Eight O’Clock Coffee and Jane Parker are ‘survivors’

Once famous store brands of The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P) – Eight O’Clock Coffee and Jane Parker – have been adopted by new owners. They carry forward a small piece of the A&P heritage.

In a sense, Eight O’Clock Coffee was part of A&P’s colorful DNA since the very beginning in 1859, when the company was founded by George Gilman in New York City. He started out selling bags of whole bean coffee, along with tea and sugar.

The brand Eight O’Clock Coffee came about as a result of a company-sponsored survey – asking coffee drinkers “what time of day they drank coffee most.” The top two answers on the board were 8 o’clock in the morning and 8 o’clock at night.

In 1919, A&P positioned Eight O’Clock, in its bright red package, as the mild economy brand. Two new brands joined the team. Bokar, in a shiny black bag, was the premium, robust brand. Red Circle, in a bright yellow bag, was full-bodied, yet mellow.

 

Buying coffee at the A&P became a ritual for consumers, once the Hobart Electric Manufacturing Company of Troy, Ohio, figured out a way to attach motors to coffee mills and meat grinders.

A&P was quick to advertise: “Coffee ground fresh with the aid of an electric engine.” 

Foodie Dave Kitchen commented: “Once, A&P was the only store where you could get coffee ground to order, and every checkout aisle had a coffee grinder right by the cashier’s station so the coffee could be freshly ground just before you left the store.” 

“Those huge red grinders were big, heavy, bullet-proof and built to last a hundred years,” he said.

 

By 1930, Eight O’Clock was the most popular brand of coffee in the United States, and it would retain that top spot into the 1970s. 

Indeed, Eight O’Clock earned its place as “a longstanding member of the pantheon of America’s legendary brands,” according to blogger David Pleasant. 

As the A&P empire began to crumble in the 1970s, the company tried to leverage the popularity of Eight O’Clock and shore up sagging profits by offering its three primary coffee brands to other chains, particularly in markets where A&P no longer had stores. 

Since 2006, the Eight O’Clock Coffee Company, has been operating as a subsidiary of Tata Consumer Products, headquartered in Montvale, N.J., with its coffee production plant in Landover, Md. The Tata Group is a multinational conglomerate headquartered in Mumbai, India. 

In 2013, the entire Eight O’Clock Coffee line was revamped with new packaging and new flavors, while dropping the Bokar brand. Bokar was resuscitated in 2018 by American Modern Coffee LLC, of Burbank. Calif.

 

It appears that Red Circle was never part of the deal with Tata. There have been “online sightings” of Red Circle product availability through MrsGrocery.com, based in Amherst, Nova Scotia, Canada. 

As an aside, Red Circle has been memorialized by artist Harold Lohner, who created an all-uppercase RED CIRCLE typeface in 2006, based on the 1930’s style lettering used on the coffee packages. “I like the big fat deco quality,” he said. The smell of fresh ground coffee and this lettering are forever linked in my memory.”

 

While Eight O’Clock Coffee lives on under the umbrella of a mega-business, A&P’s former baked goods brand Jane Parker has been taken in by a pair of entrepreneurial brothers who work in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens in New York City. We’ll check in with them soon.