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"The golden path to health": marketing Postum as a cure for coffee abuse in early twentieth-century Sweden
Örebro University, School of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences. Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK.ORCID iD: 0000-0001-5554-4492
2024 (English)In: Food, Culture, and Society: an international journal of multidisciplinary research, ISSN 1552-8014, E-ISSN 1751-7443, Vol. 27, no 3, p. 866-888Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

Throughout the early twentieth century, the widespread growth of coffee drinking in Sweden led for calls by health reformers, doctors and scientists to implement measures to curtail what they deemed "coffee abuse." Debates about the dangers of coffee took place in Swedish Parliament and trickled out into the popular press. It was not long before canny manufacturers saw an opportunity to capitalize upon this, introducing coffee substitutes onto the Swedish market. One of the most popular brands was the roasted wheat bran drink Postum. This article seeks to investigate the early marketing practices of Postum in Sweden and how the brand used advertisements to exploit the public's growing fears around coffee and put itself forward as a viable substitute that was essential for good health. Using a dataset of 200 advertisements published in Svenska Dagbladet between 1926 and 1940, it demonstrates how Postum skewed scientific/medical knowledge on caffeine to their advantage, urging consumers to buy Postum to protect themselves against neurasthenia, insomnia and digestive disorders. In doing so, Postum went far beyond its role as a drink, instead tapping into discourses of wellbeing, morality and productivity, which remain a central part of food marketing today.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Routledge, 2024. Vol. 27, no 3, p. 866-888
Keywords [en]
Postum, coffee, coffee surrogates, Sweden, advertisements, marketing, health, neurasthenia, insomnia, digestive disorders
National Category
Media and Communications
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:oru:diva-105355DOI: 10.1080/15528014.2023.2191103ISI: 000953503100001Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85150809271OAI: oai:DiVA.org:oru-105355DiVA, id: diva2:1749788
Available from: 2023-04-11 Created: 2023-04-11 Last updated: 2025-02-07Bibliographically approved

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O’Hagan, Lauren Alex

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  • apa
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