The Face of Taster’s Choice Didn’t Know He Was Famous

For years, a man’s face sat on kitchen tables all over the world, and the man himself had no idea. Russell Christoff was one of the first male faces millions of people saw every morning, gazing up thoughtfully from a jar of Taster’s Choice instant coffee, and he found out about it the way you might find out anything strange about your own life: by accident, in a drugstore, holding the evidence in his hand.

It is one of the odder stories in coffee, and it is also a small, almost philosophical lesson about fame, faces, and what a two-hour photo shoot can turn into twenty years later.

A $250 afternoon, then nothing

Back in 1986, Christoff was a working model in Northern California. Nestle booked him for a two-hour photo shoot, paid him $250, and sent him on his way. The contract he signed had a specific clause in it, the kind of detail that seems trivial until it is the most important thing in your life: if Nestle used his picture on a Taster’s Choice label, he would be owed $2,000 plus a commission, and any other use would require a new negotiation. Then he heard nothing. No label, no call, no check beyond the original $250. He filed it away with all the other modeling jobs that never came to anything and forgot about it.

What he did not know was that more than a decade later, in 1998, Nestle USA redesigned the Taster’s Choice jar and reached back into its archive for his photograph. They liked that he looked distinguished, and they liked that he resembled the original “taster” who had been the face of the brand on earlier jars. They altered his image to look a little younger, printed it on the label, and shipped him onto store shelves across the country and beyond. Nobody told Christoff. He became, without knowing it, the quiet face of one of the world’s best-known instant coffees.

“Wow. That’s you.”

The discovery, in 2002, has the quality of a short story. Christoff was shopping in a drugstore when he glanced at a shelf and saw his own face looking back at him from a coffee jar. By his own account he was “just a bit surprised.” He picked up the jar, carried it to the counter, and showed the cashier. “Wow,” she said. “That’s you.” He bought the jar, took it home, and then, being the kind of careful person who keeps things, dug out the original 1986 contract he had signed and never thrown away.

That packrat habit is the whole case. The contract spelled out exactly what Nestle was supposed to pay for using his face, and exactly what it was supposed to do before using it for anything else, which was to ask. It had done neither.

The $15.6 million jar of coffee

Christoff sued. Nestle USA offered him $100,000 to settle. He turned it down and countered at $8.5 million, a number that sounds outrageous until you hear what a jury thought. In February 2005, a Los Angeles jury sided with him emphatically and awarded him roughly $15.6 million, built largely from a slice of Taster’s Choice profits over the years his face had been selling it. For a man who had been paid $250 and forgotten about it, it was a staggering reversal of fortune, and for a few news cycles he was the model who beat a multinational over a jar of coffee.

He was, at the time, fifty-nine years old and working as a kindergarten teacher in Antioch, California. The jury’s number would have changed his life completely.

Then the law took it back

It did not last. In 2007 a California Court of Appeal threw the verdict out, and in August 2009 the California Supreme Court weighed in on the question that ultimately decided everything: how long Christoff actually had to sue. The court applied what is called the single-publication rule, and it reasoned that a product label is not published in a secretive way; it is plastered on store shelves for anyone to see. Because his face had first appeared back in 1998 and the law gave him a two-year window, the court found he could not rely on only having discovered it in 2002 to keep his claim alive, and it sent the case back for a new trial on narrow terms. The practical effect was brutal. The $15.6 million evaporated. The headline win became a cautionary tale about statutes of limitations, and Christoff was left with the strange distinction of having won and lost the same lawsuit.

Why he had a case at all

The reason Christoff could sue, and the reason a jury handed him millions, comes down to a legal idea called the right of publicity. In plain terms, your face is yours. A company cannot use your likeness to sell a product without your permission, because the commercial value of your image belongs to you, not to whoever happens to have a photo of you in a drawer. It is the same principle that stops an advertiser from slapping a celebrity’s photo on a billboard without paying them, and it applies just as much to an anonymous former model as to a movie star. Nestle had a photo and a contract that told it exactly what it owed and what it had to ask. It used the photo, skipped the asking, and that was the whole problem. The enormous award was never really about a jar of coffee. It was about a company helping itself to something that was not free to take.

The face before the face

There is a wrinkle that longtime Taster’s Choice drinkers know and casual ones do not. Christoff was not the original man on the jar. Nestle chose him in the 1998 redesign precisely because he resembled an earlier “taster,” the distinguished face that had gazed out from the brand for years before him. Plenty of devoted drinkers remember that earlier face fondly, the one their mothers’ generation had on the kitchen counter, and were a little thrown when the man on the label subtly changed. It is a small thing, but it is part of why this story resonates: that thoughtful, slightly aristocratic face was a deliberate piece of brand furniture, a type, and the men who wore it were interchangeable enough that one could be swapped for a look-alike and most people would never consciously notice.

The quiet ending

Christoff went back to teaching kindergarten. The fortune that a jury once handed him was gone, undone by a calendar. When reporters asked him about the coffee that had made his face famous and briefly almost made him rich, he delivered the perfect, dry last word on the whole affair. “I don’t buy Taster’s Choice,” he said. “I do beans.”

It is hard to think of a better punchline. The man whose face sold millions of jars of instant coffee was, all along, a fresh-ground sort of person. There is something honest in that, and something a little sad, and something that lingers the next time you pass a wall of instant coffee and really look at the calm, confident face on the label. Somebody posed for that. Somebody got paid, or did not. And somewhere, that face belongs to a real person who may have no idea you are looking at them over breakfast.

The story feels even sharper now than when it happened. We live in an age of stock-photo libraries and AI-generated faces, where the person smiling on a package may be a composite who never existed, or a real model whose two-hour shoot has been licensed into a thousand uses they will never see. Christoff’s strange ordeal, discovering himself on a shelf, fighting for control of his own face, winning and then losing it on a technicality, was a small early preview of a question we are all going to keep asking: when your image can travel anywhere without you, who owns the face looking back?

Sources

• CBS News: $15.6M Award For Coffee ‘Mug’.
• Courthouse News Service: State Supreme Court Remands Model’s Case.