Coffee company striking example of city’s growth — San Antonio Light, 11 Nov 1919

Feature story in the San Antonio Light for Tuesday, 11 November 1919 (page 10) announcing that Hoffmann-Hayman would run what the paper calls the largest coffee advertising campaign yet attempted in San Antonio, tied to Merchants Coffee / William R. Hoffmann consolidation history, the move from Commerce Street to the Caffarelli Brothers building at North Medina and West Travis, and daily output on the order of 10,000 pounds.

Transcription

COFFEE COMPANY STRIKING EXAMPLE OF CITY’S GROWTH

Largest Advertising Campaign for Coffee in City Gets Under Way.

There is perhaps no better example of the remarkable growth of business concerns in this city than that afforded by the Hoffmann-Hayman Coffee Company that it will launch this week the largest coffee advertising campaign ever put on in San Antonio. The first advertisement of this campaign appears in this issue of the San Antonio Light, and it conveys a message to every coffee consumer in this city.

Seven years ago a consolidation was effected whereby the Merchants Coffee Company and the William R. Hoffmann Store were amalgamated under the name of the Hoffmann-Hayman Coffee Company. This concern began operations in a small store on Commerce street doing largely a San Antonio trade. Today this firm occupies a portion of the Caffarelli Brothers building at North Medina and West Travis streets and its coffees are sold throughout Southwest Texas. From a weekly turnover of a few hundred pounds of coffee this company now operates two coffee roasters and its output is approximately 10,000 pounds a day.

“We owe our success largely to two factors,” said Mr. Hayman. “The first is quality. We have insisted on quality for our coffee at all times and we have sold it on that basis. The next is the growth of San Antonio which has caused phenomenal growth in every business concern offering the people honest values.

“We have always emphasized the fact that we are a home concern. We stand behind our products. We employ San Antonio people and we take an active interest in everything for the upbuilding of this community.

“Our goods cost no more than inferior grades of foreign concerns yet we give more quality for the money. The coffee consumer who buys from us gets a home product, put out by a home concern and handled by home workers.

“We believe in our coffees, we believe in our city and the buying public has shown its belief in our trade mark because our ‘H & H Blend’ has become one of the best sellers in the retail coffee trade of this city and the Southwest.

“We have undertaken this advertising campaign because we want every consumer to know about our products. We want to build up a bigger and better business and we assure the buying public that we will endeavor to maintain our high quality coffee at all times. We want the people of San Antonio to know that it should not be necessary to pay extravagant prices for imported brands of coffee that often are spot marketed until they have been held in warehouses for months and even years. By buying ‘H & H Blend’ it is possible for the coffee user to secure coffee the same day it is roasted. In fact we make a specialty of roasting and delivering our coffee the same day. The retail grocer knows that when he places an order for our coffee he gets a strictly freshly roasted article and the consumer likewise knows it. That has been one of the great factors in our trade.

“They are not drinking more coffee; they are drinking finer coffee. They are no longer satisfied with inferior grades, and they are quick to note the difference between stale coffee and coffee that is freshly roasted and secured by experts.”

Source

• Newspaper: San Antonio Light (San Antonio, Texas) — 11 November 1919 — page 10
• Digital clipping: Newspapers.com image 1257938563 (accessed 27 April 2026)
• Local PDF: 1919-11-11-san-antonio-light-coffee-company-striking-example-of-city-growth.pdf

Transcription aligned to the embedded scan and Tesseract OCR of the column image; punctuation in the long Hayman quotations was normalized where the microfilm scan left commas ambiguous.