An Elaborate Process

Note: Due to repetitive theft by those who take my intellectual property from this blog without my permission, and reproduce it as merchandise for sale on sites such as Ebay, Redbubble and Trade Me,  I have now watermarked this image. If you are interested in purchasing merch of this image you can head to my personal Redbubble store.

 

I’m  excited to present this recreation of a Chesdale cheese ad. This is probably the most complex thing I have attempted so far and have put it off for a few months because I knew it was going to be hard. As I am getting more daring at my recreation work I felt I was ready to tackle this one from a blurry, bad quality picture. This took about two days of frustrating work to make; starting with designing the three individual paper labels for the cheese segments, then the foil wedge, then the six wedges in the box, and the cartoons of the family which I could hardly see properly. As well as all the fonts which had to be hand-kerned and often recreated from scratch.
This item probably dates from around 1958, and was in a promotional booklet for a company named Butland Industries which had a lot of other nice colourful ads in it showcasing their products of the moment. At the time their other hugely successful brand besides Chesdale was Crest Fine Foods (canned fruit, and vegetables, including baked beans and spaghetti – I think this brand fizzled out in the early 1970s). Later on they had Goldpack dried fruits – as well as jam brands Blue Bonnet and Craig’s which I remember well from childhood.

It was for auction a few months ago and I really wanted to grab it – unfortunately I had just missed the end of the auction. I would have paid more money by far than it sold for, too. I was so desperate to get hold of the imagery that I approached the seller and also the buyer to try and get better photos of the advertising pages – to no avail. Unfortunately that tack didn’t work out so well to say the least, so the next best thing was to just to buckle down and make it myself.

Chesdale Cheese ad, between 1926 and 1949. Ref: Eph-A-FOOD-1940s-01. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a lot of information available either about the history of the Chesdale cheese brand or about Sir Jack Butland and his company. What we do know is he was born in Hokitika in 1896 but spent most of his life based in Auckland, where he started in foodstuffs as an agent – after earlier careers in banking and sales.
He came to be considered a pioneer in food manufacturing. He founded J. R. Butland Pty Ltd in 1922, NZ Cheese four years later in 1926, and Butland Industries proper in 1949. I know that Crest was launched in 1956 – and that the packaging had changed by 1961 – so this booklet dates from some time in between. I conject on the earlier side.
In the days before widespread refrigeration, traditional cheeses sweated, went oily, cracked, and quickly went stale. Jack Butland combated this problem by experimenting with additives, and found that adding amounts of sodium or potassium phosphate would make the cheese smooth textured and spreadable – and it would actually keep well, remaining moist and hygienic.

Chesdale Cheese, between 1949 and 1951. From cover of Four Square Stores promotional jigsaw puzzle envelope.  Ref: Eph-F-GAMES-1950s-05-cover. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

He was obviously already successful, but his was his big breakthrough. He sold it wrapped in aluminium foil, in an 8 ounce cardboard carton and later in disc shaped boxes as per the ad.

He was eventually knighted mainly for his significant philanthropic contributions some time before he passed away in 1982.
Chesdale was sold to Kraft in 1981 and then sold to Heinz Wattie in 1995. It currently is owned by New Zealand Milk Brands Limited. Chesdale is still in production today, however it also has an enormous market in the Middle East.
Chesdale is of course now considered an icon of Kiwiana, mostly for the famous Ches and Dale character TV commercials – of course they came much later in around 1968, created by advertising agency Dormer Beck -which I have a long story coming up on next week, so I will cover it in more depth then.

Healthy Curiosity

Sanitarium was founded in 1898 in Melbourne with its background in the Seventh Day Adventist health food movement from the U.S.A’s Battle Creek Sanatorium where the Kellogg brothers (yes, those ones) were creating the first specifically vegetarian “health” products.
The company claims that its “flagship product Weet-Bix is a top seller in the Australian and New Zealand breakfast cereal market”. The sales figures may well speak for themselves, however this is not an accurate statement since Sanitarium did not buy the Weet-Bix brand until 1928 from Leichardt, Sydney company Grain Products Limited. They claim that their early product Granose is a forerunner to it, but the truth is that they developed quite separately – even if they do have their roots in the same religious movement.

Sanitarium’s Betta and Marmite competition, Evening Post, September, 1938 

The Weet-Bix story is in fact so complicated it’s going to have to be its own separate post at some point further down the track. It’s a convoluted history that still doesn’t seem entirely clarified; with a great deal of confusion surrounding the origins and history of their most famous product , and who was actually responsible for supposedly “inventing” it. It also doesn’t help that Sanitarium is another one of those “crossover” trans-Tasman brands I’ve written about in the past like Woolworths and Frosty Boy; same brands, fairly separate histories for the most part – in this case although they have the same parent company Sanitarium is split into two – the Australian Health and Nutrition Association Ltd and New Zealand Health Association Ltd.

The Betta jar full of buttons is ‘from the collection of Owaka Museum, Wahi Kahuika, The Meeting Place “a rest on your journey”‘ Object number CT81.1554f.  The jar lid below was up for auction a while back.

The  actual proponent of Sanitarium products was a man named Edward Halsley who started making Granola, Granose and Caramel Cereal (a coffee substitute). He had learned his trade under the Kelloggs. The company was officially registered as a trademark in 1898 – however by 1900 Sanitarium had transferred him to New Zealand to begin manufacturing its products in a wood shed in Papanui, outside of Christchurch.
From the 1920s Sanitarium opened a chain of Health Food shops in both countries selling their products exclusively – these closed down in the 1980s. Looking at the products over the years it’s really interesting to discover how early Sanitarium started manufacturing Products like vegetarian sausages and burgers and the like – much earlier than you would think, in the mid 1950s in fact – and products like nut meat were being manufactured in the 1920s onwards – I believe Nutolene is still available, amongst others that have been around for nearly 90 years!

This guy’s fourhead scares me. Maybe this is what too many health products do to you. It reminds me of that early 90s movie about the alien family “The Coneheads”. 

Products besides Weet-Bix are too numerous to list here, but in New Zealand Marmite (imported until the 1970s, first from Britain then Australia), as well as peanut butter are notable, in particular the “Betta” brand which was introduced in the 1930s and lasted well into the 1960s before reverting to just “Sanitarium” branding . Bottles intact with labels, although usually pretty shabby, come up for auction on a regular basis.
Coffee substitute Kwic-Bru is likely a descendant of one of the very original Sanitarium products mentioned above – “Caramel Cereal”. It appeared in the early 1920s and seemed to be still on sale up until sometime in the 1960s. Both these colour ads are from “Health” magazine in 1940 and were an Ebay Australia purchase.
I’ll come back to Weet-Bix next year with a detailed post.

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Addendum Late Nov 2012: This Kwic-Bru container turned up on Ebay Australia a few months back. The seller claims it dates from the 1940s, although I think it’s more likely from the 1950s. It’s likely the design was exactly the same in New Zealand.