History of Kool-Aid

Kool-Aid itself was born in Hastings and reached maturity in Chicago. The Kool-Aid story is also the story of Edwin E. Perkins and his family. Born in Lewis, Iowa, on January 8, 1889, Edwin was the oldest son of David and Kizandra Perkins, whose families had migrated from eastern states in an earlier day. Kizzie’s father had once been a station agent at the Julesburg stage station on the Oregon Trail, and in 1893, the Perkins family sold their general store in Iowa and moved to a farm in Furnas County, Nebraska. There they lived in a three-room sodhouse which was distinguished from others because it had wooden floors and calcimined walls. They hauled their water from the well a mile away. When it was time for the children to go to school, they walked three miles across the prairie to a one-room schoolhouse.

The 1890’s in Nebraska were grim years of drought, unrelenting heat and grasshopper invasions. Many destitute families survived only because food and clothing were shipped from Aid Societies in the East. But although the Perkins family lived on the farm for seven years, its members were able to survive without charity. Part of the reason was undoubtedly that they had some savings to fall back on, but most of it was that the family was hard-working. The father labored long hours in the fields, tending the crops, the garden, caring for the milk cows and building up a herd of pedigreed Poland China hogs. The mother raised poultry, made butter and cheese, and every Saturday would load the children and the produce into the buggy, harness up old Nellie, and drive ten miles to Beaver City to make her rounds selling butter and eggs to cash customers. There was little time for leisure.

By the end of the decade, the family traded the farm for a general store in the village of Hendley, and on January 1, 1900, they moved there so the children would be closer to schools. There were eventually ten children, eight of whom survived to adulthood. After five years in the general store, David Perkins was able to build a new store building, a frame one with a sign on it: “D.M. Perkins-General Merchandise.”

In his after-school hours, 11-year-old Edwin began clerking in the store, sometimes turning the revolving candy case so fast that the customers would have to call out, “Slow Down! Slow down!” so that they could make their selections of penny candy. A family friend brought home packages of a newfangled dessert from a shopping trip to Hastings. It was called Jell-O, and it came in “Six Delicious Flavors.” Edwin was entranced with it and persuaded his father to carry it in the store. For the rest of his life, he recounted how the Six Delicious Flavors influenced his decision to get into the pre-packaged food business.

In a magazine sold in the general store, Edwin saw an advertisement, ”Be a manufacturer -- Mixer’s Guide tells how -- write today,” and sent off to Ft. Madison, Iowa, to get some formulas and labels with his name printed on them. The labels read “Manufactured by Perkins Products Co., Hendley, Nebr.” The youngster, by now 12 or 13 years old, made a nuisance of himself in his mother’s kitchen, making pungent extracts, medicines and other concoctions suggested in the packet.

Edwin also noticed sales opportunities in which people could buy merchandise from wholesalers and manufacturers and sell it door-to-door for what were advertised as “great profits.” Before long, he bought a small hand printing press and rubber-stamp making equipment so he could do his own printing. For the four years after he finished high school, he published the local weekly newspaper, the Hendley Delphic, and turned out job-printing orders, including his own Perkins Products Co. labels.

During those years Edwin was also the village postmaster, and in the back of the Hendley post office, he put his printing equipment and set up a mail order business for his products. Business was so brisk that it increased the rating of the post office from a “cancellation” basis to a respectable salaried classification. Perkins made and sold bluing, perfume, and other preparations coming out of the chemical set. These were sold through sales agents by what was known as “trust scheme” methods, the agent being trusted with the merchandise and rewarded with a premium when he sold the goods and sent in the money. It was the same kind of business procedure he had seen advertised in magazines.

In 1918 Edwin put together a remedy for the tobacco habit, packaged under the name “Nix-O-Tine Tobacco Remedy” and sold it through direct mail to users and such of them as wanted to become agents. The first advertisement for this remedy, published in the Police Gazette, cost $35, all the capital the promoter dared to risk.

For Edwin Perkins was a new bridegroom, having married Kathryn M. Shoemaker, his childhood sweetheart and the daughter of Hendley’s only doctor, in September, 1918. After that, Edwin and “Kitty,” as she preferred to be called, were inseparable. Mrs. Perkins remained in the background in business matters, but she was matched perfectly with the young businessman and remained devoted to him for the rest of her life.

When veterans returned home from World War I, many with the cigarette habit picked up in the army, the tobacco remedy business prospered. Nix-O-Tine tackled nicotine dependency from several angles: it was composed of herbs to be chewed, large flat herbal tablets to be swallowed, a hideous-tasting mouth-wash with silver nitrate in it and a powerful herbal laxative. The combined effort was guaranteed to cure anyone, and for those who stuck to the program, it probably did.

Business was good, so much that on Valentine’s Day, 1920, Edwin and Kitty moved to Hastings, eighty miles east of Hendley. Its location on several railroads and highways made it a better distribution point than the small village. But Hastings was not the couple’s first choice for their new home. The Perkinses planned to move to southern California, and in fact were packed to go, when Edwin suffered an attack of bleeding ulcers. After his release from the hospital, he decided to stay in Nebraska to be near family and to maintain a central location for his mail order business. The ulcer problem persisted, producing an ironic situation: the patent medicine man suffered frequent spells of illness throughout his life.

In Hastings Edwin and Kitty rented quarters, 22 x 60 feet in size, on the second floor of the Odd Fellows building at 218 1/2 North Lincoln Avenue. For six months they lived in the back room and turned out their products in the front. Their heat was a cookstove, fueled by coal hoisted up from the alley with bucket and rope, stored in a closet. They then purchased a small bungalow at 735 North Washington Avenue. By August, 1920, the rest of the family, including Momma and Papa Perkins, also moved from Hendley, buying houses first at 2004 West 4th Street, then 412 North Colorado.

Despite the family’s limited resources, Edwin went to St. Louis for a month in the summer of 1921 to learn more about the household products business. He worked with a small firm which contracted to make bulk orders of lotions, creams, medicines, etc. and studied their production and distribution techniques. Returning to Hastings, he spent a year preparing to introduce his own “Onor-Maid” line of products. During this time he and the rest of the Perkinses were supported by tobacco remedy sales.

In April, 1922, the company moved again, this time to “an unpretentious home” (in the words of a March 22, 1923, article in the Hastings Tribune) on the second floor of A.H. Mansfield’s building at 510 West First Street. During this period, Edwin Perkins hired his first chemist, Orval Adcock, a local man with a 7th grade education but natural abilities.

To sell the household products, Edwin set up a nationwide system of representatives who sold door-to-door from sample cases, using the same procedures as salesmen for Watkins, Jewel Tea and other companies. Nix-O-Tine and the company’s gasoline additive, “Motor-Vigor” continued to be sold by direct mail through the “Perkins Chemical Company,” using purchased mailing lists.

In September, 1922, the first Onor-Maid order was received. Before long Perkins Products was manufacturing and selling more than a hundred and twenty-five different items, ranging from face creams and lotions, medicines and salves, soaps and toilet waters to food flavorings, jelly making products and fruit drink concentrates.

In its first year of operation so many boxes of “Ironux” tonic tablets, tins of carbolic salve and cartons of “E-Z-wash” detergent were being made and sold that Perkins Products outgrew its quarters. Edwin moved the company one door east to the building at 506-508 West First Street, having purchased his first factory in March, 1923, at a sheriff’s sale.

Perkins Products became a true family operation -- everyone but sister Faye Morrow (who was married to a Ft. Calhoun doctor) -- worked in the business. While his wife, sisters and brothers and parents filled bottles and jars, Edwin himself was often busy at the printing press, turning out copies of “The Onor-Maid Herald,” a house organ started in May, 1922, and published monthly to encourage Perkins representatives in their sales. He also printed broadsides which said “I Want You to Be My District Manager,” post cards soliciting product representatives who could “Earn $10 a Day,” and booklets telling managers how to secure Perkins agents. “Our District Managers are now permitted to appoint both men and women agents,” one brochure said, “but we do not accept young boys and girls under any circumstances, as they cannot be depended upon to stay with the work.” Another advertisement offered new Ford or Hudson automobiles to the most enterprising managers. With his characteristic flair as a marketer, Edwin made a “Personal Guarantee” that any hard worker with a $3.50 sample kit could succeed as a Perkins agent.

One of the most popular items in the sample kit turned out to be the summer soft drink “Fruit-Smack,” a liquid put up in four-ounce corked bottles. It came in six flavors and appeared about the same time that Coca Cola was gaining national acceptance. It was concentrated so that a family could make a pitcher full of the beverage for only pennies. But shipping it presented problems: breakage, leaking, and the weight of the glass when it was transported.

Perkins -- who still admired Jell-O and had already perfected fruit pectin powders to make jelly at home -- knew that it should be reduced to a dry, concentrated, easily-soluble form capable of being packaged in an envelope. He also had another motive; if he could come up with a national product which was attractive to food brokers, he could get out of the trust agent and mail order business. The concept was somewhat audacious for a product yet to be developed, but Edwin Perkins was the kind of man who didn’t let go of an idea once it entered his mind.

Despite later protestations that he “was not a chemist,” E.E. Perkins the “mixer” went to work with his assistants.  Edwin’s objective was to dehydrate Fruit-Smack by tinkering with the recipe, focusing on the right mixture of dextrose, citric acid, tartaric acid, flavoring and food coloring. By 1927, he had Kool-Aid. In six delicious flavors--raspberry (Mr. Perkins’ favorite), cherry, grape, lemon, orange and root-beer. Strawberry was added later.

Perkins then turned to marketing the product. The name itself was clever and continued Edwin’s penchant for hyphenated spellings (another result of the boy chemist’s infatuation with Jell-O?). Perkins Products already sold Onor-Maid, Nix-O-Tine, Motor-Vigor, Glos-Comb and Jel-Aid. But the spelling was originally “Kool-Ade” (which was trademarked by Perkins in 1928). Family lore includes two versions of the story behind the name change. One says that government regulators complained that “Ade” was reserved for fruit juice products, so the name became “Aid.” The other states that “someone threatened to sue Edwin if he used the original name.” The “Kool-Aid” name was trademarked in 1934, again by Perkins Products.

There were other setbacks. Packaging took longer to perfect than expected, and the company missed the 1927 summer season. After experimenting with “asphaltum-laminate paper” (which leaked black, tarry material into the product) and hard waxed bread wrapping paper (resulting in envelopes which wouldn’t stay glued shut), Edwin settled on a soft waxed paper inner liner and a lithographed outer envelope in bright colors.

Finances were a problem too. Back in 1923, banks in Hastings would not lend the family capital to expand Perkins Products, so Edwin turned to private individuals for loans. That same year, Hastings College lent his parents $3,500 and took a mortgage on David and Kizzie’s home. When it came time to develop the powdered soft-drink business, Edwin again borrowed from a private source and mortgaged the factory building on First Street for $10,000 to loan broker Ernest Hoeppner.

And the family was nearly worn out trying to keep pace with Edwin’s production schedule for “launching Kool-Aid in the trade,” as he was fond of saying. Kitty and other family members worked long hours at the factory, often until after midnight, in part because of Edwin’s life-long pattern of starting work late in the morning and finishing late in the evening. Edwin himself labored two days and nights straight to print a four-color brochure for distribution to 250 wholesalers in June, 1928.

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