Business: Cream Machine

Science has given housewives the mechanical dishwasher, the tireless cooker, the cherry stoner, the self-agitating cocktail shaker, the cast-iron pea sheller. but not until last month did U. S. housewives have a machine to make cream.

Few weeks ago big Manhattan department stores like Gimbel’s, Bloomingdale’s and Wanamaker’s began demonstrating a hammered metal gadget with a long handle called the “aluminum cow.” While housewives gathered around the kitchenware counter, salesmen fiddled with its bolts, jiggled its handle, pumped out thick yellow whipping cream. By last week 250 housewives had paid $4.95 apiece for the machine at Gimbel’s, and Bloomingdale’s and Wanamaker’s had sold 500.

The cream machine, which looks like a potato ricer, cannot make cream without milk and butter. The butter is first desalted by melting it in hot water, which is drained off after absorbing the salt. Then the residue of pure butter fat is mixed with milk in a cup-like container at the top of the apparatus, in which is suspended a piston on the end of a handle. When the handle is pressed down, the milk and butter are forced through a narrow hole under pressure (600 lb. per sq. in.), spun down the curls of a valve and spring, and emulsified to form cream which spurts from a metal teat. From two oz. of butter and four oz. of milk the cream machine can make approximately one-half pint of coffee cream for 6¢less than half the cost of a half-pint of dairy cream. Heavy cream which sells for 22¢ per half pint can be made for 9¢. Big milk & cream retailers like Borden and Sheffield Farms snorted last week at the idea that the cream machine will cut into their cream sales. It is merely a gadget, say they, which will be laid to rest on the kitchen shelf after the novelty is worn off.

But the cream machine is no novelty in England where nearly a quarter of a million housewives use it. Invented by a Briton named Major A. R. Bannister, it arrived in the U. S. by way of Canada where it was snapped up by small energetic Club Aluminum Utensil Co. of Chicago. A similar machine is manufactured by National Die Casting Co. to sell at Macy’s for $3.94. In boom times Club Aluminum, a kitchen utensil company organized ten years ago by a hillbilly preacher named Burnett, sold $35,000,000 worth of heavy-cast aluminum utensils to nearly 2,000,000 people. Its salesmen went from house to house inviting housewives to give luncheons prepared in Club Aluminum pots and paid for by the company. After a successful meal the salesmen took orders. But this merchandising scheme was expensive. Depression knocked early at the Club’s doors, and by 1930 a stockholders’ protective committee had turned the company over to a new president in the person of black-haired energetic Herbert John Taylor, vice president of Jewel Tea Co. Inc.

Jewel Tea is full of ex-Navy men, and Vice President Taylor was no exception. With a firm hand he reorganized and disciplined Club Aluminum’s selling organization, began to lift its sales volume. Last year he resigned from Jewel Tea to devote all his time to aluminum. He discovered the cream machine last July at a house furnishings show in Manhattan, immediately arranged to secure U. S. patent rights from its British backer. Club Aluminum’s latest product is one of President Taylor’s personal pets. By the tail of the “aluminum cow” he hopes to pull his company back to its pre-Depression prosperity.