Did you know? Cookbooklets and Coconuts!
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What’s A Cookbooklet?
A promotional recipe booklet (also known as cookbooklet), Baker’s coconut recipes, was published in 1922 by The Franklin Baker’s Company founded in 1897. The company was the manufacturer of the retail coconut brand Baker's Coconut.
What was the intention of these little booklets? These were (usually free) promotional materials aimed at marketing the use of newly created food products by brands and food companies. It was direct to consumer print advertising, and a good chunk of propaganda, swindling, and conniving.
These cookbooklets introduced readers to the products and taught readers how to cook and/or bake with them. All of this was done first and foremost to promote sales, create new consumers, and to encourage the public to use (buy) their products over those of their competitors.
Connection to the present: I think a lot about cookbooks and their increasingly narrow function in today’s world as marketing tools, or extensions of people’s brands. It seems to me that these company produced cookbooklets played an important role in establishing and perpetuating this close connection between cookbooks and advertising. A contemporary celebrity/personality (brand) cookbook with their photo and name slapped on the cover is giving the same energy as these 100 year old food brand booklets. I am working on a larger article on this topic.
The practice of publishing and distributing company produced cookbooklets was and still is very popular. Companies want to give consumers every reason to use their products and then buy more, right? Companies hire recipe developers and testers to develop and test recipes for promotional booklets, to be used on food packaging, or to be included in other forms of advertising such as print ads. They hired artists to design and illustrate these materials. Everything had to look and sound as appealing as possible.
In the case of The Franklin Baker’s Co., the goal was to promote and market the use of their two newest canned coconut products; The Baker’s Coconut Blue can with grated coconut in coconut milk and the Baker’s Coconut Yellow can with just the sweetened shredded coconut, later referred to in their ads as Southern Style.
Design:
My partner points out that although blue and yellow are not a painter’s complementary colors on a painter’s red, yellow, blue color wheel, the colors blue and yellow are visually complementary in a red, green, blue (RGB) or cyan magenta yellow black (CMYK) visual display color wheel—like what we see on device screens or color process photography. The takeaway is that yellow and blue visually pop as complementing opposites and it catches our attention. They go together but stand apart loudly. It's a harmonious but attention grabbing color design. It’s also calming, so you trust it and pay attention to it. Exactly the type of relationship the brand is trying to build with their consumers.
Marketing Tactics:
If we take a closer look at the booklet, specifically the introduction, and the language in the print ads, we can see several familiar marketing strategies that are particularly relevant to the current discourse in food advertisement. Reading the booklet in 2024, reads as any commercial or marketing campaign you see on social media. The health benefits of the food product are their central selling point. This is in fact identical to the marketing tactics of probiotic soda brands such as Olipop and Poppi for example.
The language used in the introduction is very intentional and is meant to underscore and solidify the claim that their canned coconut products offer superior nutritional value and are healthier than other brands. And looking at menus (including kid menus) from hotels of the day, you can see that health products such as corn flakes (do you know about Dr. Kellog and his health craze?) are widely available to all ages.
Health as nutrition is on the mind of the modern consumer.
Additionally, they also use language emphasizing the natural qualities of their products by highlighting the fact that no artificial preservatives are used in their products. Something that we hear companies say all the time nowadays even when the product is highly processed.
The booklet states that the only way to get all of the nutritional benefits of a coconut is by eating fresh coconuts, and the shredded dried coconut currently available on the market is not able to provide the same quality of nutritional benefit. Since the company knows that access to fresh coconut is not widely available to most Americans, they made sure to solidify the connection between their own canned coconut products and fresh coconuts. In other words, the brand is making a promise that their canned coconuts are the equivalent of a fresh coconut. The Baker’s Coconut brand and their modern new product are superior to the “old-fashion” coconut products that were currently widely available on the market.
The crux of their argument was the introduction and use of coconut milk. They repeatedly claimed that canning the coconut in its own milk, allowed the product to be just as nutritious and flavorful as the real deal. Additionally, the use of coconut milk is also what made their coconut product overall superior in quality to all other competitors and brands on the market. The inclusion of coconut milk was used to showcase their products as superior in quality, tenderness, freshness, nutritional value, flavor, and taste.
Interesting Fact: Baker’s Coconut encouraged people to use coconut milk from their blue cans in place of cow’s milk. They obviously weren’t doing that for environmental reasons but to sell their product, but the idea of promoting baking with coconut milk in the 1910s and 1920s U.S. is pretty wild.
If you read the copy in their print ads, you will see that Baker’s Coconut constantly makes claims that their canned coconut products make a tastier cake, “our coconut won’t steal your cake’s moisture”. The additional moisture allowed for the cake to stay fresh longer, unlike the cakes baked with the outdated style of shredded dried coconut (a product that they also made and sold themselves since this is what customers have been accustomed to using when baking and cooking with coconut).
The freshness rhetoric clashes with the processing nature of canning. Even though this is a canned food item, the company very intentionally uses words like fresh, pure, natural, juicy, nourishing, wholesome, tender, over and over again in all of their marketing materials. Creating associations and repeating something tends to convince enough people.
As I already mentioned, selling grated dried coconut was not new. The production of shredded dried coconut gained popularity in the 1800s. There were other coconut products on the market. The thing that made Baker’s Coconut special was the introduction and use of canning and coconut milk. The company claimed that both of these things offered a fresher and overall better product. And if no one else is doing it, then it certainly would set them apart! They also get to define that new combination of flavors when the consumer has no direct comparison to make.
Print Ads:
The 1919 promotional ad for Baker’s Coconut in The Delineator magazine includes two recipes. They also explain in the ad how readers can request or get their hands on a free copy of the Recipe Booklet.
Additionally, they encouraged readers to reach out to them directly for product samples if their grocery store does not carry their products. When requesting a can, they asked the customer to include the name and address of their grocer.
What a brilliant form of crowd-sourcing and identifying new stores that could have the potential to carry and sell their products. Let the customers do the work of identifying potential retailers they can then expand into.
Interesting Fact: The story of how this company started is a little insane if true. Franklin Baker, the founder, was actually a flour miller and sold flour. Some of his flour customers were Cuban merchants. When the Cuban merchants couldn’t pay for the flour with money, they offered to pay Franklin with coconuts. He accepted. Franklin needed to do something with all of these coconuts so he decided to start desiccating the coconuts and selling them. Franklin became increasingly interested in the production of coconut and wanted to create a coconut product for home and industry bakers. Franklin decided to close the flour mill and start a coconut desiccating factory in New York. The company became one of the world’s major suppliers of coconut products to the worldwide food and beverage market.
Additional Things I Learned This Week:
Interesting Fact: Did you know coconut was spelled Cocoanut and Cocoa Nut.
Interesting Fact: One of the earliest published U.S. recipes using coconut dates back to 1770. It is a recipe for Cocoa Nut Puffs and published in the A Colonial Plantation Cookbook: The Receipt Book of Harriott Pinckney Horry in South Carolina.
Interesting Fact: The first known coconut layer cake was published in 1881 in What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking. “Now emblazoned in history as the second known cookbook written by an African American woman (but the oldest cookbook written by a former slave), Fisher’s cookbook was — and still is — a massive accomplishment for a formerly enslaved mixed-race girl from Orangeburg, South Carolina” (Bivins 2023) To learn more about Abby (Abbie) Fisher and her culinary legacy read the full “Who Is Abby Fisher? Here’s What You Need to Know About One of America’s First Black Cookbook Authors” article by Kenn Bivins.
BURNT BASQUE CHEESECAKE:
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I want a coconut cake so badly right now, can’t lie! I’ve always been fascinated by these historic promo materials—I love finding them at cookbook shops!