Marcel Grauls
Forrest Mars Sr. was born in 1904 in Tacoma, Washington, as the only son of Frank C. Mars, a candy salesman who struggled to survive. When Forrest was six his father remarried and the boy moved to his grandparents in Canada. Here he got the idea to make his fortune with coal and began to study mining in California. After his studies it turned out that his father had already gone bankrupt twice. And his new company, called Mar-0-Bar, was just as promising.
For months, the pastry shops of Nantes kept the change to the 108-year-old recipe secret. On June 24, 1994, it leaked out through the French daily newspaper Libération: the famous petit stock exchange biscuit from the company lu no longer contained 12, but 13.5% butter since February. The violation took place without any prior warning. A consumer survey had shown that the biscuit for today's consumer might be a bit too pâteux (floury, doughy) and too little serial (flaky, flaky).
Lipton is one of the rare companies to permanently remind consumers that their name once stood for a human of flesh and blood. You can see the portrait of the old Lipton printed on almost all packaging, including hanging mustache, sailor hat and bow tie. You will also find one or more sailing ships and Sir Thomas' sustainable advertising slogan: Direct from the tea garden in the teapot. Each of the more than 1.3 billion bags that leave the factory in Forest, Belgium every year, has his signature. Even more than sixty years after his death, the man himself still vouches for quality, the signature suggests. This also touched upon three important elements from Lipton's life.
Levi Strauss was born Loeb Strauss in 1829 in the Bavarian village of Buttenheim, between Bamberg and Erlangen. In 1847, shortly after the death of his father, an itinerant trader, he traveled to New York where two of his stepbrothers ran a textile business. He worked for his brothers for two years. Gold was discovered in California in early 1848. Believing that the Wild West pioneers needed a lot of canvas for their tents and covered wagons, he traveled by ship a year later - overland the journey would have taken eight months! - to San Francisco.
The earliest photograph of René Lacoste ever published dates from 1911. He is then 7. Wearing an aviator's hat on his head, he peeks from behind the man-sized radiator of a Hispano Suiza, a large automobile from his father's Paris factory, at the photographer. Little René's health is so weak that his parents, French Basques of origin, decide to move to the countryside. He grew up in a country house in Courbevoie, among a whole series of servants.
“The old way of selling cheese in bulk meets the same fate as the flour and oat barrel,” said a Kraft ad in 1920. “Here's a better, more tasty cheese, sold in airtight, hygienic, and inexpensive cans. Canned cheese packaging is one of the most important steps forward in the science of hygienic food distribution. The cans can be stored in any climate.
"Some can't give up anything," reads the photo caption in the ad. 'For example, Jack Daniel's also has its own sawmill. Why on earth, many visitors ask us. Well, the freshly distilled Jack Daniel's is purified by a layer of charcoal. Drop after drop. This gives Jack Daniel's its mild flavor. And because we don't want to be dependent on anyone for the quality of our whiskey, we have our own sawmill. Here the maple wood is stored, sawn into pieces and burned to the purest charcoal. That way we can't blame anyone else for making our whiskey taste that way. '
David Packard, of the electronics group Hewlett-Packard, was born in 1912 in Pueblo, Colorado. His father was a lawyer, his mother a teacher. In his 1995 book The HP Way, he recounts how Pueblo in his childhood breathed the atmosphere of the Far West rather than that of an agricultural state in the Midwest. It was a rough place with many guest workers who were attracted by a steel factory and metal foundries. It had its bars, brothels, and gangsters. Street fights and shootings were part of everyday life. The Packard family lived on the outskirts of town, against the prairie. The young Packard could go on endless wanderings with his friends.
The magical Heinz moment dates back to 1892. 48-year-old Henry John Heinz had made a name for himself brining, preserving and bottling all kinds of edibles while one day in New York on an air train from which he had a good view of the billboards of the city. He was struck by an advertisement for shoes that you could buy in no less than '21 styles'. He started counting how many different products he had in his range and ended up in his sixties, he was not sure.
The ancestors of King Camp Gillette, the inventor of the safety razor blade, were French Huguenots who arrived in America as early as the 17th century. In 1871, at the age of sixteen, his father lost all possessions in the great Chicago fire. The young King began to work as a traveling salesman in hardware. Inventing was his hobby, but the big breakthrough failed to materialize. By coincidence he came into the employ of William Painter, the inventor of the bottle cap. Painter advised him to look for one thing that people should throw away after use so that they needed new ones every time. In 1895, while shaving, he saw the new razor as in a dream. 'It was completely finished. It has never changed in form and principle, ”he said later.
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