2 - The Nathans and proprietary foods 1903–1918

Summary

Milk preservation and proprietary babyfoods

For more than fifty years the idea of preserving milk either by canning or drying had attracted the attention of chemists and manufacturers. The problem of supplying fresh milk to urban areas in England which, in the first half of the nineteenth century stimulated the search for a means of preservation, had to some extent been solved by the development of the railway network. But milk supplies in town remained of poor quality, frequently adulterated and, as was increasingly recognised towards the end of the century, the carrier of many diseases. At the same time breast-feeding of babies declined both among working-class mothers, who were employed in greater numbers in factories, and among middle- and upper-class mothers who were disinclined to feed their babies naturally. Attempts to manufacture dried powdered milk failed to produce a form capable of satisfactory reconstitution before the end of the century, but improvements in the technique of ‘condensing’ milk led to the Borden patent, granted in the USA in 1856. It was not, however, until 1865 that American financial interests formed the Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company (later Nestlé), based in Switzerland where it began operations the following year. By the early twentieth century Anglo-Swiss had opened further factories in Britain, Ireland, Denmark, Norway, Bavaria, the Netherlands, France, Austria and Italy, and a host of imitative competitors had arisen.