Canned Foods and Baltimore’s First Grocery Store Chain

A&P Grocery Store, Garland, Texas, opened in 1926, click to enlarge the image, there is lots to see here!

While doing research on Baltimore foodways I dug up a 1929 photo of J. W. Crook Grocery Store at 1626 Edmondson Avenue at Mount Street near an African American neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland. In the window of the store is a man stacking cans and on the outside of the building an advertisement for canned Beech-Nut Prepared Spaghetti. The French first invented food canning technology in 1795. The tin can came along in 1815 which then merged with improved canning techniques. The two technological innovations radically transformed the lives of working class women. Before 1920, a sort of bartering system functioned in which people could exchange the foods they produced with the country store manager in exchange for goods they could not or preferred not to produce. After 1920, well-stocked grocery stores like Crooks with almost everything available in cans radically transformed the lives of working class women relieving them of hot labor intensive canning in July and August. By the 1920s, A&P and scores of smaller regionally based competitors like Crooks established chains of retail stores with their own food systems and networks. Crooks became the first chain grocery store in Baltimore city in the 1920s.