ShivaWatch: A Toasted Bagel and Coffee

The Jewish, culinary and entrepreneurial world lost two leaders this week. Murray Lender who gave the world the frozen bagel, and Sam Glazer taught America to drip coffee. These men changed the way North America ate breakfast.

Murray Lender passed away at the age of 81 in Aventura, Florida due to a fall he suffered 10 weeks ago. He had suffered a stroke a decade earlier that left him unable to speak. Born in 1930 in New Haven CT to Jewish immigrants from Lublin, Poland, he grew up in his father’s bakery. In 1955, the Lenders, by now a father and four sons, began to sell bagels to supermarkets, and five years later, they started selling frozen bagels. Had it not been for Lenders, bagels would not have become so pervasive. In 1984, when they were baking and freezing over 2,500,000 bagels a day, Lenders was sold to Kraft.

Sam Glazer passed away last week at the age of 89 in Beachwood, OH, a suburb of Cleveland. Glazer, co-founded with Vincent Marotta the company that sold the Mr. Coffee automatic drip coffee maker which replaced percolators across America. Nowadays there are many different coffee makers from many different brands, creating confusion for many coffee lovers as to which product they should invest in so they can get the best cup of coffee possible, which is why reviews can come in handy, for example, these reviews on thefullmooncafe.com site. Introduced in 1972, Mr Coffee sold more than a million units by 1975. In 1986, Glazer and Marotta’s firm had sales of $120 million, when a million was a million.