H and H Coffee

Dedicated to the history of the Hoffmann-Hayman Coffee Co. founded 1899 in San Antonio, Texas.

United States Army installation in San Antonio, Texas. One of the oldest and largest U.S. military bases; designated a National Historic Landmark (1975). For H&H, Fort Sam Houston represents the firm’s largest documented single institutional customer and a repeating thread across H&H’s pre-WWI and wartime commercial history.

H&H connections

1914 — Largest SA coffee order to date. The trade press documented “the largest San Antonio coffee order to date” as a carload in bulk from Morrison Coffee Company (later acquired by H&H) delivered to Fort Sam Houston. See event: Large Fort Sam Houston coffee order (Morrison).

1917 — $20,000 order. The April 1917 San Antonio Express-News feature “That Morning’s Cup of Coffee” reports: “The company recently placed a $20,000 order with Uncle Sam at Fort Sam Houston” — referring to Hoffmann-Hayman by that point. This is the same article that names the firm’s founding date (February 1912), capital ($100,000), and annual gross ($120,000) — making the Fort Sam Houston contract roughly one-sixth of annual revenue. Source: HH-CLIP-1917-0009.

1898 — Spanish-American War staging. Fort Sam Houston served as a national military staging base for the Spanish-American War, cementing San Antonio’s strategic military importance. This is the historical root of Fort Sam’s outsized role in the city’s commercial economy — documented in the context event 1898-spanish-american-war-fort-sam-houston-staging.md.

WWII. Fort Sam Houston’s wartime expansion drove coffee rationing pressures that H&H navigated with its Flav-O-Tainer paper bag (December 1942 – July 1943). The installation’s wartime throughput was a major factor in the San Antonio commercial economy of the 1940s.

Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery. H&H-adjacent figure Kearney Joseph Kivlin was buried here with military honors (see people/kearney-joseph-kivlin.md).

Strategic significance for H&H research

The Fort Sam Houston contract appears in at least three separate H&H source documents (1914 Morrison order, 1917 H&H order, multiple WWII-era references), making the military market one of the most consistently documented revenue streams in the pre-1962 record. Any institutional archive for Fort Sam Houston’s commissary procurement records in the 1910s–1940s could independently document H&H’s commercial relationship.

Open questions

  • Whether H&H held a standing contract for Fort Sam Houston, or bid per order
  • Whether the commissary procurement records for 1910–1945 survive in Fort Sam Houston’s historical archives
  • What brands H&H supplied to Fort Sam (the 1917 article names H&H, Wesco, Misa, Texco as the company’s four main marks at that time)

See also