History of Bovril

Bovril’s origins date back to the 1870-1 Franco-Prussian War, when a Scottish entrepreneur John Lawson Johnston, won a contract to supply canned meat to French troops during the siege of Paris.

Lawson Johnston was teetotal butcher from Edinburgh; he was born John Johnston but added the Lawson on his marriage to Elizabeth Lawson in 1871.

In 1871, Johnston moved to Canada and set up business. In 1884, Johnston opening a factory in London for the manufacture of his unique product which was renamed Bovril in 1886. The name came from ‘Bros’, the Latin word for ox, and ‘Vril’, a word meaning energy force which was taken from The Coming Race, an 1870 novel by Edwards Bulwer-Lytton.

The earliest advertisements s for Bovril date from around 1889, but it was not until S. H Benson, a former Bovril employee, set up in business as an advertising agent, with Bovril as his first client, that the company embarked on a sustained and coordinated campaign.

Johnston sold Bovril to Ernest Hooley in 1896 for £2 million. The company sold again in 1971, this time to Cavenham Foods, and it is now owned by Unilever.  
History of Bovril

The first chocolate manufacturing plant in United States

In 1730, chocolate manufacturing becomes a mass production when a mechanical cocoa grinding process is introduced.

Chocolate production in the United States grew faster than anywhere else in the world. The first wholly machine-made chocolate was produced in Barcelona, Spain in 1780.

It was during pre-revolutionary New England – 1765 the first chocolate factory was established in America. It was first manufactured in 1765 by Irish-born chocolatier John Hannon and physician James Baker. They opened the first chocolate factory at Milton Lower Mills, near Dorchester, Massachusetts.

John Hanan brought the cocoa beans from the West Indies, thinking they might be used in medicine. In 1780 James Baker produced chocolate made soluble by a reduced cocoa butter content, a product called baker’s chocolate.

James Baker’s descendent Walter Baker hired an employee named Samuel German, who developed a sweet chocolate; which was added to the Baker’s line under Germans name.

In the 1900s, Milton S. Hershey worked zealously at preparing recipe that would compete with the Swiss until he finally came out with a formula which mixed the right combination of sugar and cocoa.

This was amazingly popular with the public that he began to mass produce and distribute chocolate candy very successfully.
The first chocolate manufacturing plant in United States

French 1st fish cannery by Joseph Colin

In the Middles Ages, the Nantes area was famous for its sardines preserved in vinegar, in the local melted butter or in imported olive oil.

They were packed in the large jars of Berry earthenware called oules and sent off to the rest of France.

In 1822 a confectioner of Nantes called Joseph Colin who in the early years of the nineteenth century first saw the possibilities of applying to the local method of preserving sardines the tinning process then being developed by ex-colleague, Francois Appert.

The French canned sardine industry developed from 1824 when Joseph Colin opened the first fish cannery in the rue des Salorges at Nantes.

By 1836 he was producing 100,000 cans, and the industry spread along the coast of Brittany.

By 1880 50 million tons of sardines were packed annually on the west coast of France, three million of which were exported to Britain. There were a number of others in the region who were to copy Colin and set up their own establishments. A restaurateur in Nantes called Millet covered his restaurant which was situated in the center of the town, into a sardine canning  factory,

For nearly fifty years sardine canning remained a French monopoly. It was not until the 1880s, that competition from Spanish and inferior grades of fish which were often not even true sardines, began to hit the French producers.
French 1st fish cannery by Joseph Colin

History of Knorr

Unilever’s biggest brand is Knorr, which includes a range of sauces, snacks, frozen foods, and other food products.

The Knorr brand of soups began with German culinary inventor, Carl Heinrich Theodor Knorr, who built a factory in Heilbronn, Germany in 1838 in order to dry chicory and make various types of flours.

The Knorrs eventually came to believe that convenience foods were the wave of the future

He then started investigating how to dry barley without affecting its flavor and its nutrients and ended up extending such researches to other vegetables and ingredients, which brought about the launch of the first powdered soup.

They introduced their first packaged soup mix in 1873. They soon expanded into bouillon cubes and other soup concentrates.

Demand for powdered or pre-prepared liquid soups – both then a novelty was so strong that in 1885 his son Carl decided to set up a packing center for the export trade.

The products were hit in Germany and were soon exported to other European nations as well.

In 1907, Switzerland set up its own factory to manufacture the foods. It was not until 1949 that the company launched the world’s first packet soup - the chicken noodle recipe that soon became known around the world.

Knorr soup mixes were introduced to America in 1958 when the company became part of the Corn Products Company, which later evolved into Bestfoods.

In 2000, Bestfoods was taken by Unilever for $20.3 billion. Today Knorr is Unilever’s largest brand by sales, a great part of which can be attributed to the strong brand marketing that was pursued by its early Swiss management.
History of Knorr