File:Cheek Neal Coffee Company Building -- Houston, Texas.jpg

English: The 1917 Cheek-Neal Coffee Company Building was designed by Houston architects Joseph Finger and James Ruskin Bailey as a regional coffee processing facility for the developers of the Maxwell House brand. The company’s Houston building was one of seven similar multi-story buildings across the country where the company roasted, blended, packaged, and shipped coffee nationwide. The Cheek-Neal Coffee Company Building is in the National Register of Historic Places in the area of Industry, The Cheek-Neal Coffee Company Building was built in 1917 for the growing coffee business interests of Joel Owsley Cheek and John William Neal, who developed the famous Maxwell House coffee brand at the company’s Nashville, Tennessee headquarters. Cheek began his career in the wholesale grocery business, which included coffee, the product on which he eventually focused. Coffee, long the favorite of wealthy urbanites, became a staple consumer item during this period. Earlier, green coffee beans were sold only in bags that had a very short shelf life, and they had to be roasted at home. In 1892 Cheek developed a popular blend of high-quality coffee beans, and Cheeks’ new company, the Nashville Coffee and Manufacturing Company, was the first to successfully introduce a prepared coffee already roasted, blended, and later ground and canned ready for home use. He persuaded Nashville’s elegant Maxwell House Hotel to serve his coffee, and then he borrowed the hotel’s name for his brand label. Cheek and Neal expanded their business that by the 1920s it had captured one-third of the coffee market in the United States.