Maxwell House became the Haggadah at Passover

In the early 1920s, some observant Jewish households avoided coffee during Passover, uncertain whether coffee beans — a plant product, though not a grain — were permitted under the holiday's strict dietary rules. Advertising agent Joseph Jacobs, who had built his agency around marketing to Jewish American consumers, got a rabbi to formally certify in 1923 that coffee beans, botanically a berry rather than a grain, were kosher for Passover — clearing the religious obstacle to Jewish households buying Maxwell House coffee at all during the holiday.

That still left the harder problem: turning a permitted purchase into a preferred one, during the Depression, against a rival brand discounting on price. Jacobs' pitch to Maxwell House (then Cheek-Neal Coffee Company) in 1932 wasn't another ad campaign — it was to print and give away, free with every can of coffee, a Haggadah: the text every household reads aloud together at the Passover Seder, the year's single most family-centered, ritual-bound meal.

Gave a free branded Haggadah with each can, making the brand the Seder's shared text read aloud yearly, so it needed no fresh ads—just stayed the ritual's vehicle.

The Haggadah is read aloud at the Seder, so the brand gets annual exposure without new ads.

The giveaway was genuinely useful, so households kept and reused it, reinforcing loyalty.

The ritual's persistence outlasted any ad campaign, giving decades of recurring brand presence.

Find a recurring ritual your audience already performs and make your brand the vehicle for it, free, rather than competing for attention.

By 2006 more than 50 million copies had been printed and distributed; by 2024 the cumulative total had passed 60 million, with roughly 400,000 new copies still printed that year alone. The Maxwell House Haggadah remains, more than 90 years after its 1932 launch, the single best-known and most widely used Haggadah among American Jewish households, despite thousands of competing editions now available.