The story
Founded by John Dauglish in 1862.1
Founding
The Aerated Bread Company Ltd was founded in 1862 by John Dauglish (1824–1866).
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. However, its initial £1 shares had risen to £5 7s 8d by 1890. By 1898, shares had more than doubled from their 1890 value and were trading at £12 per share and declaring a dividend of 37+1⁄2 percent. By 1899, A.B.C. shares had increased a further 16+2⁄3 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. 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".
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.
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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" (equivalent to £543,200,000 in 2025). 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.
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, 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] 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.
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.
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. 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 happened around 1875. 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.
The tearooms provided one of the first public places where women in the Victorian era could eat a meal, alone or with women friends, without a male escort. While by 1880 unescorted women could visit higher-end restaurants, they had to avoid the bar. In at least one instance, a women's social club was housed directly above an A.B.C. tea shop:
The New Somerville Club, close to Oxford Circus... was located over an Aerated Bread Company's shop, and notwithstanding the complaint that the female employés of that company do not participate in the vast profits of the undertaking, the members of the Somerville get meals from the aerated bread shop [sic] sent up to the general room above, a bright and very prettily furnished apartment. Men are admitted to this club as guests.
The reference to the female employees of the company not sharing in the company's profits was a very real concern at the time. It was even referred to as a "gross case of company inhumanity." At the 1895 annual general meeting of the company, Richardson proposed, and another doctor (also a director), Furnival, seconded, "giving the girls employed by the company some additional advantages." The physicians felt that if the company "did not give them one meal a day... they were a mean and shabby lot." The board chairman felt that the company had made great strides in that area: they were already giving the employees one meal a day, providing a hot dinner "at a nominal price," and "[n]ot a girl went into the company's service now who did not receive 10 shillings a week."
However, the remunerative conditions of the employees remained an important issue that came to a boil at the 1898 annual general meeting. The dividend that year was 37+1⁄2 per cent, up from 30 per cent four years previously. The shares initially sold for £1 were trading at £12, but a shareholder who suggested a pay rise for the female shop workers was shouted down and ruled out of order by the chairman.
As safe havens for unescorted women of the Victorian era, the A.B.C. tea shops were recommended to delegates of the Congress of the International Council of Women held in London the week ending 9 July 1899.
In 1919 a diner at an A.B.C. shop in Sydney, Australia, filed a claim against A.B.C. for £1,000 claiming that she had eaten a pie at A.B.C. that contained a mouse. The plaintiff was revealed to have filed a false claim and the court found for the defendant.
At its peak in 1923, A.B.C. had 150 branch shops in London and 250 tea shops and was second in terms of outlets only to J. Lyons and Co. This proliferation led George Orwell to view A.B.C.'s tea shops, and those of its competitors, as the "sinister strand in English catering, the relentless industrialisation that was overtaking it... everything comes out of a carton or a tin, or is hauled out of a refrigerator or squirted out of a tap or squeezed out of a tube."
This did not stop playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) from frequenting A.B.C.'s teashops. His diaries are replete with entries attesting to his being a habitué of the establishment at various of its London locations. One such entry is for 12 December 1888: "... to the Aerated Bread Shop opposite the Mansion House station and had some eggs and chocolate there." An entry for 27 January 1891 has him taking tea "at the Aerated Bread Shop at the corner of Parliament Square." An entry from 4 January 1892 has Shaw holding a meeting of the Shelley Society's The Cenci committee at the A.B.C. teashop at Rathbone Place. Among other A.B.C. locations at which Shaw dined were Charing Cross Station, Oxford Circus, Piccadilly Circus, and opposite St. Clement Danes Church. On arriving in England in 1953, the artist Stass Paraskos also gained his first job in London at the Tottenham Court Road branch of the A.B.C. tea shop, working as a pot washer there.
End of independence
The Aerated Bread Company ceased to be an independent company in 1955. Australian operations had already been liquidated in 1951. British operations were changed when the company, self-service tea shops and all, was purchased in 1955 by Allied Bakeries, led by Canadian-born W. Garfield Weston. Weston's corporate empire already owned the luxury Fortnum & Mason food shop and tea rooms in Piccadilly. A U.S. magazine of the day said that "[T]he Piccadilly prince is about to marry the tearoom Cinderella." Allied was expected to pay $8.1 million for A.B.C. At that time, Allied itself had a large share of the UK baked goods market. Allied's market share prior to acquiring A.B.C. was 10% of all UK bread production and the sale of 20 million biscuits per day. Allied's sales the year prior were $154 million with profits of $12.6 million in 1955 dollars. With the acquisition, Allied almost doubled its share of the UK's bread market by the end of the decade.
A.B.C. continued trading, with a major bakery on the Regent's Canal in Camden Town, London. The Camden Town bakery closed and the A.B.C. name disappeared when the company ceased operation in 1982; the building was demolished and replaced by Sainsbury's, Camden supermarket and Grand Union Walk Housing. Nowadays, the only traces of the Aerated Bread Company are faded signs above stores.
From Wikipedia’s article on Aerated Bread Company, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3