A Stork in the Kitchen!

Product development brought about through adversity may seem a contradiction in terms, but the simple need for a safer and more reliable means of feeding the front-line troops led to a rapid development of the now ubiquitous tin can.

In the fifties and sixties as technology based on war-time advances in metal working, electrics and the need to feed a nation began to expand in leaps and bounds. The company that produced your cooker, the gas board, the milk board, Cadbury’s, Ideal Milk, Marmite etc. all began to extol the virtues of their products in the form of an improved diet.

In this instance I have used a publication for Stork Margarine. Pre-war, margarine was seen as a very poor substitute for butter and only barely suitable for baking as a last resort! A margarine that was good enough to replace butter in the eyes of war-hardened housewives could only be a hard proposition to sell!

But the national markets were wide and expanding and any company worth it’s salt wanted a piece of the action. Many of the major food groups in existence today can be traced back through their lineage to the innovators of post-war product development.

Colour photography, though obscenely expensive was used to great effect in the promotion of many foodstuffs. It proved to be the beginning of the now ubiquitous ‘total marketing platform’ that led inevitably to Jamie Oliver!

The war has definitelty got LOT to answer for!