The Proliferation of Brands: The Case of Food in Belgium, 1890–1940

Nowadays, brands are inescapable. Economists and marketing experts trace this pervasive presence back to the 1980s when brands and branding seemed to promise new, crucial assets for both producers and consumers.¹ Of course, brands existed much earlier, and although some authors claim that “brands are as old as known civilization,”² most researchers accept that they burgeoned with the coming of large consumer-goods–oriented factories in the 1870s, generating the “first golden era for the modern brand mark” in the 1890s.³ The recent success of brands has stimulated historians’ attention to product variety, advertisements, brand management, firms’ and products’ reputations, consumer loyalty, the significance of brands, and much more.⁴ This is not to say that such themes were hardly being investigated before 1990, since several studies point to the contrary,⁵ but since that date the importance of brands for economic (business) and social (consumption) history has been clearly acknowledged.⁶

Most historical literature about brands focuses on single firms,⁷ and deals with the conditions for the brand’s diffusion, the advantages for producers and retailers, and the reception by consumers. Thus, changes in urbanization, industrialization, communication, employment, business organization, purchasing power, retailing, cultural prospects, gender relations, psychological motivations, and so forth have been indicated as factors in the interpretation of their growing importance.⁸ As for producers’ benefits, increased control over sales and prices and, hence, profits is cited, alongside a clear market position, product familiarity, and appeal.⁹ The retailers’ advantage in supplying branded products included exclusive sales rights, clear and direct understanding of consumers’ wishes, and equally clear and direct interaction with producers and importers, which would lead to greater control of sales, prices, and profits.¹⁰ As for consumers, historians claim that brands offered clear, recognizable, and reliable products (in terms of weight and quality), which were for sale virtually everywhere; brands, moreover, may add meaning to goods, sometimes leading to a special relationship between buyer and product.¹¹ Despite the success of brands, however, their wide acceptance encountered resistance, caused by the antagonism between producers and retailers with regard to price levels, and by the loss of direct interaction that had existed between customers and retailers.¹² It took producers great efforts (including premiums, advertisements, and special offers) to win over consumers.

Our starting point differs from the above approaches. We do not consider the history of specific brands to which history writing has recently been largely directed,¹³ but we shall investigate the actual increase in choices and the actual distribution of branded goods. We shall deal with the growth in the numbers of products and brands available in grocery stores, because the majority of consumers encountered brand names not in luxury consumer sectors such as perfume or automobiles, but rather in everyday purchases of food that, between 1850 and 1950, typically accounted for at least 50 percent of the total spending of an industrialized-nation household. “Food was one of the first commodities encompassed by a burgeoning systems of mass distribution,” Tracey Deutsch notes.¹⁴ We argue that knowledge about the development of product variety, and distribution of brands between the 1860s and 1930s is crucial to understanding the consumer society that consolidated in this period.¹⁵ All too often studying the emergence of modern consumer cultures has focused on the “spectacular and dream-like aspects of consumerism,” embodied by the department store.¹⁶ By exploring the diffusion of brands in the grocery trade, we deal with “the more mundane processes through which consumerism [became] entrenched.”¹⁷ Shopping for groceries changed with the proliferation of brands: customers were now able to buy individual standardized packages of branded food items instead of portions of a bulk product, weighed and packaged by the retailer who provided at best some information on the product’s origin.¹⁸ With a name, a logo and a package distinguishing similar products from one another, the branded product could develop into an item invested with values and emotions.¹⁹ It also contributed to the convenience of food preparation...