In his 2016 campaign for president, Bernie Sanders inadvertently explained why Americans will never embrace socialism.
In a television interview he summed up the sins of consumer capitalism with these memorable words: “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants,” he complained, “or of 18 different pairs of sneakers, when children are hungry in this country.” Well, of course not: You don’t even necessarily need underarm spray deodorants. Or sneakers, for that matter. Americans did very well, and for a very long time, without either one. And yet, would we really be content to live in a society where Sanders decides what’s essential, or more important, what is not?
Case in point: Charles Sanna, the Philadelphia-born son of a Sicilian immigrant, engineering graduate of the University of Wisconsin, and World War II naval officer, who died last week in a Madison nursing home, age 101. Sanna’s biography, while not especially well known, is a classic American success story. He rose from humble origins in an unfamiliar land to a long, productive, and prosperous career which, by any measure, was richly rewarded, personally and professionally. And yet he is best known, to the extent that he’s known at all, for an incidental enterprise that very nearly everyone can appreciate. Sanna was the inventor of the formula for Swiss Miss, the wildly popular instant hot cocoa mix familiar to most American homes and, especially, workplaces.
How, and why, did this happen? After a postwar engineering stint at United States Steel, Sanna and his three brothers went off to work for his father, the founder of a Wisconsin dairy products supplier. In the 1950s and ’60s, Sanna Dairy Engineers furnished U.S. Army troops in Korea with one of its inventions: individual packages of powdered coffee creamer. But because military contractors are penalized if supplies fall short of demand, Sanna always had large quantities of surplus powder on hand, which the Army would not allow to be used for future orders.
This gave Sanna a fortunate idea. Mixed with the proper flavoring in the right proportions, he wrote years later he believed that the powder “would make an excellent ingredient for a hot cup of cocoa,” and he set to work consulting cookbooks, experimenting in the kitchen at home, and using his family and students at a nearby elementary school as taste-testers.
It worked. In 1963, his formula for an “instantly soluble nonfat dairy milk” was awarded a patent and the family firm began supplying packages of its instant hot chocolate to airports and restaurants. But because so many customers pocketed so many packets of the savory stuff, the retail potential of Sanna’s invention — originally called Brown Miss for a Swiss breed of dairy cattle — became obvious. Renamed Swiss Miss, Sanna’s innovation became an immediate hit across the country and, a little like sneakers or underarm spray deodorants, one of those things that many Americans cannot quite live without.
Sanna Dairy Engineers was not designed for mass manufacturing or marketing, so the brand was sold to a food conglomerate in the late 1960s and its current owner, ConAgra, claims that some 50 million boxes of Swiss Miss are sold each year. Charles Sanna and his relatives became very wealthy. He seems also to have been one of those engineering types who spent his life happily tinkering: At the age of 89, he published a children’s book about his innovative use of a vacuum cleaner to remove a mouse from the Sanna homestead without harming it.
Of course, no one would argue that instant hot chocolate powder — even when its taste is enriched (as instructed on the package) by adding milk — is superior to hot cocoa made the old-fashioned way. But just as it’s better to have a choice of 23 brands of deodorants rather than a single federally mandated product, the ease, convenience, low cost, and simple pleasure of Swiss Miss makes daily life in Sanna’s America what it is.
Philip Terzian, a former writer and editor at the Weekly Standard, is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
