Most compatible way to prepare USB stick

[Mark Fletcher <mark27q1@gmail.com>]

Hello the list!

I have gotten myself all turned around and confused on this supposedly 
simple topic, so I'm hoping for a little bit of advice.

I have a USB stick I have previously used as a boot medium for Debian 
installers and live systems. Now I want to wipe it and repurpose it to 
being a generic place to store data for portability between systems. The 
key criterion is that it should be maximally compatible -- I want to be 
able to read and ideally write the stick on Debian, OSX for Mac users 
and Windows (7 and later).

It's a 4GB stick and I am thinking of using all the space in a single 
partition.

Can someone tell me what partition type I should select in cfdisk (or 
what better tool I should use to partition) and what command I should 
use to create a file system on the stick using my Jessie box, that I can 
then write some files to the stick from the Jessie box and expect my 
friend's MacBook to be able to read them? (text files, so if it can read 
the file system we are golden).

I have tried in the past to format USB sticks using Jessie (although 
unfortunately I am coming up blank on the commands I used, it was a 
while ago) and have often found that Mac users get nowhere with the 
result. They plug the stick in and I believe the Mac just doesn't 
acknowledge it is even there (although I haven't witnessed exactly what 
happens, as I don't own a Mac myself, but more than one person has 
chucked a stick back at me saying it was no good [different sticks, so 
the issue is the preparation method not the stick itself])

Thanks and sorry for the simple question! Google didn't turn up much on 
this as most sticks come ready to use and there is less to be said about 
"re-formatting" a stick after it's had an image written to it...

Mark