Business: Coffee Breaks

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Coffee with cream and sugar—and chicory, wheat, molasses, bran and caramel?

With the cost of brown gold hovering above $4 per Ib. and sales beginning to fall off, producers are hustling a variety of substitutes, additives and extenders to take the sting out of coffee prices. General Foods, the biggest U.S. coffee roaster (Maxwell House, Yuban, Sanka) is test marketing a new brand, called Mellow Roast, that is a combination of coffee and other ingredients —46% wheat, bran and molasses in the instant. Mellow Roast ads not only stress low price (about $2.90 for 8 oz. of instant) but also maintain that the additives yield "a delicious coffee taste without the bitterness" of the real thing. Nestle's entry in the field, which goes by the tongue-twisting name of Sun Rise Instant Coffee Mellowed with Chicory, is aimed at the younger generation raised on sweet cola drinks. Sun Rise contains 46% chicory, a nutty-flavored herb long used in Europe and the U.S. South to "stretch" coffee, and at $2.88 per 8-oz. jar, it costs less than the company's regular instant brands. The Chicago-based Jewel Food chain reports brisk sales of its own $3.19-per-lb. cof-fee-and-chicory blend at stores in the Midwest.

A California firm, Imported Fine Products, is distributing Buisman's Coffee Extender, a century-old Dutch concoction of caramel and calcium phosphate, at $4 to $5 per Ib.; two tablespoons of Buisman's, long used in schools and hospitals, will double the yield of a pound of coffee. Another caramel-based extender, Coffee STRETCH, now being sold in 1,000 Denver-area grocery stores, is selling fast at about 69e for a half-ounce packet. It too boosts the yield of a can of coffee by 100%.

Procter & Gamble's entry in the cheaper-Java derby, Folger's Flaked Coffee ($2.99 for a 13 oz. can), has no extenders but still yields 20% more brewed coffee per pot than ordinary ground varieties. The secret: the coffee is shaved into tiny flakes to increase the surface area that comes in contact with the hot water.

Some consumers, forsaking coffee altogether, are showing new interest in old substitutes such as Postum, the all-grain brew invented by C.W. Post in 1895 to cure "coffee nerves." Locally marketed versions, like Grandpa Knight's Cafe-Grano, an all-grain roast sold in the Cincinnati-Dayton area for $1.89 per Ib., are also in demand as replacements.

The new brews and blends will have some time to prove themselves on the market. Retail coffee prices have risen nearly 170% since a devastating freeze struck Brazil in 1975; cold winds blew through the country again last week, possibly damaging next year's crop and threatening supplies. Though there have been some signs of a softening in coffee prices, most experts now believe it will be several years before the cost of a pound of ground roast will sink back to even $3.