Gambardo

The Famously French Brand That Was Built by Brits

/ Paul Christopher Walton / 1 Comment

From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1906

The British have had a long love affair with the South of France. What began with the traveller’s tales of writers like Tobias Smollett in the 1760s was followed by a veritable Brit invasion, especially after 1860 when passports were no longer needed to visit France. Wintering on the shores of the Mediterranean became an increasingly important part of the 19th-century upper-class pursuit of health and well-being, and milords and dowagers overran all the nooks and crannies of the Midi and Provence. British money, the profits from industry and the Empire, flowed into the local French economy. Many Brits who enjoyed the sun also got a taste for investing in local concerns. And one of the most iconic of all French brands was actually built with British money and branding nounce.

Perrier, the world-famous water from the Gard départment is the product of some interesting Cretacean geology: limestone rocks folded and faulted and topped off with a layer of clay. Gaps in the clay allow water to burst from the depths of the Vistrenque plain into the daylight, along with carbon dioxide produced by volcanic or thermal action on the limestone. It creates water that effervesces. This site became known as Les Bouillens, The Bubbling Waters. The Romans knew it, and Hannibal may have watered his elephants there on his way over the Alps. But it was in the 1860s that Les Bouillens first became a commercial operation when Napoleon III granted rights, and a health spa and hotel was opened near the spring, successful until a fire gutted it in 1869.

The Bubbling Waters continued to attract interest, and in 1898, Dr Louis Perrier, a Nîmes doctor with established interests in thermal therapies, launched Société des Eaux Minérales, Boissons et Produits Hygiéniques de Vergèze. Perrier had a vision but needed significant investment to make it real. Enter St John Harmsworth.

St John Harmsworth
Dr Louis Perrier

Harmsworth was a younger son of a powerful media family. Three of his brothers were already in the House of Lords. Lord Northcliffe owned the Daily Mail, and Lord Rothermere owned the Daily Telegraph. St John became an enthusiastic supporter of Dr Perrier’s work and sold his shares in the family business to invest in Les Bouillens. 

In 1906, he formed the Compagnie de la Source Perrier and hired a completely English senior management team. But this year was momentous in more ways than one for St John. Seriously injured when his chauffeur had a driving accident on the Great North Road near Hatfield, Harmsworth was paralysed from the waist down. Recuperating in his villa near the source, he used Indian juggling clubs for exercise, which apparently gave him the idea for the distinctive shape of his new bottled water brand. He also named the product after the good doctor.

With an impressive network of chums, St John was soon exporting Perrier (The Champagne of Table Waters) throughout the British Empire, making it famous in London, Singapore and Delhi before it was even established in Paris. When Harmsworth died in 1933, the source was selling 18 million bottles a year, and by then, more than half was remaining in France.

Perrier finally returned to French hands after the Second World War.

An interesting narrative twist to the story of Perrier comes in the 1980s, when the Brand Historian was working for HP Bulmer, Perrier’s UK distributor. This was when Yuppies stalked the earth with their Filofaxes and Perrier with ice and a slice was their essential drinking accessory. Sales were torrential. But the great success of Perrier in the 80s was due mainly to another Brit, Julian Bowes, who carefully cultivated the brand’s status in top restaurants, hotels and bars. There are many stories of the clever marketing tactics he used. I seem to remember a prize was offered for the most expensive bottle of Perrier served in a UK restaurant. Julian died in a diving accident in 1984, a few years before a benzene contamination scare threatened the brand he had worked so hard to create.

Nestle acquired Perrier in 1992.

1906 Bien Etre Playlist:

La Mer Claude Debussy 

Keep Calm and Eat Your Sausage Roll

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From the Brand Historian’s Timeline: 1939

There was not much to smile about in Britain in 1939. With the possibility of war with Germany becoming ever more likely, in London, the nation’s art treasures were being packed up and transported to Wales for safekeeping and the first Anderson bomb shelters were being built. But even before the declaration of war on September 3rd, bombs were killing British civilians. However, in the dog days of August, it was the bombs of the IRA that were creating the fear and disruption.

But on Tyneside, at least one event had a happier outcome that year, for it was in 1939 that Jack Gregg founded what has become a much-loved national treasure. Initially delivering fresh eggs and yeast by bicycle to the folk of Newcastle, Jack’s bakery supplies home delivery service proved to be very popular and a few years later in 1951, Gregg opened his first bakery shop in Gosforth.

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With his sons Ian and Colin now active in the business, Greggs multiplied and began buying up other bakeries – in Scotland, London, Kent and the Midlands. By the 2010s, when Greggs had unreservedly won the Great British Bake-off by acquisition, the business underwent a significant repositioning and began to focus extensively on good value food on the go, believing it would fare better competing against quick-service food restaurants than going head-to-head with big supermarkets on the price of bread.

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The Brand Historian is a proud follower of Greggs and is particularly partial to a bacon roll on early morning starts or match days. On one of these trips, he and his daughter were amongst the many to have discovered the joys of the Greggs Vegan Roll, featuring that miracle of plant food, Quorn. Despite the neigh-Sayers, the Vegan Roll became a tremendous social media triumph for Greggs and created a platform for the business to become celebrated as the well-grounded antidote to the food snobbery of the modern age. This was brilliantly demonstrated in their Gregory and Gregory foodie festival film that was also a great social media hit.

Watch more at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tibTtj5vY1Y

1939 Popular Music 

We’ll Meet Again* Vera Lynn

*The 1939 recording also featured Arthur Young playing on a Novachord, a kind of early synthesizer.

The Early History of Quorn

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How The Value Engineers helped bring the first new food to the world since yoghurt

Breakthroughs are notoriously difficult to bring to market, especially when they involve something simultaneously as basic and yet as culturally significant as food.

But such was the challenge The Value Engineers inherited when it was approached in the early 1980s by a small science start-up in High Wycombe that was funded by two food industry giants: RHM and ICI.

The story had begun 20 years earlier when Lord Rank, convinced that the world was hurtling into a crisis of food supply, tasked his Ph.D.’s with the search for alternative and more nutritionally balanced sources of protein.

Having scoured five continents, it was perhaps ironic that they discovered exactly what they were looking for in a field in Marlow, not very far from their lab in High Wycombe.

It was a tiny plant and because of its microscopic size, they decided to call it myco-protein, and they spent the next 20 years researching its properties and assessing its suitability as a novel food. Myco-protein, when grown and harvested, has the bite and fibrosity of meat but without any of the negative nutritional complications that were becoming the subject of increasing health concerns in the 1980s. It was also an exceptional carrier of flavour. This made myco-protein a first-rate choice as an alternative to meat, especially beef.

After extensive consumer clinical trials, followed by food standards clearance and product development that included partnering with some of the U.K.’s biggest names, myco-protein was soon doing the rounds of the food trade and NPD conferences, describing itself as a Tomorrow’s World next big thing.

If only it was all that easy. Following on from the the disastrous failure of new smoking materials in the 1970s and the frankly indifferent success of soya, the trade proved to be a little sceptical of this new test-tube food. It appeared to be another one of those technologies in search of a market.

By 1983, and having already invested tens of millions of pounds, the main board of RHM showed signs of losing patience. Accordingly, and with a slight air of double or quits, they formed a joint-venture with the bio products division of ICI. Its goal was to build a pilot plant with a small capacity to prove (or otherwise) the existence of real consumer demand for myco-protein. A small executive team was formed to run a budget, make investment decisions and give myco-protein its final commercial chance.

At this point, the TVE founder partners were approached and were asked to pitch for some consultancy against the following essay question:

‘We have a new exciting food technology and a development budget of £1 million. What would you do with the money?’

In the somewhat Spartan accommodation of the Nissen hut where the start-up was based, we told the CEO that the two most important things to sort immediately were to acquire a good quality overhead projector and the best filter coffee machine money could buy, because in order to light the blue touch paper, they were going to be doing a lot late nights and a lot of presentations…

Thus, began the highly successful collaboration between The Value Engineers and what became known as Marlow Foods, together building the brand we all know today as Quorn. Incidentally, Quorn was originally going to be called Origen, but because of complex global naming and legal issues, it was decided to use an existing RHM asset, a regional sauce brand called Quorn, which was then only on sale in the Midlands.

Over the following 10 years Quorn and The Value Engineers grew and grew together.

TVE, acting as Marlow Foods’ primary marketing partner, provided strategic advice on positioning the basic raw material (“A distant relative of the mushroom family…the right food at the right time“), the identification of priority customer segments (J.Sainsbury, Unilever), the development of priority products (Supremes, pieces, sausages minced and even ice cream), all with the development of the appropriate brand architecture and personality.

Following Quorn’s successful launch in the UK in 1985, TVE went on to work with Marlow Foods on product launches in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, and created the innovation roadmap that paved the way for Quorn’s subsequent global development and later business success. Wal-Mart’s recent decision to list Quorn in 2000 US stores shows that what was once considered an unfamiliar niche has finally become part of the food mainstream.

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