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

History of Maggi brand of Nestlé

Maggi is owned by Nestlé: seasonings are their main products. Maggi really grew on its dehydrated soups-an instant food at the start of the industrial revolution.

The original owner was Julius Michael Johannes Maggi in Switzerland.

In 1883, Julius Maggi produced appliances for roasting and grinding vegetables, to make flour form peas, beans, lentils, etc. enabling women to make a quick nourishing soup.

His objective was to provide nutritious and flavorful meals for working class women who lacked the time ad money to prepare proper home cooked meals.

Eventually in Maggi put his instant product vegetable powders on the market, under his friend Doctor Schuler’s patronage. Julius Maggi started produced first instant soup in his Kemptthal factory in 1886, followed by various kinds of soups in cubes or bags and even beef cubes in 1908.

The Maggi soups and seasoning business was acquired in 1947 by Nestlé by merging with the Alimentana S.A becoming Nestle Alimentana Company.

Finding its core customer aging during the 1980s and 1990s, Maggi reached out to the younger generation with meal-maker products, ready to eat foods, and frozen snacks as well as ethnic and children’s product lines.
History of Maggi brand of Nestlé

History of tomato soup in America

Tomato soup is quintessential American comfort food, usually eaten with a grilled cheese sandwich.

Although tomatoes apparently were introduced into Florida in the 1600s, they made minimal impression on the dietary habits of Americans until two centuries later. The first tomato soup recipes were simply tomatoes added to basic vegetable soups.

By 1840s tomatoes were an important part of most cookery books, Modern Cookery, written by the British cookbook author Eliza Acton for publication in the United States, in 1845 contained several tomato recipes.

Between 1832 when N. M. K. Lee’s first tomato soup recipe was published and in 1841, when Lettice Bryan’s version published the multitude of other vegetable were left out and the purely tomato soup know today emerge. Lettice Bryan’s Kentucky Housewife feature more than twenty tomato recipes, including some for baked, broiled, stewed, fried and pickled tomatoes.

Andrew Smith in his The Tomato in America stated that tomatoes were used in soup at least as early as the mid-eighteenth century in colonial America.

In 1897, John T Dorrance created a process of condensing soup which involved removing half of the water from the soup to create a thicker consistency.

The first production in 1898 means reducing volume to make it lighter and more transportable, cheaper to can and yet convenient to cook was a new development of a specifically commercial commodity food.

History of tomato soup in America