Here’s the third instalment of the Four Square Stores promotional snap set that was an issue sometime between 1979 and 1981 (there were two other sets I know of that I have now pinpointed to being produced in the early 1960s).
I have previously posted on this item here, and here, and here on ETA Chicken Chips so many of us remember from the 197os and 80s:
I am still working my way through restoring this set digitally (they are quite damaged) and will post them in separate families of four until I get through them all. The set is missing one card from the Savlon family, “Miss Savlon”, but I’ll deal with that when I get there.
This ETA logo was registered in 1935 by Griffin’s to market “condiments, including mustard; nuts, including peanuts and almonds; confections containing nuts; and other nut products, including nut paste and nut butter”.
It seems that at some point in the 1960s – likely 1962 – ETA opened proper operations in NZ; or Griffin’s, which the brand was licensed to , opened a manufacturing facility (this seems to coincide with the Australian ETA factory in Sunshine , Melbourne being demolished in 1962 and new factories also opening that year in Baybrook , VIC and Marrickville, NSW – ergo signalling a large Australasian restructuring of the company).
This ETA peanut butter jar was found recently on a historic farm site in the South Coast NSW I was surveying, and probably dates from the late 1930s, definitely no later than 1950.
I’ve positively identified packing boxes for ETA chips in an early Woolworths NZ store in 1964. ETA actually began in 1923 – a small family company in Australia producing mustard, fruit syrup, compotes and jams. I already knew the brand was established much earlier in Australia as I have found ETA jars going back to the 1930s on historic sites so it’s likely products were exported to New Zealand up until the time the domestic factory launched. However the ETA brand had been registered in New Zealand by Griffin’s (primarily famous for their biscuits) from 1935 onwards to market.
This point-of-sale cardboard poster would have been from a dairy late 1970s-early 1980s and is courtesy of Mike Davidson (Kiwigame on Flickr) and edited by me to bring it back closer to original form.
ETA was another one of those brands like Sanitarium, Frosty Boy, Woolworths, and many more – which although started off or remained as the same company – more or less separated their trans-Tasman concerns early on and from there developed fairly independently.
ETA seems to have remained under Griffin’s wing until recently when Brittania Foods NZ Ltd, an Indian-based company which entered into a dairy concern partnership with Fonterra starting in 2001, acquired the brand. However according to the official site the product is still being manufactured by Griffin’s to date, probably under a licensing deal.
longwhitekid 