Do We Have Henry Ford To Thank For Non-Dairy Creamer?

The "History of Non-Dairy Whip Topping, Coffee Creamer, Cottage Cheese, and Icing/Frosting (With and Without Soy) 1900-2013", compiled by the Soyinfo Center, has a rather eyebrow-raising dedication. At the very top of the Dedication and Acknowledgments page, authors William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi make sure to honor ... Henry Ford. Father of the automobile Henry Ford? Popularizer of the five-day workweek Henry Ford? The Henry Ford who built a whole town in the Amazon Rainforest in a fit of hubris? 

Yes, that Henry Ford. While it gets much less press than his other business endeavors (and his virulent antisemitism), Ford was instrumental in the development of a soy-based product that became the world's very first coffee creamer. Not only that, this marvelous invention was motivated by the same thing that motivated the business magnate to make automobiles in the first place: a passionate hatred of farm animals.

It's a known fact that cars replaced horses as the primary mode of American transportation in the 20th century. Henry Ford himself disparaged horses as being far less reliable and efficient than a motor vehicle for getting around. What's less well-known is that Ford adopted this same derogatory attitude toward cows, sneeringly describing them as "nature's crudest machine". Ford argued that, instead of sinking time and money into keeping a cow for milk, it would be much more efficient to make milk synthetically. (Of course, nowadays we use more than just soy for non-dairy substitutes: There's a whole host of popular oat milk brands on the market and, thanks to lifestyle influencers, many of us know how almond milk is made.)

Ford built a factory in Dearborn, Michigan to research innovations that could help farmers and potential new crops, including soybeans. He later established a laboratory entirely for researching non-dairy soy products. He named the lab after the legendary agricultural scientist, George Washington Carver, who was partial to alternative dairy products himself and made his own out of peanuts. Ford began to hand out soy milk to anyone who wanted it, including a man named Bob Rich, with some surprising consequences. 

In 1943, the United States was in the thick of World War II, and dairy products were scarce. Bob Rich, who worked in the War Food Administration, met with a representative from Ford Hospital, who claimed that the hospital didn't have to worry about dairy ration points. Instead, it made its own dairy from soy in Carver Labs. Intrigued, Rich visited the lab, where he met the fantastically named Holton W. "Rex" Diamond. Over the next two years, the two men developed the first non-dairy creamer, made entirely from soy.

As you can imagine, the dairy industry was not thrilled, and they immediately declared war on the new product, Whip Topping. (Rich, for his part, diplomatically called it a "coffee whitener" rather than a creamer, later changing the name to Coffee Rich.) In some states, it was illegal to sell imitation dairy products until the 1970s. Dairy alternatives had many benefits on their side including being more shelf-stable than fresh milk — unopened liquid coffee creamer can last for several months in the fridge. But while Ford's dream of a cowless future hasn't quite come to pass, alternative milk products are sold everywhere, and Coffee Rich is still available in supermarkets across America.