee” check out the website: https://www.lioncoffee.com/amazing-true-history-lion-coffee/