01 Jun Accidental Heroes
Accidental Heroes*
We’re all about innovation here at Product of the Year HQ and are proud to celebrate the hours slavishly spent creating perfect new products.
We recognise the long meetings, the laborious lab tests, the fine tuning and last-minute tweaks to create something set to last.
But sometimes something comes along which just, well, happened. Call it a happy accident or a beneficial bi-product, but some of our best loved buys weren’t planned and their future wasn’t plotted.
Drum roll please. The award for most accidental invention goes to one of these ill-conceived innovations…
Cheddar Cheese
Rumour has it – don’t quote us on this one, it happened a while ago – that one of the world’s favourite cheeses came into being when a Somerset milkmaid forgot about a pail of the white stuff in one of caves of the famous Cheddar Gorge. When she went back to it, the milk had had hardened into the mellow, golden cheese that is consumed in vast quantities around the globe today. A few thousand years and innovations on from that forgetful dairy maid later leads to our 2021 Product of the Year winner Cathedral City Slices.
Crisps
We love this story of a feisty chef who was cooking up a storm in a hotel in Saratoga, New York state, in 1853. One diner kept complaining his chips weren’t thin enough, so the chef – who really did have a chip on his shoulder – sliced them as thinly as he could and fried them in the hottest oil to teach the fussy diner a lesson. But the wafer-thin fries were a hit, and the crisps we’ve come to love were born. They took off in Britain after the second world war when William Alexander, an Edinburgh baker, started to make his own crisps, named Golden Wonder after the variety of potato from which they were made. Sixty-odd years later, we much our way through six billion packs a year in Britain.
Marmite
Love it or hate it, a famous German scientist set off the trail on innovation which would lead to the store cupboard essential. In the 1800s Justus Freiherr Von Liebig accidentally discovered that the waste product derived from yeast used in brewing beer could be made into a meaty flavoured concentrate that was completely vegetarian, which eventually led to the Marmite Food Company being born in Burton-upon-Trent in 1902. Now owned by Unilever, it’s one of Britain’s biggest most beloved brands.
Von Liebig himself founded a company called Liebig Extract of Meat Company, which eventually trademarked as OXO, now a leading light with Premier Foods. Oxo Meat-Free Beef stock cube won in 2021 with the 1st vegan beef stock.
The Sandwich
Today, we Brits are set to munch through 18,000 sandwiches in our lifetime, but it all famously began when John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, was unable to tear himself away from the gambling game he was playing, so requested his servant bring him something he could eat without leaving the table. Some meat was served between two slices of bread and the humble sandwich was born. The hand-sized meal caught on, and is still evolving and innovating two century’s on.
Corn Flakes
At the turn of the 20th Century, breakfast was revolutionised by American John Harvey Kellogg. He got called away from cooking for the patients of an American sanitarium and accidentally left out some boiled maize out. When he returned, it had gone stale, but he passed it through some rollers and baked it, creating the world’s first corn flake. His happy accident is still one of the most popular breakfast cereals, instantly recognisable as Kellogg’s Corn Flakes enjoyed around the world.
*Some things are best left to chance, but not if you want the opportunity to scoop a Product of the Year award! Entries for 2022 are now open, so don’t make a mistake – head to our website.