The Aerated Bread Company Ltd (A.B.C.) was a British company founded and headquartered in London. It was established in 1862 by John Dauglish as a bakery using a new method he had developed for breadmaking which did not use yeast. In 1864 it opened a shop selling tea and other groceries, followed in the 1870s by tea rooms. It was one of the first café chains in Britain and other parts of the world. (Others included Lyons and Lockhart's Cocoa Rooms)
History
Founding The Aerated Bread Company Ltd was founded in 1862 by John Dauglish (1824–1866).Richardson, Benjanmin Ward. On the Healthy Manufacture of Bread: A Memoir on the System of Dr. Dauglish. Baillière, Tindall, & Cox. London. 1884, pp. 18, 20–21, 34, 62–63, 67–70, 74. Retrieved 2009-05-08.
The company had a factory in Adelaide, in the colony of South Australia, in the 1870s-1880s. Cecil Augustus Motteram, who later established his own company manufacturing biscuits, became manager in 1881.
The business was created as an incorporated company listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE). When the company was floated, its failure was predicted and its initial public offering was poorly supported."The Queensland Cooperative Bakery," The Brisbane Courier. Wednesday 10 May 1899. Retrieved 2008-05-08. However, its initial £1 shares had risen to £5 7s 8d by 1890."Corporations in England: The Fashion of Incorporating All Kinds of Business Concerns" , The New York Times. 1 June 1890, p. 20. Retrieved 2009-05-08. By 1898, shares had more than doubled from their 1890 value and were trading at £12 per share and declaring a dividend of percent."Local and General News". Tuapeka Times. Vol XXX, Issue 4515, 15 January 1898, p. 2. Retrieved 2008-05-08. By 1899, A.B.C. shares had increased a further percent and were trading at £14 per share.
Technology Dauglish earned his medical degree at Edinburgh. Dissatisfied by the bread available in Scotland at the time, he began to make his own, and to study the science associated with the process. When he applied his earlier studies in chemistry to the process of bread making, he determined that it would be possible to produce carbonic acid gas in bread without yeast. He established that if one could instead introduce carbon dioxide to the process—by dissolving it into solution in the water—this would eliminate the need for fermentation, dramatically reduce the need for physical contact with the dough on the part of the workers, and consequently introduce a greater level of cleanliness into the bread-making process. He sought to abolish manual kneading, which he believed was unclean and unhealthy.Rosling-Bennett, Alfred. London and Londoners in the 1850s and 1860s. 1924. As quoted in Jackson, Lee. A Dictionary of Victorian London: An A-Z of the Great Metropolis. Anthem Press. 2006, p. 288. Some years later, an 1878 issue of the scientific journal Nature reported:
As to the perfect cleanliness of this mechanical process for making bread there can be no question; it is immeasurably superior to the barbarous and old, but as Dr. Richardson remarked, not "time-honoured system of kneading dough by the hands and feet of the workman".Church, A. H. "Aerated Bread," Nature. Volume XIX, 26 December 1878, pp. 174–175.
Such a system would also lend itself to a high degree of automation. A patent for the new method of bread making was granted in 1856.
In 1859 Dauglish presented a paper on his new method to the Royal Society of Arts, for which he received a silver medal. His method also received endorsements from various Victorian-era physicians and sanitarians. Moreover, because it was considered a healthy bread, it was introduced into many hospitals. In 1862 the Aerated Bread Company (A.B.C.) was set up to exploit Dauglish's newly patented method.
Dauglish described his technique as avoiding the "destructive influence of fermentation", and claimed that the bread contained "all the gluten and all the albuminous food of the wheat", each of which is diminished in quantity under traditional fermentation methods.
A further benefit of the process is that, unlike with the traditional fermentation method, additives like alum never have to be added to slow the rate of fermentation, leading Richardson to term Aerated bread "additive-free". The 1878 issue of Nature reported that
The stream of pure water charged with carbonic acid gas vesiculates the dough, which has required neither alum, nor blue vitriol [copper sulphate], nor lime-water, to check the irregular fermentation, and neutralise the sourness of mouldy or otherwise damaged or inferior flour.
However, the journal reported that some additives were sometimes still introduced in the process:
[T]he adoption of the aerating process does not of itself necessarily exclude all adulterations of the bread: materials to whiten the loaf and to cause the retention of a larger percentage of water may still be used.
The aeration method allowed bakeries to save raw materials, time, and labour costs. As an illustration of the first of these economies, Dauglish estimated that, by eliminating the decomposition of the starches and gluten that occur from traditional fermentation (a loss equal to between three and six percent), this had a value in the middle of the 19th century of "£5,000,000 in the total quantity of bread made, annually, in the United Kingdom" ().O'Donoghue, Jim and Louise Goulding. "Consumer Price Inflation since 1750". "Economic Trends". No. 604, March 2004, pp. 38–46. Retrieved 2009-06-25. The process is a highly automated one, and thus saves time and reduces labour costs. Whereas the traditional dough fermentation method required between eight and ten hours to ready a batch of dough for baking, the Dauglish method has dough ready for the ovens in approximately half an hour. The time savings meant that the daily hours worked could be reduced, obviating the need for the night shifts that were so prevalent in the baking industry at the time. Finally, not needing most additives otherwise required to enhance the fermentation process reduces the cost of factor inputs while producing a virtually unadulterated product.
The technology allowed A.B.C. to sell its product for less than the traditional fermentation method bakers. The downward impact on prices of A.B.C. moving into a market could be felt almost immediately. For example, in 1866 Australia, A.B.C.'s lower prices forced other bakers to reduce theirs by between 8 and 17 percent."Dear Meat". The Adelaide Observer. As reprinted in The Brisbane Courier. Tuesday, 6 February 1866, p. 3. trove.nla.gov.au. Retrieved 2009-05-09.
Competition from A.B.C. prompted advertising efforts from fermentation bakers to try to retain their market share. The traditional fermentation process produces alcohol within the dough, though virtually all of it dissipates in the extreme heat of the ovens. To counter the success of aerated bread in the market, traditional fermentation bakers began focusing on this in their advertising. To that end, placard advertisements were used—especially in the neighbourhood of the A.B.C. factory—urging people to "buy the bread with the gin in it", at a time when gin was thought to have medicinal properties as it was made from juniper berries. Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson's great support of aerated bread at the expense of traditionally baked bread has been suggested to have been motivated by his dislike of alcohol.
A.B.C.'s first bakery was in Islington, London. In the late Victorian-era, the Dauglish method was considered the superior system by which to mass-produce bread. In his memoir of the method, Benjamin Ward Richardson, a later director of the company,"Our Industries" , The Brisbane Courier. Friday, 27 December 1895. p. 6. Recounting business news from The Times of London. trove.nla.gov.au. Retrieved 2009-05-09. wrote: I am convinced, from careful and prolonged observation, that the Dauglish method of bread manufacture is on the whole the best that has been discovered ... [I]t is the cleanliest of all the processes known and followed; it calls for less drudgery, and, it is not unjust to say, less objectionable labour, from the employed in bread manufacture; it inflicts less arduous toil, and so lessens the rapid wearing out of the body, which is an unfortunate fate of many of those who are engaged in the manufacture of the staff of life; it supplies a purer article to those who depend, largely, upon the staff of life for their daily aliment. Lastly, it supplies ... a better article, one which gives to the public the fullest food value that can be got out of the corn [i.e., wheat]""Corn." Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. Merriam-Webster, 2002. Retrieved 2009-05-08.) Subscription may be required for full entry. If so, see also: "Corn." Merriam-Webster Online. Retrieved 2009-05-08. from which the food is made, and which enables the manufacture of all kinds of flour or meal, white meal, mixed meal, whole meal, to be most completely and most easily produced.
As early as 1863 A.B.C.'s method regarding their "pure aerated graham bread" was receiving recommendations as far away as New York City: We have been shown specimens of this new and excellent article of food, manufactured by the Aerated Bread Company... It far surpasses anything of the kind yet introduced. With their increased facilities for making bread, the Aerated Bread Company hope soon to introduce to the trade all the varieties necessary for household consumption."General City News". The New York Times. 8 November 1863, p. 5. Retrieved 2009-05-08.
After Dauglish had spent four years introducing his bread-making system, his health worsened; this has been said to be due to the labour and excitement involved, and he visited various health resorts throughout Europe. In 1865 he became seriously ill in Paris; he returned to the U.K. and died at Malvern in early 1866. He is buried at Malvern Wells.
Thirty years after Dauglish's death, his company was thriving. As a result of its market success, A.B.C.'s shares were trading at 12 times their initial public offering price and, at its 1895 annual general meeting, it was stated by the presiding officer, Major John Bolton, that A.B.C. "had no reason to fear competition".
The Dauglish method survived its creator, and Dauglish's company survived him by well over a century, but his method was later superseded by the adoption of mechanical, high-speed dough processes such as the Chorleywood Bread Process (CBP), now used for 80 percent of UK bread production. These newer methods permit the use of lower-grade flours than were required by earlier processes.Lawrence, Felicity. Not on the Label: What Really Goes into the Food on Your Plate. Penguin. 2004.Whitley, Andrew. Bread Matters: The State of Modern Bread and a Definitive Guide to Baking Your Own. Fourth Estate. 2006.
Tea shops and early women's issues
A.B.C. operated a chain of self-service A.B.C. tea shops. These grew from A.B.C. opening a shop selling tea in the courtyard of London's Fenchurch Street Railway Station in 1864, two years after the company's founding."Tea Rooms: A shop infused with classic tradition". The Evening Telegraph. 25 August 2005. Retrieved 2009-05-08. The idea for adding dedicated tearooms is attributed to a London-based manager of the Aerated Bread Company who had been serving free tea and snacks to customers and seems to have happend around 1875.Brandt, Pamela Robin. "Tea for View, View for Tea". Miami New Times. 17 October 2002. Retrieved 2009-05-08. See also: "英格兰饮茶风俗由何而来？ （二". 8 August 2007. British Council China. Retrieved 2009-05-08. The motivation for the company acting upon the manager's suggestion was to supplement the income derived from bread manufacture, which was not sufficient to pay a dividend to shareholders.