Chock full o’Nuts began in 1926 at Broadway and 43rd Street, where William Black, born William Schwartz, sold pre-shelled roasted nuts to theatergoers who did not want to crack shells in evening clothes. He grew it to 18 shops before the 1929 crash wiped out demand for luxury snacks. Black kept the name, the signage, and the surplus nuts, and turned the shops into lunch counters selling a coffee and a nutted cheese sandwich, cream cheese and chopped nuts on dark raisin bread, together for five cents.

In the 1950s a Brazilian frost sent coffee prices soaring and competitors watered down their nickel cups. Black tried it, hated it, restored full-strength coffee, and raised his price, and in 1953 he put that coffee into cans for supermarkets. He hired Black workers for front-of-house roles, named retired Dodger Jackie Robinson vice president and director of personnel, and gave staff birthday time off and an employee resort at Bear Mountain. A jingle comparing his coffee to what the Rockefellers could buy drew a lawsuit from Governor Nelson Rockefeller.

• Staff assembled every sandwich with surgical-style tongs so the food was untouched by human hands.
• By the 1960s the chain had instant coffee in stores and about 80 lunch counters across New York City.
• Black’s wife, cabaret singer Page Morton Black, sang the jingle adapted from That Heavenly Feeling.
• After Black’s death in 1983, the last 17 counters were sold, and Sara Lee bought the brand in 1999 for over $200 million.
• The cans appear in Marathon Man and The Bucket List, and a 2010 Manhattan location tried to revive the lunch counter.