Beyond Chocolate: Guittard’s Coffee Years

Emery | The Palimpsest

Published October 20, 2026 · Confectionally Yours Journal

A coffee brand of its own

E. Guittard & Co. kept a store at 405 and 407 Sansome Street in San Francisco. Etienne Guittard had come from Tournus, in eastern France, during the Gold Rush, and had been in business for himself since 1868. The company’s own history says the shop sold chocolate, and alongside it coffee, tea and spices.¹

That last clause is where this essay lives.

They also sold coffee — under its own registered brand, with its own paper filed in Washington.

On February 4, 1879, the United States Patent Office registered trademark No. 6,991 to Etienne Guittard: Chartres Old Gov’t Java, roasted and ground coffee.² A purple stamp on the sheet reads Trade Mark — Coffee & Tea. A clerk wrote the same two words again in blue pencil.

What survives is not a package. It is the government’s copy of one: a printed label mounted on a Patent Office form, signed by an attorney on Guittard’s behalf, witnessed by two men, and marked up in the margins by the office that filed it. The sheet is twenty-six by thirty-nine centimeters. It is held at the Library of Congress, where it has been digitized at a resolution that lets you read a line of type too small to have been meant for reading.

A nineteenth-century trademark registration sheet. At center, a tall ornate coffee label reads “The Self-Measuring and Scale Package Coffee,” “Chartres Old Gov’t Java” and “Guittard & Co., 405, 407 Sansome St., San Francisco,” with a small oval engraving of three allegorical women, one holding an American flag, and a bear at their feet. Printed panels on either side carry descriptive text, and at right a long measuring scale runs from ½ to 16 ounces of coffee against water from ¼ pint to 1 gallon. Handwritten signatures and notes fill the margins. — Trademark registration for Chartres Old Gov’t Java coffee, E. Guittard & Co., San Francisco, registered February 4, 1879. The label describes a “self-measuring” package: a printed scale pairs ounces of ground coffee with pints and quarts of water, and the text notes a blend with “a little percentage of best German chicory.” In its early decades, Guittard’s Sansome Street business sold coffee, tea and spices alongside chocolate.

Trademark registration by E. Guittard for Chartres Old Govt. Java brand Roasted and Ground Coffee, 1879. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, TRADEMARKS, no. 6991. No known restrictions on publication.

Public-domain archival document, 1879. Reproduced as a historical record in editorial and archival context. E. Guittard and Guittard Chocolate Company are marks of a company still trading; no endorsement, affiliation, or connection is claimed or implied.

What the label promised

The headline across the top is not the brand. It is the mechanism: The Self-Measuring and Scale Package Coffee. Below it, in smaller type, Patent Applied For.

The package was asked to do three jobs.

Keep the coffee. A panel printed vertically down the left side explains that the coffee is “put in a certain peculiar kind of Chemical Paper of our own composition,” that it “will keep its Aroma for months in it,” and that “the weather either dry or damp will have no effect on it.”

Measure it. Down the right edge runs a printed ruler. Ounces of ground coffee on one side, from a half ounce to sixteen. Water on the other, from a quarter pint through one quart, two, three, and a gallon. The first pairing is given at the head of the scale: For ½ oz Coffee — use water ¼ pint. That is what self-measuring meant. The proportion was held by the wrapper rather than by the cook.

Vouch for it. A boxed guarantee sits beneath the firm’s name. The left panel ends with an instruction and a warning in the same breath: “Observe the signature and do not allow yourself to be imposed upon.” Beneath it, a facsimile of Etienne Guittard’s own hand.

The right panel reaches for France to explain the name. The coffee, it says, is made “from Rodger’s Process of Chartres, (France) where it first originated,” and it “gives fully a saving of 20% over common coffee.” Nothing found so far identifies Rodger’s Process. The claim stands on the label alone.

The brand name reaches further still. Old Government Java was a trade term of the period: Java coffee held and aged for years in Dutch government warehouses in the East Indies, and by extension a mark of quality.³ On this sheet it describes a character, not an origin. The sheet does not say where the beans were grown.

The sheet nine weeks earlier

Nine weeks before the coffee mark was registered, on December 3, 1878, the same office had registered trademark No. 6,858 to the same man at the same address: Chocolat Francais, prepared chocolate.⁴ The Patent Office filed it under Beverages — its own category for the product, and not confectionery.

A nineteenth-century trademark registration sheet with a small color label at its center. The label reads “Chocolat Francais” and “E. Guittard & Co., San Francisco.” It shows three allegorical figures, one in a helmet holding an American flag, beside a crate marked “E.G. & Co. S.F.,” with ships on a bay behind them. Gold medallions in the upper corners read “Highest” and “Premium,” and cherubs sit in the lower corners. Printed headings and handwritten signatures surround the label. — Trademark registration for Chocolat Francais prepared chocolate, E. Guittard & Co., San Francisco, registered December 3, 1878. The color label sets three allegorical figures against a bay of ships, between two medallions claiming honors for “best chocolate,” one from the Mechanics’ Institute. It was registered ten years after Guittard opened on Sansome Street, and two months before the firm’s Java coffee trademark.

Trademark registration by E. Guittard for Chocolat Francais brand Prepared Chocolate, 1878. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, TRADEMARKS, no. 6858. No known restrictions on publication.

Public-domain archival document, 1878. Reproduced as a historical record in editorial and archival context. E. Guittard and Guittard Chocolate Company are marks of a company still trading; no endorsement, affiliation, or connection is claimed or implied.

The reverse sheet: a black-and-white line drawing of the same Chocolat Francais label, mounted on a tan registration form, with handwritten signatures below and a red stamp reading “Draftsman” in the corner. — Trademark registration for Chocolat Francais prepared chocolate, E. Guittard & Co., San Francisco, registered December 3, 1878. The color label sets three allegorical figures against a bay of ships, between two medallions claiming honors for “best chocolate,” one from the Mechanics’ Institute. It was registered ten years after Guittard opened on Sansome Street, and two months before the firm’s Java coffee trademark.

Trademark registration by E. Guittard for Chocolat Francais brand Prepared Chocolate, 1878. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, TRADEMARKS, no. 6858. No known restrictions on publication.

Public-domain archival document, 1878. Reproduced as a historical record in editorial and archival context. E. Guittard and Guittard Chocolate Company are marks of a company still trading; no endorsement, affiliation, or connection is claimed or implied.

The chocolate label is the prettier object by a distance. It is a color lithograph, and a very small line in its lower left corner credits a San Francisco house — read as Lith. Britton, Rey & Co. S.F., probably but not certainly. Three allegorical figures occupy the center, one standing and two seated, under an arch. Behind them is a bay with a sailing ship and a steamship, hills, and a steam locomotive at the left edge. Two gold medallions sit in the upper corners, two cherubs in the lower. A French brand name runs in a banner above the firm’s name, and the street numbers sit on ribbons in the lower corners.

The coffee label was printed on the other side of the country: National Bureau of Engraving, Philadelphia & New York appears below it. A French name on a California picture — and if the lithographer’s line reads correctly, the chocolate was printed at home while the coffee was engraved in the East.

The two labels share an emblem. The helmeted figure holding the United States flag. The figure in the feathered headdress. The crate stencilled E.G. & Co. S.F. The bear lying at their feet. All four appear on the chocolate sheet of December 1878, and again on the coffee sheet of February 1879. On the coffee label the group is captioned The Three Great Republics. On the chocolate label it carries no caption at all.

The paperwork is plainer than the pictures. Both sheets were witnessed by the same two men, George C. Stewart and James B. Stewart. Both were signed by the same attorney. And both carry the same handwritten line at the foot: Nov. 26, 1878. The word written before that date has not been read with certainty, so what the date marks — a first use, a filing, something else — is not known.

Read cautiously, the two sheets look like one house putting its marks on record in late November 1878, reaching the register nine weeks apart. That is a reading, not a record. What the sheets themselves carry is the same date, the same witnesses and the same attorney.

Why a chocolate house sold coffee

Emery:

Etienne Guittard was a marketer, and I would guess he saw coffee for what it already was. By 1878 it was settled deep in American life — tied to waking, to meals, to military endurance, to ordinary comfort. An established staple, and a natural companion to the ground cocoa market that was growing at the same time. In the Bay Area, with that coffee demand in front of him and Ghirardelli across town, adding coffee reads to me as a sound business decision rather than a diversion.

— Emery

The record supports the shape of that reading, if not the motive. Domingo Ghirardelli launched his chocolate manufactory in San Francisco on June 18, 1852 — sixteen years before Guittard opened on Sansome Street. In that first shop, by one account, “Ghirardelli sold chocolate, candy, liquor, ground coffee, and spices.”⁵ Coffee and spices stayed on his books for decades afterward. By 1885 his ground chocolate was the star seller.

So two of the city’s chocolate makers were in coffee at the same time, and both of them ended in chocolate alone — Ghirardelli by the mid-1880s, Guittard after 1906, when the earthquake took the Sansome Street factory and the rebuilt company put its manufacturing into chocolate and left the rest.¹

The medals

The chocolate label makes two claims of standing. The medallion at the upper left reads Industrial Exhibition — Highest — Best Chocolate. The one at the upper right reads Mechanics’ Institute — Premium — Best Chocolate.

The Mechanics’ Institute was founded in San Francisco in 1854 by builders, artisans and engineers, and between 1857 and 1899 it held thirty-one Industrial Fairs to promote goods made locally.⁶ Which fair these medallions name, and in which year, is not established.

What they do is clear enough without the year. A business ten years old prints the judgment of a civic institution in gold, twice, in the corners of its label.

The law that disappeared

Both sheets were registered under the federal trademark act of July 8, 1870.

Later in 1879 — the same year the coffee mark was granted — the Supreme Court held in the Trade-Mark Cases that the 1870 act reached beyond the power Congress had been given. The law under which these registrations were made was struck down within months of the second one being issued. Congress passed a narrower act in 1881.⁷

The statute did not survive the year. The paper did.

What stayed

The Guittard Chocolate Company is still in business in the Bay Area, owned by the family that founded it. The coffee is gone. So is the tea, and the spices, and the self-measuring package, and the chemical paper, and whatever Rodger’s Process of Chartres was.

The chocolate stayed. And because two labels were filed under Beverages and Coffee and Tea, a coffee wrapper from 1879 can still be read — which is more than can be said for the coffee.

This is the first of three. The next looks at the house itself: a family business that stayed in one city while nearly everything around it changed hands. The third turns to the trade as Emery knew it from the inside.

The two registrations, in Orphicon

Each sheet has its own page in Orphicon, with the full curatorial record — the label read panel by panel, its history, and what is still unknown about it.

Chartres Old Gov’t Java — E. Guittard’s Coffee Trademark, 1879

Chocolat Francais — E. Guittard’s Prepared Chocolate Trademark, 1878

Notes

Guittard Chocolate Company, Our History — https://guittard.com/our-company/our-history. The company’s own account of its 1868 founding on Sansome Street, its early range of coffee, tea and spices, and the narrowing to chocolate after the 1906 earthquake. ↩ ↩
Trademark registration by E. Guittard for Chartres Old Govt. Java brand Roasted and Ground Coffee, 1879. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, TRADEMARKS, no. 6991. https://www.loc.gov/item/2022669073/ ↩
Covoya Coffee, Old Celebes, Old Government Java, Aged Coffee, and New Sulawesi — https://www.covoyacoffee.com/blog/old-celebes-old-government-java-aged-coffee-and-new-sulawesi.html ↩
Trademark registration by E. Guittard for Chocolat Francais brand Prepared Chocolate, 1878. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, TRADEMARKS, no. 6858. https://www.loc.gov/item/2022668943/ ↩
Sidney Lawrence, “The Ghirardelli Story,” California History 81:2 (2002), with additional material adapted by James J. Boitano — https://www.ilcenacolosf.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Domenico-Ghirardelli-Revised-for-Website.pdf ↩
Mechanics’ Institute, History & Mission — https://www.milibrary.org/about-us/history-and-mission/ ↩
In re Trade-Mark Cases, 100 U.S. 82 (1879) — https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-supreme-court/100/82.html ↩

Researched, written, and curated in collaboration with AI tools. Human selection, historical interpretation, creative judgment, and final authorship remain central to the work. AI Disclosure

The Palimpsest is the essay room of Confectionally Yours Journal — longer reflections on confectionery craft, lived memory, and the knowledge that lived in people’s hands.