Beloved by generations of diners and immortalized in art, song, cinema, and poetic verse, Automats, also known as “automatics” or “waiterless restaurants,” were popular manifestations of an early-twentieth century modernizing impulse. Influenced by studies of scientific management by Frederick W. Taylor and the widespread use of the assembly line, the Automat removed the process of ordering food through a professional waitstaff and allowed customers a faster dining experience via coin-operated vending machines. Designed to streamline dining out while offering a broad choice of freshly prepared menu items, Automats were integral features of Greater Philadelphia’s restaurant industry from the early 1900s through the mid-1960s.

Automats first appeared in Germany and Scandinavia in the 1890s. The first Automat in the United States is credited to Joseph Horn (1861-1941) and Frank Hardart (1850-1918), whose Philadelphia baking company imported the technology from Quisiana, a Berlin-based manufacturer. While European Automats were small, novelty-like affairs with unreliable brass machines, the American version pioneered by Horn and Hardart was larger and grander, with Art Deco accents, chrome paneling, stained glass windows, vaulted ceilings, and improved mechanization.

Philadelphian Horn and New Orleans transplant Hardart had operated luncheonettes and bakeries in Center City since partnering in 1888. For their first Automat, they chose a site at 818 Chestnut Street. It proved an immediate sensation. After it debuted June 9, 1902, the Philadelphia Inquirer noted that Horn and Hardart had solved the city’s “rapid transit luncheon problem” of feeding people on the go. Their official slogan, “less work for mother,” affirmed their goal for faster restaurant service.

Customers from politicians and factory workers to secretaries and policemen enjoyed a plethora of food choices and comparatively low cost. For less than fifty cents, diners could eat three meals a day. With breakfast, lunch, and dinner items in climate-controlled glass cases that could be quickly accessed, the Automat not only appealed to the urban masses but with its speed and consistency, marked the rise of the fast food industry in the United States. Horn and Hardart opened their second Automat in 1905 at 101 S. Juniper Street, third in 1907 at 909 Market Street, and a fourth in 1912 at 21 S. Eleventh Street. Initially, cooks and prep kitchens were housed on site in the rear or basement. To maintain quality as the company grew, food preparation was moved to a central commissary at 202 S. Tenth Street, where board members tested menu items daily.

Philadelphia’s Automats catered to specific crowds: stevedores, who worked irregular hours, preferred the twenty-four-hour location at 234 Market Street; Jeweler’s Row merchants and Gimbel’s employees frequented 818 Chestnut; the Eleventh and Arch Automat “reserved” nightly a table for prostitutes; politicians and judges frequented 1508 Market Street; and insurance salesmen gathered at 6006 Market Street. By 1932, the company had forty-six restaurants in Philadelphia, of which fewer than half contained Automats. Including the company’s New York locations (the first appearing in 1912), by 1940 Horn and Hardart fed 700,000 people each day. The Automats’ “nickel-throwers,” women who gathered daily thousands of coins, became a citywide fascination.

Following World War II and mass migration to the suburbs, the popularity of Automats in Philadelphia, which peaked during the Great Depression, waned. Fast food chains such as McDonalds developed drive-thru windows that served the region’s growing car culture. Trying to capture suburban customers, Horn and Hardart opened retail stores and cafeterias in Northeast Philadelphia, Jenkintown, Willow Grove, Havertown, and Wilmington, Delaware. Hoping to revive the Automats’ popularity, in 1961 they sought and received liquor licensing for their location at Sixteenth and Chestnut Streets. Yet competition and changing dining tastes as well as the company’s diversification, labor troubles, and expansion spelled trouble. Urban renewal also abetted the Automat’s demise. In 1965, the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority forced Horn and Hardart to close their commissary to make way for Thomas Jefferson University’s dormitories. The following year, the Sixteenth and Chestnut building was demolished and replaced with a movie theater. In May 1969, the original Automat at 818 Chestnut Street was auctioned and its interior donated to the National Museum of American History. In 1981, Horn and Hardart filed for bankruptcy and many of its restaurant buildings were converted into McDonald’s, Burger King, and Gino’s Hamburgers, and other fast food outlets. Finally on May 12, 1990, Greater Philadelphia’s last Automat, located in Bala Cynwyd, shut its doors.

Stephen Nepa teaches history at Temple University, Rowan University, and Moore College of Art and Design. He has written for Buildings and Landscapes, Environmental History, Planning Perspectives, and other publications. He received his M.A. in history from the University of Nevada and his Ph.D. in history from Temple. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Philadelphia supported several commercial bakers from the beginning. A list of businesses in the city in 1690 included seven “Master Bakers,” while a 1700 report to the Commissioners of Customs noted that the fertile farmlands of southeastern Pennsylvania allowed for the export of large quantities of bread and flour, staples of Philadelphia’s substantial trade with the West Indies. As the city grew in its early years, bakers were among the many providers of essential goods and services to the expanding population. Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) recalled that one of the first things he did upon arriving in Philadelphia in 1723 was to purchase “three great puffy rolls” from a baker on Second Street.

Philadelphia’s leading trading firms sold large amounts of bread and hard crackers to Caribbean and European customers in the colonial period. The region’s bakeries sometimes had to supply other groups as well. In September 1757, during the Seven Years’ War, the city’s largest trading company, Willing and Morris, wrote to associates in Barbados that it was difficult to procure bread for export because “the Bakers are all engaged in Baking Bread for the different Fleets & Troops in America.” Commercial bakers also did the baking for poorer families that did not have the facilities to bake at home; women would make the dough themselves and pay the local baker a small fee to bake it.

One of the region’s earliest large-scale bakers was Evan Thomas (1690-1746), a Quaker miller who in 1735 bought a tract of land on the Delaware River at the northern edge of Philadelphia County, where he built a very large bake oven. The “Bake House,” as it was known, was a major operation that supplied bread and biscuit to ships that plied the river. When Thomas died, his son Evan (b. 1724) continued the business. Although there is no documentary evidence, tradition holds that the Bake House provided bread for American troops in the area during the Revolutionary War.

Bread for the Troops

Cyrus Bustill (1732–1806) also supplied bread to continental troops during the war. A mixed race African American born a slave in Burlington, New Jersey, Bustill was purchased by a Quaker baker who taught him the trade. After his owner freed him in 1769, Bustill set up a bakery in Burlington, from which he supplied troops in the area with bread. He later moved to Philadelphia, where he operated a bakery on Arch Street above Second Street and became a leader in the city’s African American community.

Germans were among the largest immigrant groups to bring baking traditions from their homeland to the Philadelphia area in the colonial period. German-born Christopher Ludwig (1720–1801) was one of the most successful such immigrant bakers. The son of a baker, he served in that capacity in various militaries in Europe and later received culinary training in London before immigrating to Philadelphia in 1754. Ludwig established a prosperous bakery and confectionary shop in Letitia Court, between Market and Chestnut and Front and Second Streets. Although a wealthy entrepreneur in his mid-fifties at the time of the Revolutionary War, Ludwig nevertheless volunteered for service and in 1777 the Continental Congress appointed him Superintendent of Bakers for the Continental army.

A few large-scale operations notwithstanding, the region’s baking industry was comprised primarily of small shops in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For example, there were three biscuit makers and four cake bakers among Philadelphia’s self-employed free African American women in 1838. An 1857 report on Philadelphia manufacturers found that while there were many bread makers in the city, only two or three produced enough to be considered wholesalers. A new bread-making firm incorporated in 1856 as the Pennsylvania Farina Company built a large steam-powered bakery at Broad and Vine Streets, but it failed within a few years. The 1857 report noted that baking of pies had recently developed into a considerable business, but that overall, the city’s only major commercial baking activity involved making biscuits, crackers, and ship bread (the latter known as “hard tack”). Nine such establishments operated in Philadelphia in 1857, employing a total of 125 men who made 120,000 barrels of crackers annually.

Biscuits, Crackers, and Cookies

The city’s largest mid-nineteenth-century biscuit and cracker maker was T. Wattson & Sons, which occupied a four-story building on North Front Street. Thomas Wattson (1788–1874) started the business in 1846 and in 1852 sold it to his son-in-law John T. Ricketts (1805–63). One of Rickett’s chief employees was German immigrant Godfrey Keebler (1822–93), who came to America at age ten and at nineteen settled in Philadelphia to learn the baking trade. Keebler operated a small bakery in the city in the early 1840s, moved out of the area for several years, and returned in 1850 to work for Ricketts. In 1862 he went out on his own, first opening a small bakery at Twelfth and Christian Streets in South Philadelphia and then a large factory, Godfrey Keebler’s Steam Biscuit, Cracker and Cake Bakery, at Twenty-Second and Vine Streets. By 1890 Keebler had one hundred employees. He entered into a partnership that year with Augustus Weyl (1835–1926), son of a German-born baker, to form Keebler-Weyl Baking Company, which became one of the nation’s largest cookie and cracker makers.

Another mid-nineteenth century Philadelphia baking company, J.S. Ivins & Sons, rose to prominence on the strength of its cookie products. Founded in 1846 by Job S. Ivins (d. 1894), the company had various locations on North Front Street before moving in 1898 to a large factory on North Broad Street below Ridge Avenue. Ivins produced a variety of cakes and cookies, including Spiced Wafers, a cookie that became a longtime regional favorite after its introduction in 1910.

Vienna Model Bakery of 1876

At the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the Fleishmann brothers, natives of Austria-Hungary who were based in Cincinnati, Ohio, exhibited their “Vienna Model Bakery,” which featured a bread-baking process using packaged compressed yeast cake they had invented. The Fleishmann’s process greatly improved the commercial production of bread, and when the Exposition closed they moved the Model Bakery to Broad Street near Vine Street. From there they expanded into a nationwide baking and restaurant company, while their packaged yeast became widely used in commercial baking, ushering in the era of mass-produced, store-bought bread.

An 1882 census of Philadelphia manufacturers noted that the city was home to 934 baking establishments, employing a total of 3,240 workers, including 2,363 men, 396 women, and 481 children. Curiously, only ten of the establishments were listed as “steam” bakeries; the rest were listed as “hand.” Steam was used to heat baking ovens as well as to power machines that kneaded, mixed, and rolled dough. At a time when most industries were powered by steam engines and many manufacturing processes were automated, baking in Philadelphia was still done primarily by hand. By 1909 Philadelphia boasted 1,208 baking establishments employing 4,598 workers and ranked third in the nation in bread and bakery products.

One of the most successful local baking firms was the Freihofer Baking Company, established by brothers Charles (1860–1942) and William (1858–1932) Freihofer in Camden, New Jersey, in 1893. The company moved to Philadelphia several years later and in 1900 merged into the larger Freihofer Vienna Baking Company. By the mid-1910s Freihofer was one of the largest bread makers in the nation, with nine hundred workers in two large plants in North Philadelphia.

In 1927 Keebler-Weyl merged with a nationwide group of bakeries to form the Union Biscuit Company, whose headquarters were in Chicago. Although part of national conglomerate, Keebler-Weyl maintained major baking operations in Philadelphia. In 1934, the company began making cookies for the Girl Scouts of Greater Philadelphia Council. Local Girl Scout troops throughout the nation had been selling cookies as a fund-raising activity since the 1910s, but Keebler-Weyl was the first commercial bakery to bake and package cookies for the Girl Scouts on a council-wide scale. Other area councils joined the arrangement and Keebler-Weyl became the official baker of what soon came to be known as “Girl Scout Cookies.”

Ethnic Bakeries

The types of baked goods available in the area expanded significantly in the early twentieth century with the influx of large numbers of southern and eastern European immigrants who brought their ethnic baking traditions with them. Italian and Jewish bakeries became especially common, joining German bakeries, which had long been part of the area’s food landscape. Area residents could now purchase a wide range of baked goods in countless neighborhood ethnic bakeries throughout the region.

Local Italian bakers supplied the rolls for Philadelphia’s unique hoagie and cheesesteak sandwiches. The area’s largest roll maker, Amoroso’s Baking Company, was founded by Italian immigrant Vincenzo Amoroso (1862–1927) and his two sons in Camden, New Jersey, in 1904. In 1914 the company moved to West Philadelphia, first to Sixty-Fifth Street and Haverford Avenue and then in 1960 to South Fifty-Fifth Street, where it grew to over four hundred workers. Still family-owned in the mid-2010s, Amoroso’s moved to Bellmawr, New Jersey. In nearby Glassboro, New Jersey, Liscio’s Bakery, another large family-owned Italian bread maker, began in 1994.

German bakers introduced pretzels in the nineteenth century. By the twentieth century pretzels were a signature Philadelphia snack, widely available and popular throughout the area. The Oakdale Baking Company, established in 1903 at North Tenth Street and West Susquehanna Avenue in North Philadelphia, was a major pretzel maker in the first half of the twentieth century. Under the direction of businessman L. J. Schumaker (1878–1948), it merged with several pretzel makers nationwide to form the American Pretzel Company, which by the late 1910s controlled about 80 percent of the U.S. pretzel business.

National and Multinational Bakers

In addition to local companies, Philadelphia was home to the production facilities of large national and multinational baking firms in the twentieth century. Bond Bread, a brand name of the General Baking Company conglomerate based in Rochester, New York, established several plants in Philadelphia early in the twentieth century, including operations in Lower Northeast, South, and West Philadelphia. Cookie and cracker maker National Biscuit Company (later Nabisco) opened a plant at Broad and Glenwood Streets in North Philadelphia in the early twentieth century, then moved in the 1950s to a large plant on Roosevelt Boulevard in the Far Northeast. After going through several ownership changes, the plant closed in 2015. By this time, much of the industry had consolidated and moved out of the area, leaving just one large-scale bakery in the city, the Tasty Baking Company.

Philip Baur (1885–1951), a baker from Pittsburgh, and Herbert Morris (1882–1960), an egg salesman from Boston, founded the Tasty Baking Company in Philadelphia in 1914 with the novel idea of selling individually wrapped, fresh-baked snack cakes. Their first bakery on Sedgley Avenue in Germantown was successful, and in 1922 Baur and Morris opened a large plant on Hunting Park Avenue in Nicetown. The company’s “Tastykake” products became longtime area favorites. In 2010 the Tasty Baking Company moved to a new modern production facility at the Philadelphia Naval Business Center in South Philadelphia, where it employed eight hundred workers. In 2011 Georgia-based food conglomerate Flowers Foods acquired Tastykake and began to distribute its products nationwide.

From modest beginnings in the late seventeenth century to the growth of large-scale baking operations in the twentieth century, the Philadelphia area has a long, rich history of bakers and bakeries. The region’s signature baked goods–Italian rolls, pretzels, and snack cakes–were still made locally in the early twenty-first century, while the area continued to support a wide range of baking operations from small family-run bakeries to large industrial bakers with regional and national distribution.

Jack McCarthy is an archivist and historian who specializes in three areas of Philadelphia history: music, business and industry, and Northeast Philadelphia. He regularly writes, lectures, and gives tours on these subjects. His book In the Cradle of Industry and Liberty: A History of Manufacturing in Philadelphia was published in 2016, and he curated the 2017–18 exhibit Risk & Reward: Entrepreneurship and the Making of Philadelphia for the Abraham Lincoln Foundation of the Union League of Philadelphia. He serves as consulting archivist for the Philadelphia Orchestra and Mann Music Center and directs a project for Jazz Bridge entitled Documenting & Interpreting the Philly Jazz Legacy, funded by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Bootlegging gained protected status in a region where neighborhood saloons often served as informal offices for local ward bosses. Corrupt politicians, many operating within the Republican machine, worked in concert with police captains to protect vice industries like prostitution and bootlegging. Police heads often received kickbacks from both their underlings—for job protection—and from the illegal entities in their district—for ignoring their illicit operations.

Just before Prohibition took effect, Philadelphia was home to 1,700 saloons. Nearly a decade later, investigators estimated that nearly 1,200 saloons still operated more or less openly. Philadelphians abided a city of speakeasies, patronizing the candy stores, barber shops, pool halls, and private residences that served illegal liquor. The multitude of breweries in Philadelphia, which had an extensive and centuries-old history of beer production, also continued to supply the region.

Risks of Bootleg Liquor

While police guessed that 8,000 unlicensed taverns operated throughout the city, journalists estimated that at least 8,000 more “blind tigers” sold intoxicants to Philadelphians. Imbibing bootleg liquor carried risk; over the course of one month in 1923, Philadelphia reported 307 alcohol-poisoning deaths to the federal Prohibition Bureau. Government chemists noted that most of their confiscated bootleg liquor samples contained wood alcohol, chloride, sulfuric acid, iodine, or some other poison. By the late 1920s, temperance forces in the government ramped up their anti-liquor crusade by introducing a formula that doubled the poison in denatured industrial alcohol. Imbibing a product redistilled improperly by amateur moonshiners, consumers ran the risk of blindness and death. Nonetheless, forty million dollars poured through Philadelphia’s liquor trade annually.

The Delaware Valley, a hub of the chemical industry, produced millions of gallons of industrial alcohol. Those holding federal permits to manufacture perfumes, medicines, and barber supplies received about 430,000 gallons of alcohol every month. Many of these permit-holders operated “coverup houses” that distributed alcohol to consumers. Investigators unearthed records detailing implausibly large deliveries of hair tonics and perfumes throughout the Philadelphia region, including a delivery of 500 gallons of “hair oil” to an unidentified town of just fifty people. From 1924 to 1928, the number of gallons of industrial alcohol released in Philadelphia doubled, from five million to ten million.

As Philadelphia’s industrial alcohol purveyors moved their product over land, high-profile rum-runners like Bill McCoy (1877-1948) set up shop in the Quaker City, moving their liquor into the city via its waterways. Bootleg liquor bound for Philadelphia often ran first through Atlantic City, described as a “smugglers’ paradise” because of the cooperation among rum-runners, local politicians, and Coast Guard officials. Rum-runners ushered as many as ten million quarts of liquor per year through the Bahamas and up the Atlantic Coast. McCoy and others sailed “Rum Row,” an Atlantic Ocean corridor stretching from Atlantic City to New York’s Long Island, making sure to stay outside of U.S. maritime limits (or working with corrupt Coast Guard officers) as they brought bootleg shipments northward. Though the term “the real McCoy” emerged in an earlier era, it was used by McCoy’s biographer in 1931 to signal the bootlegger’s unadulterated product: high-quality, single-source imported liquor.

The Regional Network

Numerous bootlegging gangs serviced the city alongside Philadelphia’s bootlegging kings, Max “Boo Boo” Hoff (liquor) (1895-1941) and Mickey Duffy (beer) (1888-1931). Philadelphia bootleggers worked in concert with South Jersey syndicates, who in turn partnered with North Jersey and New York City operatives. Max Hassel (1900-33), a bootlegger from Reading, Pennsylvania, who owned more than a dozen breweries in Pennsylvania, New York State, and New Jersey, paired with Duffy to operate several beer breweries in South Jersey, including Camden County Breweries Inc. and Camden County Cereal Beverage Company. Hassel also worked with Irving Wexler (1888-1952), commonly known as Waxey Gordon, a prominent bootlegger and associate of New York City crime kingpin Arnold Rothstein (1882-1928).

Philadelphia’s bootleg trade depended on the region’s roads, rail routes, and waterways—its interconnectivity and proximity to other import and export hubs, like Trenton, New Jersey, and Wilmington, Delaware. Bootleg business that affected Philadelphia often affected the surrounding region. When investigators probed bootleggers and racketeers in Philadelphia during the 1928 Special August Grand Jury investigation, some illicit entities crossed the Delaware River to Camden, New Jersey; as Philadelphia became more temperate, Camden became less so.

Charged with investigating bootlegging and its attendant gang violence, the 1928 Special August Grand Jury revealed the extent to which illegal liquor saturated the region, putting bootleggers on the defensive. The grand jury found that over the course of a few months, in excess of a million gallons of consumable liquor was released into the city, much of it diverted from denatured industrial alcohol. Philadelphia boxing promoter and nightclub owner Max Hoff built a bootlegging empire from industrial alcohol and amassed a fortune. Hoff operated several financial firms, including the Franklin Mortgage & Investment Co., to manage the revenue from his bootlegging ventures.

Despite interviewing 748 witnesses, the grand jury failed to indict Hoff or any other big-name bootlegger. Its success lay in uncovering police graft. When the grand jury finished its work, 138 police officers were deemed unfit for service. Many of these officers worked within Unit No. 1, an elite vice force established in 1924 by Director of Public Safety Smedley Butler (1881-1940).

In its report, the grand jury admitted it failed to destroy an underworld architecture built on bootlegging. In noting the lack of a permanent solution to the liquor racket problem, it implicated the residents of Philadelphia. It reasoned that only a constantly vigilant citizenry could prevent bootlegging, violence, and police graft. District Attorney John Monaghan (1870-1954), leading the investigation, implored Philadelphians to insist upon clean government and law and order. His exhortation echoed the voices of many Pennsylvania reformers of the 1920s, including Butler and Governor Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946). The will of Philadelphians to abide by Prohibition remained limited, however, and officials who zealously enforced the unpopular federal mandate assumed a hefty political liability. Bootlegging in Philadelphia continued until Prohibition’s repeal, meeting the unwavering demand for liquor.

Annie Anderson is the senior research and public programming specialist at Eastern State Penitentiary and the co-author, with John Binder, of Philadelphia Organized Crime in the 1920s and 1930s (Arcadia Publishing, 2014). She received her M.A. in American Studies from the University of Massachusetts Boston. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Anyone crossing the Benjamin Franklin Bridge from Philadelphia to Camden during most of the twentieth century saw one of the best-known icons of American consumerism, the giant Campbell-Soup-can water towers looming over the company’s flagship cannery. Campbell Soup may have been “America’s Favorite Food,” as the title of the company-sponsored history claims, but it was also much more to residents of the Delaware Valley. South Jersey’s farmers grew the tomatoes that went into the cannery, and at its height in the middle of the century it employed five thousand production workers year-round at its Camden plants. Thousands more high school students, housewives, and temporary workers newly arrived from Puerto Rico or elsewhere swelled the workforce at peak harvesting time.  By 1991 no evidence of the cannery remained, though the company continued to maintain corporate headquarters in the city of its birth.

When a tinsmith and a vegetable merchant joined forces to form the Anderson & Campbell Preserve Company in Camden in 1869, there was little to differentiate their establishment from the dozens of other small canneries scattered among the towns and fields of South Jersey. But after the wealthy Dorrance family of Bristol, Pennsylvania, invested in the company and the young John T. Dorrance (1873-1930) carved out a new niche for the firm in convenience foods–condensed soup–it rapidly outpaced all other canneries in the region. Dorrance also aggressively experimented with new forms of advertising, placing placards in streetcars and ads in popular magazines, and later was among the first to advertise on radio (Amos ‘n’ Andy) and television (Lassie). Campbell Soup became one of the most recognizable brands in America. In painting American icons, Andy Warhol famously chose the Campbell Soup tomato can as his commercial subject.

A Focus on Detail

But sales and marketing were dependent on the continued availability of good-quality but low-cost products. Dorrance devoted extraordinary attention to controlling every detail in the production of his soups. He employed agronomists to develop the perfect seed for his tomatoes and dictated to farmers how much fertilizer to apply and when. In the soup factory Dorrance’s industrial engineers closely observed each task performed by workers, decreed the optimal procedure to be followed, and calculated the precise wage to be paid for each subtask. His efforts at “scientific management” and automation yielded impressive results. The Camden cannery turned out ten million cans per day during peak season and generated fabulous wealth for the Dorrance family.

The pressure to produce took its toll on the cannery workers. Employees labored long hours for low pay in hot, noisy, and often dangerous conditions, and their frustrations eventually erupted in a spontaneous strike in 1934. Workers succeeded in winning union recognition in 1940, and over the next several decades work stoppages and other industrial actions were regular features in area newspapers. The company countered by bringing in new sources of low-wage labor and by building canneries elsewhere. Although Camden and Chicago union locals won a united strike in 1946, an attempt at a multi-plant strike in 1968 eventually ended in failure.

End of Line for Camden Plant

When Campbell stopped using South Jersey’s famous tomatoes in 1979 in favor of industrially produced tomato paste from California, the company was free to move production to newer and, it hoped, less contentious rural plants. The last can rolled off the line in Camden in 1990, and the plant was imploded a year later.

Campbell Soup Company remained, however, an important corporation nationally and in the Delaware Valley. By continuing to aggressively cut costs and make innovations in its product portfolio, the company consistently delivered profits of about a billion dollars annually on sales of some eight billion dollars in the early twenty-first century. In Camden, where 1,200 white-collar employees continued to work at the firm’s world headquarters in an expansive campus setting, Campbell remained one of the region’s most important and visible local companies.

Daniel Sidorick has taught history at Temple and Rutgers Universities and the College of New Jersey.  His book Condensed Capitalism: Campbell Soup and the Pursuit of Cheap Production in the Twentieth Century (Cornell University Press) was awarded the Richard P. McCormick Prize by the New Jersey Historical Commission. (Author information current at time of publication.)

A cheesesteak is a sandwich unlike any John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich (1718-1792), might have encountered. Thin bits of frizzled beef served on a locally-made Italian roll, usually topped with fried onions and Cheez Whiz drawn from the can with a paint stirrer, the Philly cheesesteak also is distinguished, in part, by its place in presidential politics.

Cheesesteaks originated in 1930 as simply steak sandwiches, the cheese part coming later. The undisputed creators, Harry Olivieri and his brother Pat, ran a hot dog stand in South Philadelphia. One day, weary of eating their own dogs for lunch, they grilled some sliced beef with onions instead. Before either could take a bite, a passing cab driver offered five cents for the sandwich and declared it better than their hot dogs.

The brothers Olivieri did not make the steak sandwich their main attraction until 1940 when they opened Pat’s King of Steaks on Passyunk Avenue, where it intersects with Ninth and Wharton Streets.  They did not initially add cheese because many of their customers in the neighborhood were Jewish and dietary laws barred them from eating meat and cheese together. But after Kraft introduced Cheez Wiz in 1952, Pat Olivieri realized he could simply take the lid off the industrial-size can, put the whole can on the grill to cook, and add cheese to some steaks without tainting the grill for his kosher customers.

Rivalry Across the Street

When Joey Vento opened Geno’s across the street from Pat’s in 1966, he acknowledged the Olivieris invented the cheesesteak, but insisted he made it better. To be sure, cheesesteak lovers can get their fix in almost any neighborhood in Philadelphia and its suburbs. But the intersection of Ninth, Wharton, and Passyunk remains the center of the cheesesteak universe. Both Pat’s and Geno’s are open twenty-four hours a day, and customers thrive on debating which shop makes the better cheesesteak. Whatever the arguments for either side, tourists, visitors, and even locals have made sampling cheesesteaks almost a rite of passage to knowing Philadelphia.

In the rest of the nation, candidates in search of voters with whom to chew the fat routinely descend on classic diners and coffee shops. In Philadelphia, they go to the intersection of Ninth, Wharton, and Passyunk Avenue to prove their mettle by ordering a cheesesteak properly.

Candidates need not consume all 1,200 calories, but they must know the lingo. A cheesesteak “wit” has onions, while one with no onions is ordered “widout.” If no cheese is desired, the order is “plain.” The only acceptable cheeses are American, provolone, and the Kraft sauce known as Whiz. Both Pat’s and Geno’s have instructions posted. Still, in 2004 the Democratic presidential nominee, John Kerry, asked for Swiss and was ridiculed on the evening news.

In 2005, when the Philadelphia Eagles faced the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl, then-Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell wagered a cheesesteak against then-Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s clam chowder. The Patriots won (24-21), but Romney refused to eat the Philly cheesesteak, saying his cholesterol count couldn’t handle all that cheese and fat.

Geno’s Makes National Headlines

The Philly cheesesteak made national news later in 2005 when Geno’s owner Joey Vento fed the national debate on immigration by posting a sign telling customers, “This is America – When Ordering Speak English.” The open-air food market surrounding Vento’s store, known for decades as the Italian Market, had by then attracted newer immigrants from Southeast Asia and Latin America. While Vento appeared on national television programs hosted by conservatives Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs, the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations charged him with discrimination. Vento ultimately was exonerated of the anti-discrimination charge and said at the time that if his family took the trouble to learn English, recent arrivals should as well. He died in 2011.

The city’s claim to cheesesteak fame is recognized nationwide. Wherever cheesesteaks are sold, they appear on the menu as Philly cheesesteaks. Some high-end steakhouses, the kind that serve Porterhouse and T-bones, developed gourmet versions of the lowly cheesesteak. In 2004, restaurateur Stephen Starr introduced a Kobe beef version at his Barclay Prime restaurant. Made with Taleggio cheese, caramelized onions, and truffles on a brioche roll, and served with a split of champagne, it was priced at an even $100. Ever up-to-date, Starr later replaced that version with a wagu ribeye beef cheesesteak topped with foie grass, truffles, and fontina on a ciabatta roll—again with the half bottle of Perrier-Jouet Grand Brut and the $100 price tag.

Even if those stylized versions are tasty, they miss the crucial point politicians reach for when they order a Philly cheesesteak. It’s about connecting with everyday people.

Dianna Marder is a journalist who retired in 2012 after 27 years as a staff writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer, where she wrote about the courts, crime, and the cultural impact of food. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Early American coffeehouses were often modest ventures. A land deed for Philadelphia’s first coffeehouse, opened by Samuel Carpenter (1649–1714) in 1703 on Front Street just north of Walnut Street, described a “tenement” measuring just twenty-four feet wide by thirty feet deep. Later coffeehouses grew in size and often set aside rooms for special groups or functions. The coffeehouse opened in 1720 by a Captain Roberts, also on Front Street, had enough space to host board meetings of the Library Company, North America’s first circulating library. His wife, the “Widow Roberts,” continued to manage the business after his death until 1754. She was one of three women known to operate coffeehouses in Philadelphia by the 1750s.

In some ways colonial coffeehouses functioned like taverns or inns. They offered food and drink, and both served coffee and alcohol. But there were also important differences. Coffeehouses were centers of commercial activity, particularly during exchange hours, when traders compared currency prices and bought or sold bills and coins. Period prints and paintings usually depict these first-floor spaces as large public halls, with communal tables dominating their centers and booths arrayed along the walls where more private business could be conducted. Even the front porches and walls of coffeehouses were put to commercial use. The space in front of the Old London Coffee House at Front and Market Streets was one of Philadelphia’s most popular auction blocks and was used to sell everything from imported bags of coffee and barrels of rum to indentured servants and enslaved Africans. The city sheriff even used the Old London four times a year to auction goods and property confiscated for nonpayment of debts.

Newspaper Subscriptions

Because of their business orientation, eighteenth-century coffeehouses subscribed to a variety of newspapers. In 1796, the Merchant’s Coffee House and Exchange boasted both local Philadelphia newspapers as well as periodicals from New York, Boston, Baltimore, and Europe, a subscription series costing a hefty £500 or more annually. Such publications were invaluable to savvy traders who needed to be kept abreast of the latest news, such as where hurricanes or foreign privateers were wreaking havoc, which goods were selling most quickly, and what styles and fashions had come into demand.

By the 1760s, the Old London was Philadelphia’s leading coffeehouse, owned by printer William Bradford (1719–91). Centrally located in the business district and adjacent to the waterfront, it was a well-known landmark. It was thus the ideal meeting place for merchants and storekeepers when they began formulating their responses to new, and largely unwanted, British commercial legislation and voicing their discontent. When several Philadelphia merchants and store owners assembled at the Old London to discuss their response to the Stamp Act in September 1765, political discourse quickly escalated into threats against John Hughes (1711–72), Philadelphia’s tax collector, that left him so terrified he would later recall how he had fortified himself “with Fire-Arms” and resolved “to stand a Siege” while several of his friends patrolled the neighborhood “between my house and the Coffee House.”

Hughes’s fears were well founded. During the American Revolution, local leaders used Philadelphia’s coffeehouses to stage ritual destruction of hated pieces of legislation, as well as to post the nonimportation agreements that they circulated and signed. Coffeehouses also hosted meetings of the city’s Committee of Correspondence, which sought to strengthen communication about protest between colonies, and the Committee of Compliance, which enforced the embargoes designed to compel Parliament to reconsider its approach to governing trade. The “deliberations of Congress are impenetrable secrets,” John Adams (1735–1826) mused from Philadelphia in 1775, “but the conversations of the city, and the chat of the coffee house, are free, and open.”

Coffeehouses Reinvent Themselves 

By the 1790s and early 1800s, many of the commercial functions formally associated with coffeehouses had become professional industries in their own right, such as banks, insurance companies, post offices, and auction houses. As a result, coffeehouses had to remake themselves. Some relocated to the outskirts of town, such as Manayunk and Passyunk, or near suburban parks. Abraham Streaper (1747–92), for example, opened his coffeehouse on the banks of “that beautiful and airy situation on the west of the Schuylkill River” two miles from the city where he advertised a relaxing atmosphere, fresh fish in season, and the best liquors. With such amenities as gardens, summer houses, and country air for the genteel, they bore little resemblance to the mercantile coffeehouses of a generation before. Other coffeehouses expanded their services in the city. Some offered menus that changed by time of day and season of the year, competing with taverns and restaurants. Some entrepreneurs featured special shows, including lecturers on topics from philosophy to politics, scientific experiments, and traveling music or theater productions. Concert tickets for a chamber music performance were sold by the Merchants Coffee House and Exchange in 1783, and the following year Bradford’s coffeehouse featured the work of an itinerant scientist presenting “A Lecture on Heads.” The American Coffee House, which operated between 1831 and 1834 on the second block of Chestnut Street, was really more of a creative restaurant, replete with pools filled with turtles, fish and crabs cooked to order, and roaming black bear cubs, until the animals outgrew the venue.

These trends continued during the nineteenth century, as coffeehouses became less associated with the world of business and more with entertainment, culture, and the culinary arts. By the turn of the century, patrons of the region’s coffeehouses saw them as places to chat about the shows they had just attended, or as purveyors of artisanal breads and pies. In these respects, the coffeehouses of the late nineteenth century were much more like what would emerge in the years to come than the busy, noisy haunts of the eighteenth-century merchant.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the number of coffeehouses had declined in most urban settings. Too many kinds of businesses competed for the same diners, and the functions that had differentiated coffeehouses in earlier years had waned. In the 1920s, however, coffee shops slowly made a comeback. Like the first American coffeehouses, modeled after English antecedents, this latest iteration was a European import, although this time the inspiration came from Italy. A small coffeehouse in New York’s Greenwich Village, which installed an Italian espresso machine in 1927, claims to be the first Cappuccino bar, but Philadelphia was not far behind. Several coffee shops clustered around Ninth and Christian Streets, in what became known as the Italian Market.

Most of these venues initially served a very local clientele, recreating experiences that migrants had left behind. But the association of coffeehouses with alternative authors and songwriters, particularly the Beat Generation of the 1950s, revitalized the institution. The Gilded Cage, a coffeehouse opened by Esther (c. 1930–2009) and Edward Halpern (c. 1928–2006) at Twenty-First Street and Rittenhouse Square in 1956, exemplified this era. It became a popular venue for folk musicians, including Peter, Paul & Mary, Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, and Simon and Garfunkel, until closing its doors in 1969.

The 1990s witnessed a new iteration of the coffeehouse, as what became known as the Starbucks generation emerged. The first Starbucks opened in Seattle in 1971, and the company went public in 1992. By 1995, Starbucks had come to Philadelphia. By 2015, almost two dozen Starbucks coffee shops operate in the city, alongside other franchises such as Dunkin’ Donuts, regional chains such as Philadelphia-based La Colombe, and scores of independent operators. The end result was a profusion of choices for the modern coffee drinker, catering to a wide range of different tastes and price points, but all reinforcing the centrality of coffee in modern American life.

Michelle Craig McDonald is an Associate Professor of History at Stockton University, where she teaches courses on early American and Atlantic world history, as well as museum studies. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The birth of the diner is traced to Rhode Island, where in the 1870s, a vendor named Walter Scott parked his food cart in front of the offices of the Providence Journal. Noticing that night shift workers had few dining options (the city’s restaurants closed by 8 p.m.), Scott initially sold sandwiches, pies, and coffee from his “pioneer wagon” and later added hot dogs, oyster stew, and egg dishes. By the late 1880s, other operators expanded the concept throughout New England and as far west as Denver, Colorado. To accommodate more customers and comply with health and zoning regulations, by the 1890s quick-lunch operations became permanent, around-the-clock establishments, with many shaped like railroad dining cars. “White House Cafés,” with their frosted glass and artistic embellishments, made by T.H. Buckley Co. in Worcester, Massachusetts, set new standards for cleanliness and efficiency. By 1900, the firm had built and shipped more than 275 units around the country.

Diners continued to thrive during the 1920s as the nation basked in postwar economic prosperity. In 1924 a T.H. Buckley competitor, the Jerry O’Mahony Company based in Bayonne, New Jersey, became the first manufacturer to employ the term “diner,” shortened from “dining car,” in its sales catalog. Over time, New Jersey hosted several diner manufacturers, including the Silk City Co., the Mountain View Co., the Paramount Co., and the Fodero Co. Though located mainly in the northern portion of the state, these builders assembled many of the diners that appeared in greater Philadelphia by the end of the 1920s. In 1927, the Philadelphia-based J.G. Brill Co., then the world’s largest streetcar builder, opened a diner manufacturing division; its “Brill Steel Diners” rolled off the assembly line at one unit per week. Diners in this period were far larger than those built by the industry’s pioneers and contained stainless steel counters and tiled floors and walls to promote cleanliness. Most, such as the Mayfair (established 1926), the Melrose (1935), and the Ace (1936) operated in close proximity to factories and other industries in Philadelphia and Camden. Others, including Kennett Square’s O’Mahony-built Creekside Diner (c.1928), opened in small rural towns. During the Great Depression, as more expensive restaurants suffered declines in business, diners thrived due to their affordable fare and wide variety of menu items. Attempting to match diners’ appeal, in the 1930s a number of Philadelphia’s opulent hotels, including the Bellevue-Stratford and the Stenton, closed their luxury dining rooms and opted for cheaper “lunch counter” fare.

After World War II, with the onset of the Baby Boom and a healthy economy, the diner industry experienced impressive growth. Into the 1960s, companies such as Fodero continued to manufacture new units, including Philadelphia’s Broad Street Diner, the Red Robin Diner in Mayfair, and Old City’s Continental. Some, including the Mayfair, enlarged their spaces and exchanged their stainless steel aesthetic for stone, stucco, or brick. With increases in car ownership and large-scale suburbanization, diners appeared in areas beyond the region’s urban centers. Nowhere was the postwar diner more ubiquitous than in New Jersey, which contained not only the nation’s highest concentration of diner builders but also more diners and highways, per capita, than any other state. From the 1950s through the mid-1960s, dozens of new diners opened in South Jersey, including the Salem Oak in Salem (established 1955), Olga’s in Marlton (1959), Angelo’s in Glassboro (1964), the USA Country Diner in Windsor (1964), and Ponzio’s in Cherry Hill (1964). Philadelphia’s suburban towns saw several new diners, including Hank’s Place in Chadds Ford (1948), which became a favorite haunt of artist Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009); Downingtown’s Cadillac Diner (1954), where scenes for 1958’s The Blob were filmed; Upper Darby’s Llanerch Diner (1968), which appeared in the 2012 film Silver Linings Playbook; and the Sun Gate Diner (1959) in Marcus Hook. Wilmington, Delaware, and its environs also became home to many postwar diners such as The Charcoal Pit (1962) and Lucky’s Coffee Shop (1965), both located on the heavily trafficked Concord Pike (U.S. 202).

By the 1970s, many of the region’s diners closed due to declining business and the retirement of owners. Others survived but felt shopworn when compared with national chains, fast food outlets, and shopping mall food courts. Yet during the 1980s and 1990s, diners enjoyed a nostalgia- and kitsch-fueled revival as consumers rediscovered them. In 1987, the original Melrose, after having moved in 1959 from south Philadelphia to Robbinsville, New Jersey, was selected by the Smithsonian as representative of the American diner; due to exorbitant costs, the museum’s proposal to move the structure to Washington as an exhibit was shelved the following year. Influenced by the success of San Francisco’s upscale Fog City Diner (established 1985) and the Empire Diner in Manhattan, entrepreneur Stephen Starr (b.1956) in 1995 purchased and reopened the Continental Diner in Philadelphia’s Old City as a global tapas restaurant and cocktail lounge. Three years later, Starr opened his successful Jones near Jewelers Row, a diner-inspired comfort food establishment with retro-1970s décor.

In the early 2000s, as some neighborhoods declined or changed demographically, their long-operating diners closed. Several were owned by Greek immigrants who arrived in the region after World War II. Olga’s, owned by the Stavros family since 1959 and once hailed by the Newark Star-Ledger as the “queen of south Jersey diners,” closed in 2008 due to redevelopment plans while the Country Club Diner in Voorhees, New Jersey, owned and operated for fifty years by the Kokolis family, shuttered in 2011. Philadelphia’s West Oak Lane Diner closed in 2011 after a fire, the Aramingo Diner in Port Richmond reopened as an urgent care clinic, and the American Diner in West Philadelphia was renovated in the 2010s as Kabobeesh, an Indian-Pakistani eatery. Other area diners adapted to changing tastes, such as Geet’s in Williamstown, New Jersey, which expanded to include a sports bar with flat-screen TVs.

While Greater Philadelphia’s diners changed significantly since their introduction in the 1920s, their transformations over several decades demonstrated a certain flexibility that reflected customers’ cultural, culinary, and residential preferences. Having evolved from the food cart and rail-car styles, diners by the 2010s catered to urban, suburban, and shore town residents while still maintaining elements of affordability, efficiency, and popularity.

Stephen Nepa teaches history at Temple University, Moore College of Art and Design, and the Pennsylvania State University-Abington. A contributor to numerous books and journals, he is currently at work on a project about the history of Puerto Rico’s Levittown community. He received his M.A. from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and his Ph.D. from Temple University. (Author information current at time of publication.)

As early as the 1650s, industrious farmers produced enough wheat not only to sustain themselves but also to send a surplus to market. For farmers in the city’s hinterland, the center of any rural community was the “custom” grist mill.  More than just a place where farmers took their product for grinding, the mill was where they learned news, met with friends, and transacted  business. These custom mills serviced a geographic radius of five to ten miles—the distance a farmer could travel with a wagon in one day. Custom mills were small, typically one or two stories, and the miller extracted payment by taking a “toll,” or a portion of the product. This he could keep for his own use or sell. Unlike the grist mills of New England and the South, most Delaware Valley mills were powered by indoor water wheels, an innovation unique to this area.  Moving the wheel inside helped prevent it from icing in the winter, and the miller could work nearly year-round.

As demand for Pennsylvania flour increased, larger merchant mills appeared. Merchant mills differed from custom mills in that they purchased unprocessed wheat seeds from the farmers and sold the rendered flour at market themselves or through agents. The most famous of these merchant milling centers developed on the banks of the Brandywine River, where shallops (ships slightly smaller than sloops) were loaded directly at the mill with up to two hundred barrels of flour at a time for shipping to Philadelphia. By the 1770s the Brandywine mills featured prominently in travel accounts as “must-see” destinations.  Their round-the-clock operation contributed to the growth of a symbiotic industrial town,  Brandywine Village, which provided a ready supply of skilled workers such as coopers, millwrights, and ship captains. The difficulty and expense of transporting wheat from western farms to eastern markets, often over roads plagued with potholes and muddy quagmires, led to the incorporation of the first paved turnpikes and turned the simple business of transportation into a potentially lucrative venture.

Flour Inspection Act

The importance of flour to Philadelphia was further demonstrated by the city’s preoccupation with protecting its dominance in the market. After decades of competing with New York and Baltimore, during which time Philadelphia flour developed the reputation of being lower quality than that of its neighbors, the city passed the first comprehensive flour inspection act in 1722. This act stipulated that flour intended for export meet a set standard for quality and be packed in barrels branded with the registered mark of the miller. Millers who improperly classified the quality of their flour or who were caught tampering with weights paid  severe penalties. These laws, among the first of their kind in the British colonies, enabled Philadelphia’s flour exports to increase sevenfold from the 1730s to the early 1770s.

This commitment to quality, paired with a series of poor harvests in Europe, soon made the Delaware Valley the breadbasket of the world.  A further boon was the work of inventor Oliver Evans (1755-1819). Evans was born in Newport, near Wilmington, Delaware, already  famous for its Brandywine River mills. Prior to his inventions, a grist mill required four or five workmen to keep the machines running smoothly and the wheat and flour flowing. The system often bogged down when it came time to sift the flour, which was warm and moist from the friction of the stones. Moist flour clogged the sifters, and warm flour packed before it cooled could turn rancid before it reached its consumers.  Evans invented a system by which bucket elevators did the work of men to carry wheat and flour between the different floors of a mill, and a mechanized rake called a “hopper boy” cooled the flour and delivered it to the sifting machines. These innovations made flour milling perhaps the first automated industry in America, and on December 18, 1790, Evans received the third patent ever awarded by the United States government.

Area Reigned Until 1815

The Delaware Valley continued to reign as the world’s foremost milling center until 1815. The steady decline after that time period can be attributed to a number of factors.  First, Philadelphia’s flour merchants depended heavily on the trade of high-quality “superfine” flour to European markets.  Improved harvests in Europe in the early part of the nineteenth century diminished demand for American wheat and flour, while at the same time the catastrophic invasion of the Hessian Fly, which first appeared on Long Island in 1777, destroyed wheat harvests in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware.  After consecutive years of loss, many farmers stopped planting wheat altogether and focused on corn, rye, and oats, which were fine for domestic use but had no market overseas.

By 1860 railroads made possible the free flow of farmers and commerce to the open, fertile plains of the Midwest. Hard Midwestern wheat, higher in gluten content than softer Eastern wheat, could not be processed on millstones because of its tough hull. When “roller mill” technology emerged to process this desirable product, the giant new commercial mills on the Mississippi River won those sought-after contracts. Millers in the Delaware Valley were slow to refit their machines, and most saw no point in competing with Minneapolis, which after 1880 was simply known as “Mill City,” home to corporations like Pillsbury and Gold Medal Flour.

For a century, Greater Philadelphia served as the powerhouse of the world’s flour economy. Even though the flour bubble burst after 1815, there existed enough of an industrial foundation that many of these mills and commercial centers successfully shifted to more marketable products.  The Brandywine Valley’s world-famous grist mills converted to textiles, paper and gunpowder. Emerging industries took advantage of existing pools of skilled laborers and shippers, as well as one of the best transportation infrastructures in the country. All of these were built in large part on the back of the flour industry.

Jennifer L. Green spent four years as the education and interpretation director at a historic grist mill in Chester County, Pa., and continues her work in the industrial history of the Greater Philadelphia area as Program Manager at the National Iron & Steel Heritage Museum in Coatesville, Pa. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The indigenous and early colonial residents of the Delaware Valley were largely self-sufficient. The minimal processing needed to make bread or to preserve meat was done mostly at home or on the farm. Yet the inklings of the future food industry were visible in the trades marching in the Philadelphia Grand Federal Procession in 1788 celebrating the new Constitution: bakers, butchers, sugar refiners, and brewers joined their fellow predecessors of the coming Industrial Revolution in the line of march.  And even in this early period, food processing brought the region into the global economy. Hogs driven to Philadelphia for slaughter and grain transported to the city for milling ended up not only in market stalls on High Street (later Market Street) but also as provisions traded for Caribbean sugar destined for the city’s refiners.

Philadelphia’s propitious location in the midst of the rich agricultural lands of southeastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey made it the natural location for the artisans and merchants who would establish a wide array of food-processing businesses. Yet until the mid-nineteenth century only flour milling, brewing, and sugar refining had established enterprises beyond the size of small artisanal shops.  Philadelphia, in fact, became the center of the new country’s largest food industry, dominating flour milling in the late eighteenth century  through the first third of the following century and exporting some 400,000 barrels of flour (and a smaller quantity of corn meal) per year. The city also housed many sugar refineries from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century.

Although  leadership in flour milling fell first to Baltimore and then the Midwest, Philadelphia, Camden, and nearby towns soon saw phenomenal growth in an amazing range of food-related industries: canning, the baking of bread, biscuits, and soft pretzels, candy-making, meat processing, the production of ice cream, mustard, and vinegar, and much more. Most new companies were of the type Philadelphia was best known for: small- to medium-sized and family-owned, often operating in the production of specialty items. But some of them grew to become national or world leaders in the mass production of food products and obtained financing from sources of capital beyond the wealth of their founding families.

Food Processing Outpaces Manufacturing

Spurred by the demands of war and growing urban populations, food industry expansion nationally outpaced manufacturing as a whole in the late nineteenth century, and, in Philadelphia, food processing become the city’s second largest industry (after textiles) by 1910. Canning, invented to feed Napoleon’s armies, became essential in the Civil War and remained so in America’s twentieth-century conflicts and in ordinary consumption.

Urbanization separated more and more people from the farms that produced their food, and the new advertising industry, as well as the promise of lightened housework, helped convince Philadelphia housewives (and others) that they needed factory-made canned soup and mass-produced sliced bread. Fears of contamination that led to governmental regulation also provided advertisers with arguments for why consumers should buy brand-name (and government-inspected) ice cream and cellophane-wrapped chocolates. Philadelphia’s many ethnic groups expanded the range of food processing methods and markets even further. Meat processing, for example, took the form of a first-floor Kosher butcher shop in West Philadelphia, an Italian basement butchery in South Philadelphia, and a Polish smokehouse in Port Richmond.

Canning, more than any other food-processing sector, brought the industrial revolution to the cities, towns, and hamlets of the Delaware Valley in the second half of the nineteenth century. In virtually every town in the lush agricultural region surrounding Philadelphia, tinsmiths built canneries, partnered with farmers and merchants, and sold their products not only in the city, but along the trade routes stretching west along the railways. When the steamboat Bertrand sank in the Missouri River in 1865, it carried to the bottom peaches and cranberry sauce from canneries in Philadelphia and southern New Jersey (as well as rival Baltimore). Canning also spurred development of allied industries.  Southern New Jersey’s glass manufacturers provided the first containers for the industry, and several can makers followed (like the Continental Can Company located next door to Campbell Soup in Camden), while Bridgeton’s Ferracute Machine Company built canning machinery used throughout the region. This growth of related industries and synergies among producers of raw materials, intermediate outputs, and final consumer goods was seen most clearly in the case of canning, but it was a phenomenon that characterized all branches of the food industry in the Delaware Valley.

Most canneries remained fairly small, but several grew into sizable establishments, employing hundreds or even thousands of workers, typically doubling in size during harvest season.  Philip J. Ritter first tried his hand at confectionery, but had more success when he began selling his wife’s preserves in 1854. When operations outgrew the family’s Kensington home twenty years later, he opened a factory on Dauphin Street. By 1894 his cannery employed 150 workers year-round and 300 at peak season. To get even closer to its raw materials, especially tomatoes for its award-winning Ritter Catsup, the company opened a plant across the river in Bridgeton, New Jersey.  An even more famous product, Campbell’s Soup, rolled off the lines of that company’s mammoth plant in Camden.

New Eating Habits

Eating new items like canned soup was something Philadelphians were learning to do, but bread and other baked goods had been part of their diet from colonial days.  Yet even with the onset of the industrial revolution, most people in the city and surrounding towns continued baking bread at home or purchasing it from the hundreds of small neighborhood bakeries. The first attempt at building a large mechanized bread bakery at Broad and Vine Streets in 1857 ended in failure three years later. But by the end of the nineteenth century a number of local bakeries and branches of national bread makers had implemented modern production and distribution methods, and brands like Freihofer‘s and Stroehmann’s became household names.

One of the main obstacles to commercial production of bread was overcome by Charles Fleishmann’s (1835-1897) invention of consistent packaged yeast in 1868 in Cincinnati.  His “Vienna Model Bakery” became one of the highlights of the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876. The Model Bakery moved to 253 North Broad Street after the Exposition (managed by Fleischmann’s brother-in-law) and the company expanded from there to Manhattan and elsewhere. Other bakers quickly adopted the use of commercial yeast, and store-bought brand-name bread spread rapidly.  Philadelphia baker Charles Freihofer (1860-1942) continued the Vienna theme when he teamed with his brother to open the Freihofer Vienna Baking Company in Camden in 1899 and a similarly named company at 24th and Master Streets in North Philadelphia a year later. Rapid growth in the business led to a move to 20th and Indiana Streets in 1913 and expansion to several other cities. Freihofer’s and competitors’ home-delivery vans, originally horse-drawn, became a fixture in Philadelphia’s neighborhoods as many smaller bakeries closed their doors.

Entrepreneurs Philip Bauer and Herbert Morris conceived the idea of mass-producing and marketing small “sanitary-wrapped” cakes and opened a plant on Sedgley Avenue in 1914. Their Tasty Baking Company was so successful that “Tasty Kakes” became a Philadelphia icon. By 1922 they moved to a much larger facility on Hunting Park Avenue.   Other Philadelphia traditions remained the province of smaller establishments.  Small soft pretzel bakeries were found in almost every neighborhood, though some, such as Federal Pretzel Baking Company in South Philadelphia, introduced limited mass-production techniques to increase their output. Similarly, the rolls used for Philadelphia’s cheesesteak sandwiches and hoagies came from a variety of bakers.  But the Amoroso family enterprise, originally just another small bakery in Camden in 1904, repeatedly outgrew its facilities until it was able to produce enough rolls to meet region-wide demand in a large plant on South 55th Street in Southwest Philadelphia.

Although large-scale production of breads and cakes got off to a slow start in Philadelphia, the manufacture of biscuits and crackers was well established by the Civil War, when “hard-tack,” a hard, usually saltless biscuit, was widely used for military rations. Godfrey Keebler (1822-93) had worked in a number of bakeries by the onset of the war, and in 1862 opened a bakery in South Philadelphia. His success from supplying the Union Army as well as the Philadelphia market led to expansion to a mechanized facility at 258-264 N. Twenty-Second Street and later, after a merger that formed the Keebler-Weyl Baking Company, to a large plant at G Street and East Hunting Park Avenue. The National Biscuit Company conglomerate (formed in 1898) also opened operations in Philadelphia at Broad Street and Glenwood Avenue, and later near the Roosevelt Boulevard in the Far Northeast section of the city.

Confectionary Leader

Philadelphia has also long been a leader in the confectionery industry. Stephen F. Whitman (1823-88) opened a confectionery shop on the waterfront in 1842 and introduced prepackaged candy in 1854. His company pioneered the use of cellophane in its famous Whitman’s Sampler (1912) and moved several times, eventually to Fourth and Race Streets.  It relocated once again, in 1960, to a new industrial park in the Far Northeast, where it employed 1,650 workers.  (Another Philadelphia candy shop, opened in 1873 by the young Milton Hershey [1857-1945], failed after a few years; he moved about a hundred miles west where he founded the Hershey Chocolate Company in 1894.)  Among other well-known Philadelphia candy makers were Richardson’s Mints (1893), C. A. Asher (1892, moved to Germantown in 1899), and David Goldenberg (who started his candy store on Kensington Avenue in 1890 and created Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews as a World War I ration in 1917).

A related industry, the manufacture of ice cream, was also important in Philadelphia. Among other ice-cream makers in the city, William A. Breyer (1828-82) began making ice cream in 1866 and opened a retail store on Frankford Avenue in 1882. The business was continued by his wife and sons after his death.  The company trumpeted the pure ingredients of its ice cream, and growing sales led to several moves, eventually to a large plant at Forty-Third Street and Woodland Avenue that employed 500 workers by 1931.

Meat, poultry, and seafood processing have been small but continual parts of Philadelphia’s food industry from the beginning from the beginning.  Excellent transportation to the West enabled meat processors to supply the needs of the large regional market. A few small-to-medium-sized slaughterhouses were found in the area, such as Cross Brothers in Kensington and Triolo’s in Burlington County, New Jersey. Dietz and Watson started making delicatessen meats in 1939 and expanded to other cities while maintaining a large plant in the Tacony section of the city. The nineteenth-century shad fisheries and markets of Shackamaxon even resulted in the change of that neighborhood’s name to Fishtown.

Local Consumers Were Producers, Too

Philadelphians were not only consumers of the products of the companies founded by the area’s food industry entrepreneurs; residents of working-class neighborhoods throughout the region were also the ones who did the work that turned agricultural raw or semi-processed materials into finished products. And that work was often long, hard, and low-paying, especially before employees joined together in unions to press for better pay and working conditions. Among the first recorded activities of united Philadelphia food workers was a strike for higher wages by the Journeymen Bakers in 1835. Journeymen Biscuit Makers were mentioned in the press a year later.  Some crafts in the industry were unionized over the next century, but it was only after the organizing drives of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1930s that most of the areas food workers became union members–even the 1,500 confectionary workers who organized Candy Workers Local 350. Union contracts improved the lives of food workers but often only after strikes and other industrial actions. One example among many was the strike of 1,900 bakers in 1946 against eight major bakery firms including Freihofer and Fleischmann in Philadelphia and Stroehmann Brothers in Norristown. Working-class support for unions and picket lines was impressive.  A sense of the strong traditions against crossing picket lines can be garnered from an arbitrator’s report about what happened at Cross Brothers Meat Packing Company when employees who had struck a different unit of the company crossed the street to an unrelated division of the firm:

On July 1, 1971, [Cross Brothers] expected approximately 65 slaughterhouse and 18 boning employees to report for work. None reported, since they refused to cross the Local 195 picket line. The office and clerical employees and the delivery employees, represented by Teamsters’ locals 161 and 500 respectively, similarly did not report for work. . . . Employees of an independent contractor building an addition to Packers’ building, as well as those of a garbage removal contractor, also refused to cross the picket line in order to perform their job duties.

Several of the most intense clashes between workers and management in the food-processing industry occurred in South Jersey, especially at Campbell Soup in Camden and Seabrook Farms in Cumberland County.  The workers at Seabrook, mostly African Americans and Italian immigrants, who were paid 12-15 cents per hour, initially won a big increase in their  wages when they struck in 1934, but their union was destroyed a few months later after concerted attacks by company, police, and vigilantes.

By the early twenty-first century much of Philadelphia’s food processing industry had disappeared or been absorbed into global food mega-corporations, though, just as in earlier centuries, small establishments continued to compete in various niches. There were many reasons for the decline. The rich agricultural hinterlands of the city that had supplied canneries and other food processors were no longer the source of raw materials. Although local farms still produced a smaller amount of food for the fresh market, food processors preferred cheaper mass-produced intermediate inputs like tomato paste from California and China. Beyond reasons specific to the food industry, Philadelphia’s food workers suffered along with others from the increasingly aggressive cost-cutting strategies of global capitalism that ramped up in the 1970s. The lure of highly automated factories with fewer workers, remaining workers who would accept lower pay and not join unions, states and countries offering corporate tax breaks and little regulation, and repeated bouts of merger-and-acquisition mania all took their toll on Philadelphia’s industries, including its food processors.

Recent Consolidation

Freihofer’s and Stroehmann’s breads (along with Arnold’s, Entenmann’s, and others) had been absorbed into the largest bakery corporation in the United States, Bimbo Bakeries, a unit of Mexico’s Grupo Bimbo. Area residents might have taken some comfort from the fact that Bimbo’s American headquarters located in Horsham in Montgomery County. Tasty Baking Company closed its Nicetown plant and moved to a new taxpayer-subsidized facility at the former Navy Yard in 2010. Because the new plant was highly automated, hundreds of employees were laid off.  Yet the company avoided bankruptcy only by becoming part of Georgia-based Flowers Foods (a Bimbo competitor). After Whitman’s Chocolates’ much-heralded move to the new Philadelphia Industrial Park in 1960, it was sold to Pet, Inc. When Pet later sold the brand to Russell Stover Candies in 1993, it closed the Philadelphia plant.  Breyer’s Ice Cream went through several corporate owners; it became part of the Anglo-Dutch multinational Unilever in 1993 where it made mostly “frozen dairy desserts” rather than ice cream.  It laid off the 240 workers at its Philadelphia plant in the mid-1990s and demolished the building. One of the city’s oldest industries–sugar refining–ended with the closing of the National Sugar refinery (Jack Frost sugar) in Fishtown in 1981 and the Amstar (formerly Franklin) refinery (Domino sugar) in South Philadelphia a year later.

Still, food processing companies large and small remained in the area in the twenty-first century. Cross Brothers was gone, but 400 workers at Dietz and Watson continued curing meat in Tacony, and the Czerw family still smoked kielbasa in its Port Richmond smokehouse. Keebler’s factory in Juniata was closed long ago (and the company itself had been absorbed into Kellogg’s), but 700 workers still made cookies and crackers at the Nabisco plant in Northeast Philadelphia, though it had changed ownership by then to Kraft Foods. Federal Soft Pretzel Bakery was sold to snack food giant J&J Snack Foods Corporation across the river in Pennsauken in 2000, but Philadelphia Soft Pretzels continued hand-twisting pretzels at its Feltonville bakery, though by then it was competing with dozens of new franchised pretzel makers.

The Philadelphia food-processing industry had fallen far from its important position of the early twentieth century.  Most large mass-production facilities had taken the same route as the region’s other large manufacturers and moved to newer and cheaper locations in the globalized food economy. Some foods that had short shelf life or were difficult to transport were still made in plants in or near large cities, including Philadelphia. For example, while Bimbo managed all of its U.S. holdings from Horsham, it still relied on local bakeries (such as Stroehmann’s) for most of its bread production (and it continued using old local brand names). A few independent companies with strong local ties (like Dietz and Watson) still employed hundreds in the area, and the growing ranks of “foodies” and newer immigrant groups provided opportunities for numerous niche producers of specialty and ethnic foods. These, along with a handful of national and global corporate headquarters of food companies like Campbell and Bimbo, marked the latest stage in the history of food processing in Philadelphia.

Daniel Sidorick has taught history at Temple and Rutgers Universities and the College of New Jersey.  His book Condensed Capitalism: Campbell Soup and the Pursuit of Cheap Production in the Twentieth Century (Cornell University Press) was awarded the Richard P. McCormick Prize by the New Jersey Historical Commission. (Author information current at time of publication.)

In colonial times, outdoor street markets near waterfront docks provided fresh meat, fish, and produce. Such public markets, later located near railroad lines, supplied food to many town and city dwellers (and, eventually, retail grocers) into the twentieth century. In Philadelphia, a few retail stores specialized in food items, but they generally sold expensive, imported “fancy goods” such as coffee, tea, wine, sugar, and chocolate. Gradually, some of these shops began offering everyday foods as well. Butchers, bakers, dairy stores, dry goods stores (which also carried some nonperishable food items), and apothecaries (which sometimes sold spices) also sold food items.

The early nineteenth century marked a transition to general groceries that carried a range of dry food items and sometimes a limited selection of longer-lasting perishables, such as potatoes and apples. In Philadelphia, hundreds of general groceries opened in both older and developing residential neighborhoods as the city expanded. DeSilver’s Philadelphia Directory and Stranger’s Guide for 1835 & 1836 listed 485 Philadelphia grocers. Some grocers operated in semi-detached and detached dwellings, depending on the neighborhood, but in Philadelphia and Camden, cities characterized by row-house blocks, most were located in row houses.

The stereotypical “corner store” offered clear retail benefits: two sidewalk facades provided extra space for displaying goods, increasing the relatively limited interior stock and display space and creating the possibility for two large plate glass display windows. However, even in this early era fewer than half of Philadelphia’s grocers, about 45 percent, had corner locations. They vied with many types of retail stores—saloons, pharmacies, dry goods, bakeries, hardware stores, and  tobacconists/newsagents—all desiring visible locations.  There simply were not enough corners to go around.

Challenges of Perishables

Before refrigeration, the small grocery was an especially risky business. Grocers had to estimate the quantities of foods they could sell, which could require years of experience to accurately predict the needs of a store’s particular group of customers. Many perishable goods had to be sold the same day the grocer purchased them.  Overstocking, particularly of quickly perishable items, led to failure for many stores.

As the number of grocers increased, national trade publications, such as American Grocer (first published in 1869) and later Progressive Grocer (established in 1922) provided advice augmented by local and regional publications.  For grocers in Philadelphia, Camden, and adjacent counties, Grocers’ Price Current (1873-86), Cash Grocer (1874-94), and Grocer (1875-90) offered price and transportation information for the region. By the end of the century, the national rail network and the appearance of nationally manufactured packaged food items reduced the need for local publications. National publications kept grocers apprised of weather conditions affecting growing seasons and reported on rail strikes or other factors that affected the quality, supply, or price of food items, which the grocer might need to explain to disappointed or even angry customers.  By carrying items from an expanded marketplace, the local grocer connected each family in the neighborhood to a global food economy.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Philadelphia transformed into the “workshop of the world” and outlying wards urbanized, the system of food distribution became increasingly complicated; at the end of the system, the neighborhood grocery made it all work.  By 1920, Philadelphia had an estimated sixty-five hundred independent retail grocers and two thousand additional chain and association stores, not including delicatessens, variety stores, caterers, small shops and restaurants that sold a few groceries as a sideline, or food halls at department stores that sold primarily “fancy goods.” The number of grocery stores increased steadily through the building boom of the 1920s.

The advent of chains and grocers’ associations beginning in the 1890s increased competition in this relatively risky business, but many independent small grocers absorbed and implemented new methods. Like chain grocers, they began carrying manufactured, packaged foods, which they displayed on shelves, in glassed counters, and in complicated arrangements like pyramids.  The independent grocers also continued to offer goods and services that made them indispensable to many customers. Many grocers took pride in offering homemade ethnic foods, such as German lunch meats, or homemade honey or home-smoked hams. Neighborhood grocery stores also offered an extension of family domestic space as women and children ran in and out every day, even several times a day, before most families acquired electric refrigerators.

By the early years of the twentieth century, independent grocers had to show they were keeping up with modern methods as a defense against criticisms by some Progressive reformers. Journalist Ida Tarbell (1857-1944), for instance, suggested that in addition to being tempted to overweigh goods, independent grocers might sell unpackaged goods that could be contaminated or adulterated. For this reason, professional trade publications suggested displaying packaged and branded foods in large storefront windows, which also allowed passersby a full view of the interior of the store.

Chains and Supermarkets

The first grocery store chains in Philadelphia, established by several Scots-Irish and British immigrants, emerged in the 1890s.  By 1910 they accounted for about 490 stores, including the Acme Tea Company with two hundred stores and Robinson and Crawford, first established in South Philadelphia, with about one hundred. Originally very similar to independent groceries in size and daily operation, stores within a chain system benefited from central management of inventory.

Chains practiced economies of scale unavailable to independent grocers.  By standardizing inventories of member stores, they could purchase large quantities at discount from wholesalers and pass on lower prices to customers. A Wharton School economist, Clyde Lyndon King (1879-1937), suggested, though, that chains actually lowered their prices to points only just below those of independent grocers. The largest chains skipped the wholesalers and dealt directly with food manufacturers and sometimes even with farmers.

To compete with these chains (and the growing number of independents), by the 1890s some retail grocers joined together to form wholesale associations. Reformers noted these retail cooperatives were especially successful in Philadelphia. The Retail Grocers’ Association (Girard Grocery Company) included about seven hundred Triangle Stores, so-called because their newspaper advertisements featured a triangular emblem.  The other significant grocery association in Philadelphia was the Unity-Frankford Association (Frankford Grocery Company). By 1920, about twenty-two hundred grocers had joined one or the other. Smaller groups of grocers had less success.  A group of thirty Polish grocers started the Richmond Grocery Company, but they did not have adequate working capital to purchase the large quantities necessary to pass on competitive lower prices to customers. Their association folded after just a few years.

Grocers, as well as customers, struggled with the increasing price of food.  Like reformers, grocers identified the various middlemen in the food distribution process as a cause of rising food prices.  As retailers joined together in wholesale cooperatives, wholesalers fought back by creating retail cooperatives.  Food prices fluctuated wildly and became an issue in the 1912 election. The years 1916-17 saw a steep rise in prices of many goods, including the daily staples of flour and potatoes; women in several districts of the city, primarily in South Philadelphia, attacked pushcart vendors and grocers.  A mayoral commission appointed to investigate found that prices varied widely from grocer to grocer and that independent grocers invariably charged more than chain stores.

Chain-Store Efficiencies

Progressive reformers approved of the large-scale efficiency of the chain stores and attacked the independent retail grocer as the main culprit in high food prices.  In Philadelphia, important avenues devoted to small retail stores (Frankford Avenue, Germantown Avenue, Ridge Avenue, Woodland Avenue) frequently had two or three grocery stores to a block.  In many areas of the city, two of four corners at an intersection were occupied by grocery stores. By World War I, the city had one retail grocery for every fifty-nine families or 295 people.  Experts estimated this allowed the average grocer an income of $640 or less after expenses. Reformers believed cooperative associations should regulate the grocery trade by imposing stricter credit requirements on grocers, reducing both competition and failure.

Even the chains had difficulty competing effectively. During and after World War I, they began merging with each other.  When the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, the first grocery store chain in the nation, entered Philadelphia from New York and New Jersey, local mergers followed.  Five Philadelphia chains, including the Acme Tea Company, combined to create the American Stores Company, parent of ACME Markets. By 1920, six hundred grocers in the city and another six hundred in the surrounding counties had become part of American Stores. ACME experimented in New Jersey with two self-serve supermarkets, but both ACME and A&P were reluctant to abandon the familiar and overall successful model of the neighborhood grocery.

From the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s, automobile and refrigerator ownership, the latter of which increased tenfold, changed the way Americans shopped for food. The Great Depression of the 1930s made customers even more sensitive to food prices and that decade saw a wave of supermarket expansion and innovation.  Three local businessmen founded the Penn Fruit Produce Store (1927-78) as a green grocery (only produce), but they quickly transformed their stores into a full general groceries in response to competition from ACME and A&P. By the late 1930s, Penn Fruit operated six self-serve supermarkets in Philadelphia. At its height in the 1950s, Penn Fruit ranked as one of the most successful supermarket chains in the United States.

The Depression also provided the impetus for grocery and supermarket modernization. New Deal Main Street Programs encouraged even small businesses to remodel in a Moderne style characterized by glass and chrome, and newly constructed supermarkets most fully exploited the new visual taste. Most iconically, Penn Fruit became known for its modern streamlined curving arched storefront, even more so in 1955 when the company hired commercial architect Victor Gruen (1903-80) to create a prototype store design for the Black Horse Shopping Center in Audubon, New Jersey.  By the 1950s, developers looked to supermarkets as anchor stores for new suburban shopping centers reached by automobile. In 1953, Penn Fruit opened the first store in Shop-a-Rama in Levittown, Bucks County.  Food Fair, which originated Harrisburg in the 1920s, soon followed. Compared to these large, well-lit, glass and chrome structures in colorful new shopping centers surrounding by parking lots, traditional corner groceries in cities and the small shopping districts of inner suburbs like Swarthmore and Drexel Hill, Delaware County, often seemed out of date, unhygienic, and simply inconvenient.

Suburban Migration

In the mid- to late-twentieth century, supermarkets were identified with suburbia.  Giant, which began as a small meat market in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, expanded to several cities, but after World War II the company followed families moving to the suburbs. Genuardi’s, which began as a green grocery in Norristown in the 1920s and evolved into a supermarket by the 1950s, expanded in the suburban counties west and north of Philadelphia but never opened a store in the city.

By 1970, supermarkets, which had revolutionized food distribution by carrying all kinds of foods under one roof and had largely stabilized food prices, accounted for about 70 percent of national food sales. Still, competition emerged. Offering an alternative to congested parking lots and long check-out lines, new “convenience” stores with easily accessible, roadside locations stocked basic items such as milk, snacks, and ready-made foods, tobacco products, newspapers, and sundries. In the 1990s, many began installing automatic-teller machines. Convenience stores generally charged higher prices than grocery stores and supermarkets, but they offered longer hours, sometimes twenty-four hours a day, and relatively quick service.

As with supermarkets, local and regional convenience stores competed with national chains.  A decline in popularity of home-delivered milk led two of the region’s dairy producers into the convenience store business: Heritage’s Dairy Stores, familiar in Camden and other southern New Jersey counties, opened its first convenience store in Westville, New Jersey, in 1957.  In Pennsylvania, the first Wawa Food Market opened in Folsom, Delaware County, in 1964.  Wawa expanded into New Jersey in 1968 and just one year later into Delaware.  In the early twenty-first century, Wawa also opened Center City Philadelphia stores geared toward urban pedestrians. Wawa and Heritage’s competed with the national 7-Eleven chain, founded in Texas in the 1920s, which became more famous for its Slurpee and large-sized sugared drinks than for milk and daily basics.

Large discount stores, such as Walmart and Target, also competed with supermarkets. With grocery departments as just one of their many offerings, these stores successfully offered one-stop shopping. Price clubs, like BJs and COSTCO, offered even more inexpensive food items for those who could pay annual memberships and buy in larger than usual quantities.

Food Deserts and Obesity

By the 1990s, the Philadelphia region had a full complement of supermarkets, including Giant, Shop Rite, IGA, Trader Joe’s, and Whole Foods (joined in the twenty-first century by Aldi, which sold discount organic produce). Quality and prices varied significantly between supermarkets and between neighborhoods, as new food categories—organic, non-GMO, and gluten-free—came into demand, for health or political reasons.  As “foodies” sought tasteful and unusual ingredients, supermarkets competed with farmers’ markets for customers who sought to “buy local.”

At the same time, in the 1990s several studies indicated that Philadelphia residents exhibited increasing levels of obesity, diabetes, and other diseases closely related to poor nutrition.  This once again made small, independent grocery stores the target of critics. Most neighborhood grocery stores still carried mainly packaged processed foods, with limited produce, meat, and seafood selection. Some urban areas (sections of Germantown, for instance, and the city of Camden) had deteriorated into “food deserts,” defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as areas lacking relatively easy access to the ingredients for a healthy diet, such as affordable fruits, vegetables, whole grains, low fat milk, and other fresh food products.

To combat the high incidence of diet-related diseases in low-income neighborhoods, in 1992 Duane Perry (b. 1955), then-executive director of the Reading Terminal Market Merchants’ Association, founded the Food Trust to encourage public-sector support of a nutritious food supply and a return of supermarkets to lower-income neighborhoods. Because more Philadelphians had convenient access to small neighborhood groceries, the Philadelphia Department of Public Health launched the Get Healthy Philadelphia initiative and offered neighborhood grocers financial incentive to carry at least two healthy food items in at least two food categories. In Camden, the situation was less promising as plans for a second full-service supermarket, a new ShopRite, fell through in 2016. Earlier, the city lacked a full-service supermarket for one year until a PriceRite opened in 2014, the first new supermarket to enter the city since the late 1960s.

Due to increasing publicity, dedicated activists, and widespread health concerns, supermarkets and neighborhood grocery stores brought an improved selection of healthy foods to many of Philadelphia’s residents by the beginning of the twenty-first century.  Despite new forms of competition, the corner grocery—the original convenience store—survived, and the distinctive offerings of Mexican, Asian, Italian, Nigerian, and other ethnic grocery stores in the city’s neighborhoods continued to attract a loyal following.

Anne Krulikowski holds a Ph.D. in American History with a concentration in material culture/historic preservation from the University of Delaware. She teaches at West Chester University and has published articles on working-class neighborhoods, oral history, vernacular architecture, and grocery stores. (Author information current at time of publication.)