1871 | Food And Drink
Food And Drink
Dutch margarine production begins in the spring at Oss in North Brabant as local butter merchants Jan and Anton Jurgens open the world's first fully operative margarine factory. Jan and his brother Henri have visited Paris in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War and met with Hippolyte Mège-Mouries in his laboratory at Pantin (see 1869); Mège agreed to show them his process, knowing that sooner or later they would be able to develop a similar process themselves. The Jurgens brothers acquired rights from Mège for 60,000 francs per year but found that his process was still primitive and have improved on it to create a product that they market under the name "butterine." British butter prices began rising in the 1860s when an outbreak of cattle disease produced a severe shortage of domestic butter, the Jurgens and other Dutch firms have benefited from increased British imports, but only the richest Britons can afford butter at 2s/lb., and the needs of working-class Britons have increased interest in a butter substitute (see United States, 1881; Jurgens, 1883).
C. A. Pillsbury & Company is founded by Minneapolis miller Charles Alfred Pillsbury, 29, with his brother Fred, their father, George, 53, and their uncle John Sargent Pillsbury, 43, a hardware merchant who will serve as governor of Minnesota from 1875 to 1881. The New Hampshire-born founder came to Minneapolis 2 years ago, leased a small flour mill, increased its daily capacity from 150 barrels to 200 by improving its equipment, has turned a profit of $6,000, and uses the money to start the new firm (see Pillsbury's Best XXXX, 1872). Millwright George T. Smith, 30, has made improvements in the 1865 LeCroix middlings purifier, employing a traveling brush that keeps the cloth clean and thus permits better control of air currents. C. A. Pillsbury & Company persuades Smith to join it as chief miller. George H. Christian retains Edmund LeCroix to install purifiers in the Minneapolis flour mill set up by C. C. Colden in 1866, and it becomes the first large mill to be so equipped (see 1874).
Glasgow grocer Thomas Johnstone Lipton, 21, opens his first shop May 10 (his birthday) on the ground floor of a Stobcross Street tenement. Lipton sailed to America at age 17, worked in Carolina rice fields, learned about merchandising while employed in the grocery section of a New York department store, returned earlier in the year with an American rocking chair and barrel of flour for his mother, but could not persuade his Irish-born parents to back him in a shop of his own. He has bought hams from a ship damaged by a storm, resold them at a profit of £18, and begins business, undercutting the competition by offering hams at 5 pence per pound. Wearing white overalls and an apron, he has profits of £2 6s. the first day, works long hours, hangs a painted wooden ham over his door, attracts customers with cartoons in his windows, and then has two fat pigs driven through the streets of Glasgow, stopping traffic: painted on the pigs' scrubbed sides are the words, "I'm going to Lipton's, The Best Shop In Town for British Bacon." By year's end Lipton has opened a second shop in High Street and will soon have shops in Edinburgh, Liverpool, London, and Manchester (see 1879; tea, 1890).
George F. Gilman and Huntington Hartford of the A&P send emergency rail shipments of tea and coffee to Chicago, most of whose grocery stores have burnt in the great October fire (see 1869). They also send employees to open A&P stores in the Midwest (see 1880).