Cold coffee was not always so popular. Despite a brief spike in popularity in the early 1920s iced coffee was not a typical American drink. Coffee sales would reliably drop as temperatures rose. For the Pan-American Coffee Bureau, this drop in sales was a problem in need of a solution. Formed in 1937, the Pan-American Coffee Bureau (PACB) was a cooperative of Latin American coffee growers whose mission was to promote coffee consumption in the United States, the largest market in the Western Hemisphere. In 1939, inspired by the popularity of iced tea, it launched a decades-long campaign to convince Americans to drink iced coffee.
The PACB launched another large advertising campaign for iced coffee in 1946, a few years after sponsoring a radio show, Over Our Coffee Cups, with Eleanor Roosevelt between September 1941 and April 1942 (the transcripts are available digitally through George Washington University). The PACB found much more success with the “Coffee Break” ads of the early 1950s, although they did not give up on promoting iced coffee. They launched a large-scale “Cool Off With Coffee” campaign in 1956.
