7 Global Peppermint

Peppermint began its history in North America when roots of the recently discovered hybrid were imported to newly independent British colonies at the start of the nineteenth century. The Ranney family concentrated on bringing medicinal peppermint essence to American consumers, and the Hotchkiss brothers and Albert May Todd and his children exported large quantities of peppermint oil back to Great Britain and to Europe. Peppermint has been an item of international commerce from its earliest days. As markets consolidated and integrated in the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, peppermint has remained a global commodity. When Albert Todd retired from the peppermint oil business in 1928, his company dominated the essential oil market. Directed by his descendants, the A. M. Todd Company continued to lead the industry in sales of peppermint and spearmint oils, in research and technology, and in expanding peppermint production to the Pacific Northwest and ultimately to India after it achieved independence from Britain following World War II. In 2011, the company became a subsidiary of a German firm. But before we examine the national and international scope of the peppermint oil industry in the recent past, it is important to recall that growing peppermint and distilling oil was a personal, day-to-day activity that changed the lives of many individual American farmers.

Among the farmers whose personal stories included peppermint oil was Mary Clark of Galien, Michigan. Mary was first noticed by the Detroit Free Press in a 1905 article entitled “Woman Farmer’s Success—Miss Mary Clark of Michigan Does All the Work on 80 Acres.” The article began with the news that Mary Clark “was paying girls a dollar a day and their dinners” to work on her farm.^[1] As word of the high wage Clark offered spread, the article reported, “the story stirred up the sluggish imagination of half the wage earners of Berrien county, where flesh and blood are cheap—where women pick berries in the broiling sun for twenty-five cents a crate; where they toil week days and Sundays for the same pitiful sum and work in the kitchen for a dollar and a half a week.” The women who went to work for Mary Clark did not earn as much as Albert Todd’s farm workers, but they did much better than they would have otherwise. But the “fortunate few” whom Clark hired to tend her peppermint fields worked for their money, because “they literally worked shoulder to shoulder with the most indefatigable woman in the country—a woman noted for her tremendous capacity for work, and whose endurance is the marvel of men where brawn is the common heritage.”

The article described how Clark had taken over running her widowed mother’s farm at the age of sixteen and bought an additional forty acres next door. “She cuts and rakes twenty tons of hay,” the author of the article marveled, “milks ten cows night and morning, and once a week sends half a ton of milk eight miles to the creamery, where her checks average $50 a month.” Returning to the women earning a dollar a day and their meals on Clark’s farm, the article explained: “This is the basis on which these unusual wages were paid—the workers must keep abreast of their leader, like a regiment of soldiers, to get their dollar and their dinner. To their credit be it recorded, not one went hungry and every girl had her shining piece of silver when the day was done.” The following year, the Kansas City Star too ran a story about Clark, entitled “Girl Runs Peppermint Farm,” remarking: “She made a study of the chemistry of the soil and of the rotation in crops. With this knowledge she made the ordinary crop growing a secondary consideration, and went into the raising of peppermint and the distilling of peppermint oil.”^[2] The article noted that the peppermint farmer made her own decisions, which did not always conform with the accepted wisdom of peppermint culture. “Miss Clark has adopted a system of autumn planting, which is contrary to established rules,” the article remarked, and the region’s peppermint farmers predicted disaster. “But the innovation was a success, and is now heartily endorsed by farmers, as the cost of planting is doubled in the spring, it being hard to get hands at any price to work in muck soil in the wet season.” The article concluded, “Miss Clark employed fifteen women in the weeding season, paying those who worked shoulder to shoulder with her $1 a day and their dinners. However, she says women cannot stand the hard work in the peppermint field, and she has decided to employ men for this work hereafter.”

This last comment attributed to Clark was apparently a bit of fiction, because several years later year in 1912 the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a half-page feature entitled “Wealth for Women on Peppermint Farms.” The article described her success as a peppermint farmer, naming Clark “the ‘Peppermint Queen,’ as her achievements in the cultivation of peppermint may well prove an inspiration to other women farmers to specialize on some one crop and make its cultivation a rousing success.”^[3] Peppermint farming, the article claimed, was becoming increasingly popular with women farmers in Michigan because, it “is an ideal occupation for feminine bread winners and one in which the profits are practically assured.” The article included a long passage in which Clark told her own story. She had been fourteen, she said, when she took over the farm. Friends advised her to sell it and open a boarding house in town. She had begun with two acres of peppermint and had added two acres each year. But she rotated fields out of peppermint after five years, because, she said, “after that time the crop became less remunerative and my profits faded.” She rejected the claim that she had shifted to employing men: “I employ as many half-grown boys and girls on my farm as I can get. Mint setting is not heavy work, and besides, the stooping makes it especially adapted to people with young, supple backs . . . weeding must be done by hand, and for that purpose again I prefer women and children. They are lighter on their feet and more nimble with their fingers, and, if painstaking, do as clean work, covering more ground than men.” She concluded, “We make a good income and we now have a high-priced farm, free from debt, but both of us, my mother and I, have had to work for it. Every year that passes we are thankful that we stuck to our land and didn’t try boarders and the shop.” In a period when Progressive reformers were beginning to address the “Country Life Problem” and women were beginning to chafe at the limitations imposed by patriarchal society, Mary Clark’s peppermint farm offered a valuable example for women and for farmers eager to take charge of their own rural destinies.^[4]

Prices for peppermint oil reached twenty-eight dollars a pound in 1925, encouraging many growers to plant more roots. A farmer named John Irmer in California’s San Joaquin Valley planted sixteen acres of peppermint, and over the next few years peppermint fields were planted up and down California’s Central Valley.^[5] Unfortunately, California peppermint oil never achieved a strong reputation for quality, perhaps due to weediness. The low prices they received for their inferior oil and the high cost of production relative to alternative crops convinced most California growers to abandon peppermint, and by 1939 only a single farm, near Stockton, remained in production.^[6]

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, peppermint production held relatively constant, at about a million pounds of peppermint oil annually. Prices averaged in the $1.70s. For many farmers, these prices were painfully close to their cost of production. Many continued producing peppermint oil only because mint was part of a crop rotation plan, or because they were heavily invested in expensive distilling equipment. Luckily for American peppermint farmers, worldwide production declined, and exports increased from about two hundred thousand pounds in 1927 to 386,000 pounds in 1936. By 1939, nearly half the peppermint oil produced in America went to the export market.^[7]

In October 1935, the Oil Paint and Drug Reporter ran a report from Washington, D.C., that a Michigan representative named Fred Lewis Crawford had asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate rumors of a monopoly. The report related that the congressman had said he “had been given information indicating that one firm, which he did not name, maintains a monopoly on the purchase of peppermint oil, and that, while the market price is around $2.50 per pound, the farmers are unable to get more than $1.25 per pound in selling their oil.”^[8] The unnamed firm was of course the A. M. Todd Company, and the real issue soon became clear, when investigators discovered the complaint had originated with growers who were unhappy that company buyers had judged their oil to be inferior, resulting in them being offered lower-than-market prices. In 1936, an internal company memo summarized a conversation between Bert Todd and the FTC investigator. The investigator, Bert said, had asked “whether there was any agreement between Colgate, Beech-nut and Wrigley with respect to prices. I told him that there was not, that we canvassed the situation and recommended to these three firms a price that we thought should be paid for choice oil and to this price was to be added the differential we receive for buying.” The investigator was satisfied with Bert’s explanation and “stated that so far as he was concerned the investigation was closed.”^[9]

Congressman Crawford and some of the Michigan growers were unsatisfied with the results of the investigation, so 150 mint farmers met at Saint Johns in April 1936 to form the Michigan Peppermint Growers Association. The group’s purpose was “to promote the marketing of peppermint and spearmint grown by members and the collective purchasing for the members of the commodities used in the growing and distilling of peppermint.”^[10] This mission was similar to that of many agricultural cooperatives. The key difference for the peppermint growers was that, unlike the value of other commodities such as wheat, corn, or milk, which was fairly uniform, the value of essential oils depended on purity and quality, which varied widely. Many producers of high-quality peppermint oil were afraid that cooperative marketing would hurt their chances of selling their oil at a good price. They felt the co-op benefited producers of poor peppermint oil more than it did themselves. The association tried to reassure its members: “Remember, THIS IS NOT A POOL—Oil placed in the association warehouse will be tested, tagged and labeled for you and may be taken out and sold at any time you choose.”^[11] If that was the case, wondered many farmers, wouldn’t the co-op be better off sticking to pools for equipment purchase and education?

As the Great Depression dragged on, peppermint farming remained a viable business in a depressed agricultural sector. In October 1937, the New York Times ran a story entitled “Peppermint Fields Offer Jobs.” The article, filed from Kalama, Washington, described peppermint farming in the Columbia River Valley and encouraged workers to come west for jobs or to try peppermint farming on their own.^[12] In 1938, Bert Todd visited London, where the British Manufacturing Perfumer published a notice announcing his arrival and mentioned that Great Britain had purchased 185,323 pounds of peppermint oil exported from America, most of it from the A. M. Todd Company.^[13] The outbreak of World War II in late 1939 had a substantial effect on essential oil markets. Uncertainty drove peppermint oil prices up to about four dollars a pound.^[14] The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor drove prices higher still. In December 1941, the Wall Street Journal announced: “Peppermint Oil Prices Jump $1 a Pound Here.” The article explained that “dealers attributed the sharp increase to the cessation of menthol imports from Japan, the principal source of supply.” The article also commented, “Some dealers believe the increase represented a purely speculative move on the part of the growers. They seem to be holding stocks, perhaps remembering the first World War when peppermint oil values advanced from $3.25 a pound to $28.”^[15] A few months later, a March 1942 Wall Street Journal article reported that due to the absence of Japanese mint oil in the market, the Vick Chemical Company had placed an order with “an essential oil refiner” for menthol extracted from peppermint oil.^[16] Since Albert Todd had patented the process for extracting menthol crystals, it is likely the A. M. Todd Company was the source of Vick’s wartime menthol.

Once the United States entered the war, peppermint oil was requisitioned for military use and for export in the Lend-Lease program. Lend-Lease allowed the United States to transfer arms and other defense materials to Britain without the immediate payment required under the Neutrality Act of 1939, and peppermint oil was designated a war material. Chewing gum and toothpaste were both components of the soldiers’ rations, so there was substantial allied demand even before the United States entered the war in December 1941. Peppermint oil also came under the control of the Office of Price Administration (O.P.A.), which instituted price ceilings, and the War Food Administration (W.F.A.), which set quotas. When prices rose to more than seven dollars a pound in early 1942, the O.P.A. set price ceilings for dealers of six dollars a pound for natural oil and $6.35 for redistilled oil.^[17] The price ceiling for growers was fifty cents less, which caused some dealers to complain that their profit margins were too thin. The Todd Company had already become well accustomed to buying peppermint oil for customers such as Wrigley on a cost-plus-commission basis, so the price controls were not that unusual, and the company was able to sell its refined Crystal White oil at the higher price point. In 1943, the British government requested two hundred thousand pounds of peppermint oil under the Lend-Lease program. The W.F.A. issued a Food Distribution Order in September 1943, freezing the entire national supply of peppermint oil. The W.F.A. stated it had “acted to assure the equitable distribution of oil of peppermint—an essential oil now limited in supply but important in both food preparations and pharmaceutical uses—by reserving all such oil for Government action.”^[18] In April 1944 the O.P.A. raised the price ceiling to $7.50 for natural peppermint oil and to $8.05 for redistilled oil.^[19] While the price delta between the growers’ ceiling and the dealers’ remained fifty cents, the premium for redistilled oil increased, benefiting dealers like the A. M. Todd Company who were actually adding value by refining their peppermint oil. And the higher price allowed to growers encouraged new farmers to try their hand at raising peppermint.

In 1950, the journal Economic Botany published an article entitled “Domestic Production of Essential Oils of Peppermint and Spearmint”; U.S. production had grown to an average of 1,410,000 pounds annually from 1940 to 1950.^[20] “The production of peppermint and spearmint oils in the United States is second only to that of turpentine in the volatile-oil industry,” the article reported, of which “five percent is employed in pharmaceutical preparations, 15 percent in miscellaneous flavorings, 15 percent in dentifrices, 15 percent in confections and about 50 percent in chewing gum.” The article identified that three varieties of peppermint, “called ‘black,’ ‘American,’ and ‘white,’ are reported to occur in commercial areas. The black mint, sometimes called ‘Black Mitcham’ or ‘English mint,’ is by far the most extensively grown of the three, although some American mint can be found in certain areas. It is doubtful that any of the white mint, sometimes called ‘white Mitcham,’ is now grown commercially.”^[21] American mint was in the process of being phased out in favor of the higher-yielding, hardier black. The white mint, which was “reputed to produce a higher grade oil,” was not grown, “because it is not hardy and yields less oil.”

Academic interest in peppermint production accelerated in the late 1940s. In 1947, two Mint Research Conferences were sponsored by the Beech-Nut Company, which led to the establishment of a permanent program of assistantships and fellowships for mint research at Purdue University, Michigan State, Oregon State, Washington State, Rochester University, and the University of Washington.^[22] Much of the early research focused on combating pests and Verticillium wilt, which had been discovered in 1924 on Albert Todd’s Mentha plantation. The wilt was caused by a soil fungus, Verticillium dahliae, that caused peppermint plants to dwarf, twist, curl, blanch, and lose leaves. Cankers grew on roots, making them less likely to winter successfully, and of course the leaf damage reduced yields tremendously. There was no known chemical control for the fungus, and once introduced to fields on infected roots, it persisted in soils indefinitely.^[23] In the early 1940s, Michigan acreage began to decrease steadily, as farmers planted infected fields with crops unaffected by the wilt and as new, uncultivated mucklands became scarcer.

By the early 1950s, the problem of Verticillium wilt had become severe in both Michigan and Indiana.^[24] Although many farmers were turning away from peppermint to grow other muckland crops like celery, some were reluctant to write off their investments in specialized tools and distilleries. But in spite of the persistence of some Midwestern farmers, the Pacific Northwest region where Oliver Todd had introduced peppermint culture took over as the region of greatest production, with seventy-five hundred acres in Washington and fifteen thousand in Oregon planted with peppermint. And the western region’s average yield of 58.5 pounds of oil per acre was more than double the average of 26.25 pounds produced in the peppermint fields of Michigan and Indiana. As a result, in 1952 western production was more than twice that of the Midwest.

Higher western peppermint oil yields were partly attributable to newer plantings, more technology, and freedom from wilt. Another western innovation was the use of geese to weed peppermint fields. The geese ate grass and weeds but left peppermint plants alone. A Washington goose-grower’s guide remarked, “It has been estimated that twelve young weeder geese, properly managed, will replace the work of one man and hoe.”^[25] The guide outlined the savings of keeping geese versus hiring labor and reminded farmers that at the end of the growing season “returns from marketing the geese should be deducted which will make the actual cost far less.” But these innovations did not tell the whole story. Oil yields had been higher in the Pacific Northwest ever since Oliver Todd had first planted peppermint there in 1912. In the 1940s, studies by agricultural experiment stations found that day-length, or “photoperiod,” was a critical factor in the oil production of peppermint plants. Researchers discovered that peppermint is a long-day plant that produces its greatest yields in geographical zones with a photoperiod of sixteen to eighteen hours. This high-light requirement suggested much higher ideal latitudes for peppermint growing than those of the mucklands of Michigan and Indiana, but winter temperatures and the Canadian border were a barrier to an ideal situation.^[26] Although it was also south of the ideal location, the Pacific Northwest was several degrees north of the Midwestern mucklands, the climate was milder, and western fields received an hour extra of sunlight, on average. In 1960, Purdue researcher N. K. Ellis observed that “little oil will be produced in a 14 hour day length, and for economical production, the day length must approach 16 hours.” Ellis added, “This is still not the whole story, for there is a great difference in the intensity of sunlight between the two areas with the midwest running from 450 to 550 langley units . . . in Indiana, while eastern Washington may get as much as 700 langley units.”^[27] He concluded that peppermint plants metabolized nitrogen into a variety of different compounds, depending on day length. Some of the compounds produced in western peppermint were liabilities, but the West’s greater yields were impossible to ignore. As a result of the Pacific Northwest’s solar advantage, in 1955 there were 7,005.5 acres of peppermint planted in Michigan and 9,659 acres in Indiana, while Washington farmers planted 7,761 acres of higher-yielding peppermint, and Oregon had 13,410 acres. In contrast, Michigan farmers planted 7,906.5 acres of spearmint, which was less affected by day length and was immune to Verticillium wilt, and Indiana had 6,976; Washington had 1,599 and Oregon only twenty-five acres of spearmint. And when another study suggested that cooler nighttime temperatures encouraged oil development in peppermint plants, the A. M. Todd Company began a search for new producing areas that led to the development of the Madras district of central Oregon.^[28]

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Midwest produced an average of 467,000 pounds of peppermint oil annually. Indiana led in production, followed by Wisconsin, where fields planted during the price rise of World War II produced more than double the oil distilled in Michigan. Oregon and Washington together produced 1,996,000 pounds of peppermint oil, with Washington’s total slightly ahead of Oregon’s.^[29] A new development that helped widen the West’s lead was portable irrigation equipment, which not only increased yields but also helped mitigate the effects of Verticillium wilt when it struck. By 1959, supplemental irrigation was being used on nearly all of Oregon’s peppermint farms but on nearly none of Indiana’s.^[30] In 1959, domestic peppermint oil production reached 2,388,000 pounds, and Indiana peppermint acreage diminished to forty-seven hundred acres.^[31]

A mint industry research fund was established in the late 1950s, financed by users such as Wrigley, Beech-Nut, Colgate-Palmolive, American Chicle, and Proctor and Gamble and by dealers such as the A. M. Todd Company and William Leman and Company.^[32] The fund sponsored research programs focusing on Verticillium wilt, insect and weed control, and plant breeding. In his review of peppermint and spearmint production, N. K. Ellis had observed: “Mentha piperita L. ‘Mitchum’ [sic] is thought to be a naturally occurring hybrid. It has been postulated that . . . M. piperita is really a three way cross involving M. aquatica, M. sylvestris, and M. rotundifolia. I might say, however, that although considerable work has been done in breeding for mint resistance to the current diseases, geneticists have not been able to reconstruct this cross and come up with the quality oil which comes from this naturally-occurring hybrid.”^[33] Developing new peppermint varieties is difficult because commercial peppermint is a hybrid, which renders the plant sterile. Traditional crossbreeding can only be done using a plant’s seeds, which in the case of peppermint are not viable. Michigan State University’s plant breeder Ray Nelson reported that in one sample of eighteen thousand peppermint flower spikes he recovered 2,888,000 ovules containing just fifty-five seeds, and only five of them germinated.^[34] When hybrids do set seeds, the resulting plants are usually not “true” to the traits of the parents. Peppermint plants resulting from Nelson’s and Todd employee Merritt J. Murray’s breeding experiments differed from their parent plants and represented mutations that occasionally introduced subtle new flavors and scents. Murray, who worked as a plant breeder for the A. M. Todd Company from 1947 to the late 1970s, recognized the possibility that these hybrids could become valuable in the aromatic trade, rather than in the company’s traditional flavoring business.

In addition to developing hybrids with novel flavor profiles, Murray spent decades working on the problem of resistance to Verticillium wilt. In the 1960s he took tens of thousands of peppermint roots to Brookhaven Laboratory in New York, where he had the roots irradiated. Although mutation by radiation was a hot research topic at the time, progress was slow. Nearly fifty years after Murray’s experiments began, only two successful cultivars, Todd’s Mitcham and Murray Mitcham, have been developed using irradiation breeding. While these hybrids have become commercially successful, some farmers have resisted adopting the new cultivars due to unfavorable mutations. More recently, researchers have taken advantage of new scientific techniques to explore direct genetic manipulation through in vitro shoot regeneration.^[35]

By the mid-1960s, Midwestern peppermint oil production had decreased to an average of 403,000 pounds annually. Indiana led the region, followed by Wisconsin, which produced three times as much oil as Michigan. The West produced 2,167,000 pounds of peppermint oil, with Washington’s total slightly ahead of Oregon’s.^[36] Agricultural technology continued to improve, and most peppermint farmers began using combines that cut the mint hay and deposited it in hoppers with built-in distilling capabilities. Rather than loading and unloading mint hay into tanks connected to steam boilers, the new harvest hoppers could be directly connected to a steam source and a condenser. Spent hay could then be driven back to the fields and spread as mulch or dried and used as livestock fodder.

A 1972 U.S. Department of Agriculture pamphlet on American mint oil and European markets found that due to significant increases in Wisconsin peppermint production, Midwestern oil production had increased to 598,000 pounds, with Wisconsin dominating the region. Washington peppermint production was down substantially, and Oregon produced 75 percent of the West’s 2,798,000 pounds of oil.^[37] Washington farmers had replaced a great deal of their peppermint plantings with spearmint and produced 80 percent of the national total of just under a million pounds. Reflecting on foreign markets, the article also mentioned that only sixty to eighty acres of mint were grown in England.^[38] The practical elimination of mint culture in Britain was probably due to high land costs associated with the encroachment of Greater London onto Mitcham.

Reflecting new discoveries in the science of volatile oils, the article discussed the chemical properties of the peppermint oil that was exported. A large percentage of oil exports were of a variety called Yakima oil, for the region in Washington State where it was produced. The soil, water, and sunlight conditions there produced a biting flavor profile disliked by the chewing gum and toothpaste industries. “However, the U.S. confectionary industry reportedly uses this oil because of its strong flavor burst, necessary in candy products.”^[39] Yakima oil was described as containing 52.5 percent total menthol, 8.5 percent menthylesters, 19.9 percent menthone, and 8.6 percent menthofuran. This was a higher-than-average percentage of menthofuran, which imparts a musty flavor and is regarded as one of the least desirable components of peppermint oil. The ability to separate these components using fractional distillation techniques pioneered by Albert Todd allowed dealers like the A. M. Todd Company to customize their flavor profiles to client needs, blend the oils of different regions, and deliver a standardized product to their customers regardless of annual fluctuations in the peppermint crop.

The Todd Company’s success tailoring its services to the needs of its clients frustrated some of its rivals. In the late 1980s, the company found itself at the center of an antitrust lawsuit alleging that the company had conspired with major clients like Wrigley and Colgate to fix prices and restrain trade. An investigation was conducted, based largely on an inaccurate portrayal of the A. M. Todd Company presented in historical geographer James E. Landing’s 1969 book, American Essence: A History of the Peppermint and Spearmint Industry in the United States. The book, which ironically had been published by the Kalamazoo Public Museum with a grant from the Todd Foundation, used imprecise business terminology that allowed the nature of the A. M. Todd Company’s relationship with Wrigley and other large companies to be mischaracterized in the lawsuit. In the end, the charges were proven to be as baseless as the suspicions that had led to the Crawford Federal Trade Commission investigation of 1936. But the episode was not without its detrimental effects. Winship Todd, the company president who had defended the family business during the investigation and lawsuit, recalled the period as the worst five years of his life.^[40] And many of the documents and archival materials that Landing was given access to in researching American Essence were lost during the investigation or discarded in frustration during its aftermath.

Peppermint acreage in the United States peaked in 1995 at 149,000 acres. Over the next ten years, acreage decreased to less than eighty thousand acres in 2005.^[41] Meanwhile peppermint acreage in India, where land and labor are significantly less expensive, doubled over the same period. U.S. production shifted from Oregon to south-central Washington and western Idaho, where yields were higher. To offset the decreasing acreage, peppermint oil yields have increased from an average of about sixty pounds per acre in the 1960s to nearly 110 pounds per acre today. The A. M. Todd Company, still the world leader in peppermint and spearmint oils, opened a production center in Mumbai. Although Indian peppermint is grown at latitudes around 28° north, the lower oil yields and quality differences of Indian peppermint are mitigated by dramatically lower production costs.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the A. M. Todd Company found itself under pressure from cost-conscious customers, which encouraged them to seek new markets for flavoring products. A 1999 article in Business Economics featuring the company observed, “Plant-derived chemicals . . . represent a vast range of materials of limitless variety and containing a richness and complexity that is nearly impossible to duplicate artificially.”^[42] The author noted that while the “complexity of composition gave essential oils a significant advantage over synthetics . . . the science of analyzing and identifying the many constituents of essential oils has advanced greatly in recent years, allowing producers to tailor synthetic products to capture many of the subtleties of natural materials.” The cost savings associated with these synthetic alternatives drove producers of natural flavoring and aromatic agents like the A. M. Todd Company to appeal to processors of natural foods. The article concluded that “consumer preference for natural ingredients has created an onslaught of products boasting that they contain plant-derived chemicals.” In the mid-1990s, the company formed A. M. Todd Botanical Therapeutics, which the CEO at the time, Henry Todd Sr., said “applies our expertise in botanical science and extraction techniques to natural nutraceutical ingredients.”^[43] Todd explained, “Mint includes more than 300 chemical compounds, and our state-of-the-art flavor research and blending facility in Kalamazoo can isolate specific molecules that deliver just the flavor components that a customer needs for a proprietary application.” In 2005 the director of research and development and the chief flavorist of the Todd Company wrote an article for Perfumer and Flavorist magazine discussing the business and technical challenges of their industry. The authors observed, “While peppermint remains one of the flavor industry’s most perennially popular ingredients, businesses that traditionally rely on peppermint oils are under pressure to reduce raw material costs.”^[44] They suggested their company’s value lay in its ability to navigate the complexity of producing a consistent product using variable natural inputs. For example, they said, “the ideal time to harvest mint is when oil yield and oil quality are at their peak. Because these two criteria rarely coincide, compromise is necessary. This is especially true for peppermint, whose oil quality varies considerably more than spearmint as harvest time approaches.”^[45]

While the A. M. Todd Company’s approach continued to rely on harnessing the subtle flavor differences of peppermint oils from different regions, blending oils, and reducing or eliminating chemical compounds associated with unwanted flavors in the manufacturing process, others have attempted brute-force solutions to the problems of yield and oil quality. For example, frustrated over the difficulty presented by peppermint’s sterility, some scientists have explored metabolic engineering as a technique for improving both peppermint oil yield and oil composition. In 2011 a team of scientists wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Encouraged by the results obtained with greenhouse-grown transgenics, we performed field trials to evaluate the performance of these lines under commercial growth conditions in the Yakima River Valley growing area of Washington State.”^[46] The team reported, “Our transgenic plants did not show any obvious physical phenotypic differences (leaf and stem morphology) compared to wild-type controls,” but “highly significant yield enhancements over wild-type controls were determined” for several genetically modified varieties. The authors also stated that because regulatory agencies in several countries require the labeling of transgenic products, they planned to add a flavorless chemical marker to make the oil produced from their transgenic plants easily recognizable. To date, experiments of this type have not produced marketable products.

In the same way that the subtle approach of the A. M. Todd Company to flavor production has been bypassed by impatient scientists with a new arsenal of biochemical tools, the industry the family company existed in has been swallowed up by billion-dollar global conglomerates. A 2016 “Fragrance and Flavor Leaderboard” listed a handful of multinational corporations that dominate a $26.5 billion market. Businesses such as the A. M. Todd Company that despite operating internationally occupied relatively narrow niches in that market have mostly been swallowed by the global conglomerates.^[47] WILD Flavors, which acquired the A. M. Todd Company in 2011, was itself acquired by Archer Daniels Midland in October 2014. A.D.M. is a global producer of food ingredients, animal feeds and feed ingredients, biofuels, and other agriculture-related products with a market capitalization of $25.61 billion. The WILD website declared that with the acquisition of the A. M. Todd Company, WILD became “the most vertically-integrated natural mint ingredient and flavor provider to the chewing gum, confection, and oral care industries.”^[48] WILD also highlighted its new role as “a technological leader in the development of new, natural, non-GMO mint cultivars used to create a wide variety of flavor solutions.” Building on the A. M. Todd Company legacy, WILD pledged to provide a sustainable supply of high-quality natural mint ingredients and highlighted sustainability and eco-efficiency as corporate goals. It will be interesting to see if the company can achieve those ideals as a subsidiary of one of the world’s largest agribusiness conglomerates.

The legacies of the peppermint kings in the regions where they lived and worked are varied. In Ashfield, where the Ranneys first grew and distilled peppermint oil in significant commercial quantities, the story of peppermint is the most remote in time. Peppermint plants still grow wild in Ashfield, however, and residents transplant the aromatic plants into their gardens. Some remember there was once a thriving business in the town’s distant past. The house George Ranney built with the help of his sons who then moved to western New York and Michigan still stands, as does the large, rambling farmhouse Samuel Ranney built. George’s house is now home to a regional theater company that in 2017 produced an original show about the Ranneys, Dr. Knowlton, peppermint, and peddlers.

In Phelps, New York, where Hiram and Leman Hotchkiss began their peppermint oil business and where Leman remained, stories of the peppermint business have faded. The local historical society has a file on Leman Hotchkiss, which includes a set of very colorful labels from Leman’s peppermint oil and other essential oil bottles. Leman is regarded as a solid, wealthy citizen who is better remembered for owning the downtown hotel than for his peppermint oil business—although there are vaguely recalled stories of a fire in his home, where he occasionally stored peppermint oil. Dimly remembered images of blue flames shooting into night air and of the lingering smell of peppermint following the incident are all that remain.

In Lyons, New York, where Hiram Hotchkiss cut a decidedly large figure, the peppermint oil business is remembered in exaggerated terms. Following the outline of the propaganda Hiram put out in his own lifetime, which his descendants amplified, the history of the peppermint oil business focuses on his heroic achievements in single-handedly creating an industry. Lyons still hosts an annual Peppermint Days Festival, and a group of dedicated Hotchkiss fans have placed Hiram’s old headquarters on the National Register of Historic Places. A campaign to turn the building into a museum seems always on the verge of raising enough money.

The fictitious account of Hiram’s exploits is still available in a brochure reprinted for the part-time museum and is repeated on websites, Facebook pages, and murals painted in the neighborhood of the old Peppermint Depot along the Erie Canal. The claim that there was no domestic market for peppermint oil and that the quality of American peppermint oil was too poor to compete in a large international market dominated by oil from Mitcham is countered by the fact of a thriving domestic industry centered in Ashfield prior to Hotchkiss’s entrance. But even in the absence of the Ranneys and their peddlers, without a market the area farmers would never have gone to the trouble and expense of growing and distilling the thousand pounds of peppermint oil they purportedly traded to Hotchkiss. Although clearly illogical, however, this story is strictly adhered to by peppermint enthusiasts in the region today. When graduate student Jenny Ann Mikulski interviewed Anne Hotchkiss, the last surviving executive of the family-owned H. G. Hotchkiss Essential Oil Company, in 2005 for her Master’s Thesis in Cornell University’s Landscape Architecture program, Anne Hotchkiss retold the same story.^[49] When pressed by Mikulski regarding “complications with the authorship of cultural landscapes,” the great-granddaughter of Hiram Hotchkiss and sole inheritor of the business insisted that “her stories and decisions have ensured that the Hotchkiss company and, by extension, the peppermint industry of Lyons, will be remembered,” and she expressed determination that those would be the only stories preserved. Alarmed by the possibility the myth might be undermined, Hotchkiss ultimately refused to give Mikulski permission to publish or share the interview.^[50] The Hotchkiss brand name is still used by Essex Labs, which claims to have acquired “the formulation and rights to Hotchkiss from Wm. Leman Company.”^[51] It is a mystery what the formulation could mean beyond a trade name, when none of the Wayne County or even Michigan peppermint oil that went into Hotchkiss’s product is now available and when there is no remaining original Hotchkiss peppermint oil to provide a flavor profile.

In Kalamazoo, where a subsidiary of Archer Daniels Midland called the A. M. Todd Company still employs people who process and market peppermint oil, history blends with the present. The headquarters built in1928 still stands, and the rich aroma of nearly a century of peppermint oil hangs in every room. Old men remember their service as managers and executives of the company that was once run exclusively by Todd family members. They tell stories of fighting to ensure the purity of their peppermint oil against the inroads of inexpensive but hated arvensis oil and reminisce about contract meetings with Wrigley executives in Chicago, after which they would drive into the city’s western suburbs on their way home before calling in from a payphone, to prevent being overheard, and announce they had closed the deal and disclose quantities, prices, and terms. But many of the company’s records were lost or destroyed after the traumatic lawsuit precipitated by the history the Todd Foundation had sponsored. And many of the images of Albert Todd and his early business photographed from the remaining records are impossible to display, since the legal department of the conglomerate that now owns the company can’t be bothered to grant permission to use them.

Albert Todd’s legacy, however, persists in the art that still hangs for the inspiration of students at Kalamazoo College and Western Michigan University. And Todd’s voice might even be faintly heard in contemporary American politics. Todd, who castigated his congressional colleagues over the fact that “every railroad company investigated knowingly falsified its accounts” would surely have something similarly acerbic to say about the scandals and concentration of wealth plaguing America today.