Agricultural History Review, Volume 63 Part 1 (2015), p. 179

In 1913 the Board of Trade was thinking about making the confectionery, jam, pickle and sauce-making trades subject to the minimum wage provisions established by the 1909 Trade Boards Act. In response, several of the firms likely to be affected, some of them still familiar household names, came together to form the Confectionery and Preserved Food Manufacturers’ Federation. By October 1913 over 200 firms had joined. Four years later it became the Food Manufacturers’ Federation, and was one of the principal industry pressure groups. In the mid-1980s it merged with the Food and Drink Industries Council to represent the whole food and drink processing industry as the Food and Drink Federation, which commissioned this short account of the major changes in the industry from a group of food scientists and economists at Reading University to commemorate its centenary.

Summarizing a century’s changes at this length requires some selectivity, and it is perhaps revealing of the industry’s sensitivities that three specialist chapters concentrate on nutrition, science, and food quality and safety. The nutrition chapter highlights the discovery of vitamins and micronutrients in the first half of the twentieth century, the establishment of the National Food Survey in 1940, and the more recent attention to cardio-vascular disease and obesity in nutrition policy. The scientific and technical developments discussed include not only freezing, packaging, and other processing methods, but also the impact of analytical methods, such as spectrophotometry and chromatography, in the detection of fraud and in identifying the food components responsible for flavours and aromas. The chapter on quality and safety deals with both the legal framework and factors affecting consumer confidence. For many historians, however, chapter 2, which provides a narrative summary of the main changes and continuities in food processing over the century, will be the most interesting. The 1907 Census of Production, for example, revealed an industry in which well over half of the labour force was employed in just three sectors: grain milling, baking, and the manufacture of alcoholic drinks. Nevertheless, there was by then a well-developed export trade ensuring a supply of British ‘native foods’, from suet to plum puddings, across the world. The subsequent history of the industry is about its response to demand influences, such as income, household size, and retailing developments, to the rise of branded products, and to technology changes such as the development of refrigerators and freezers, all of which combine to increase the level of services incorporated into food products.

While this is a useful summary of the main changes in food processing over the last century, it has little to say on some of its more significant and controversial aspects, such as changes in the size and ownership structure of the industry. And while pointing out that productivity in food processing lagged behind that of the manufacturing average for most of the twentieth century, it fails to explain why this was so. Finally, and paradoxically, given that it commissioned the work, the book has virtually nothing to say about the history of the Food and Drink Federation, and makes no attempt to investigate its political effectiveness in representing the interests of the industry.