History of Givaudan

The Givaudan Group, based in Switzerland, is one of the world’s leading wholesale producers of fragrances and favors.  Spray-dried encapsulated flavorings constitute an important category in the company’s product portfolio.

The company was started in 1895 by two French Brothers, Leon and Xavier Givaudan, both chemists, to supply the French perfume houses from a factory at Vernier, near Geneva.

Leon Givaudan

In 1963 it became a part of the Hoffmann-Loa Roche group of companies. In 2002 Givaudan acquired Nestle’s FIS (Food Ingredients Specialties)

In the end of 2006 Givaudan announced that they will acquire Quest International.
History of Givaudan

Givaudan had launched a new-state-of-the-art spray drying facility in 2014 in Indonesia, after an investment of CHF 24 million, to meet the rising demand for flavors in savory, dairy and beverage applications.
History of Givaudan

The Frito Company

In 1932 a San Antonio promoter named Elmer Doolin paid $100 for the recipe and the seven-outlet sales territory of a corn chip he’d happened to taste in a café.

Corn chips, which are derived from corn masa like that used in tortillas, were originally developed by Gustavo Olguin.

Doolin set up a production facility in his mom’s kitchen and sold the chips out of the back of his model T.

He was successful in selling them and he quickly opened a factory in San Antonio, Texas. In 1933, the fritos production was increased by designing a ‘hammer’ pres and the company continued to expand.

Within a year Doolin moved to Dallas where his company has remained ever since, because it was a better distribution center and he quickly became the snack food lord of the Southwest.

Frito adding potato chips to its line-up by buying out existing firms, including Crispie of Stockton, California, Nicolay-Dancey of Detroit and the Noss family’s Num Num of Cleveland.

In 1945, The Frito Sales Company was established, which separated sales from production activities. Expansion by the Frito National Company continued with issues of six franchises in 1945.

In 1961 the Frito Company merged with the Lay Company maker of Lay’s potato chips to become the giant Frito-Lay, which dominates the $14 billion snack food market. In 1965, Pepsi-Cola merged with Frito-Lay to form PepsiCo.
The Frito Company

Adam Express Company

Started by the ambitious Alvin Adams it was formerly incorporated in 1854. Adams Express Company had a sterling reputation based on its involvement in delivering messages, documents and securities during the California Gold Rush and westwards migration.

In 1840, 36 year old Alvin Adams (1804-1877) established Adams and Company.

He and his partner, Ephraim Farnsworth purchased season tickets from New York City to Boston and return. They then contracted to carry valuables securities and bundles for deliveries. His service was used by banks, merchants and individuals making valuable shipments.

The total assets consisted of ‘two men, a boy and one wheelbarrow’, it soon became one of the fastest growing and nation’s leading independent express companies.

During the Civil War, Adams Express maintained the payroll of both the Union and the Confederate armies. By the 1880s, Adams Express had nearly 8000 employees. Adams Express was one of four companies which dominated the field, the others being American Express, Wells Fargo and National.

The transformation of Adams Express into an investment company continued with its decision to operate the company as a closed-end mutual fund.
Adam Express Company 

Bird custard powder

Recipes for custard go back as far as the invading Romans who brought with them to Britain the skill of thickening sauces with eggs.

Alfred Bird, whose father taught astronomy at Eton, was born in 1811 in Birmingham. In 1837 Alfred established himself as an analytical and retail pharmaceutical chemist there.

His young wife suffered from a digestive disorder which prevented her from eating anything prepared with eggs or with yeast.

His wife Elizabeth Lavinia was apparently yearning for custard to go with her favorite pies so Alfred Bird started experimenting in his shop. He produced custard powder from cornflour instead of eggs, and baking powder so that bread could be made without yeast.

The result was the custard powder bearing his name. These products were apparently served at his dinner guests at home and when they met with their approval Alfred started the firm of Alfred and Sons Ltd in 1843 to make them in large quantities.

By next year Bird’s Custard Powder was being sold internationally. Alfred was a great believer in promotion and carried out a number of stunts to advertise his new product, including a record breaking ride from John O’Groats  to Land’s End on a tricycle.

Demand for Bird’s product increased steadily during the second half of the century. The company also produced one of the earliest commercial brands of baking powder and later blancmange powder on the 1870s.

The firm Alfred Bird and Sons Ltd of Birmingham remained a family business for 120 years. Alfred Bird Senior’s son, Alfred Fredrick Bird took ownership of the company in 1878 and is credited with having invented jelly crystals in 1895.

In 1947 Bird’s was taken over by the General Foods Company which merged with Phillip Morris in 1985. Three years later when Philip Morris acquired Kraft, Bird’s became part of the Kraft Foods.

In late 2004, Kraft sold Bird's Custard and some other Kraft brands to Premier Foods.
Bird custard powder

History of Edox watch

In 1883, Christian Ruefli-Flury, and exceptionally gifted watchmaker, gave his wife, Eva-Maria, a pocket watch that he had designed for her 25th birthday.

His wife impressed with the beauty of the watch the persuaded his husband to found his own watchmaking company.

In 1884, Christian Ruefli-Flury launched his watchmaking enterprise and it first workshops are established in BielBienna, a city famous for its well-educated watchmakers.

He named the company ‘Edox’ which means the hour in ancient Greek, and the hourglass logo has adorned all Edox watches ever since.

In 1955, his company employs up to 500 watchmakers. In 2008, Edox is the official timekeeper of the Class-1 World Powerboat Championship.
History of Edox watch

Wall’s ice cream

In 1919, Sausage maker Thomas Wall purchased Friars Place House in Acton, London and its ground for a factory making sausages.  He concerned about the cost of having to run his factory during the summer-off season, diversified into ice cream.

In 1922, ice cream manufacturing began at the factory to make use of the spare capacity in the summer.

Ice cream was sold from tricycles, and the phrase ‘Stop me and buy one’ became very familiar to ice cream consumers. Following of Wall’s invention of the tricycles the mass production of ice cream made it the first frozen food to enter working-class diet.

Wall’s became part of Unilever in 1929. Wall’s began to supply refrigerators on hire to cinemas and sweet shops, by 1939, they supplied 15,000 shops and had a turnover or about £1.5 m.

For home consumption, the firm operated 8,500 tricycles on the streets and had 136 depots all over the country to supply them.

Wall’s then became the largest ice-cream manufacturer in the world, as it still is today, after company’s expansion into markets in Western Europe and North America.
Wall’s ice cream

History of Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems was founded in early 1982. It was founded by Vinod Khosla and Scott McNealy, continued the long tradition of effecting a transfer of technology from a pubic funded university research project to a profit-making company by moving key people.

Two key people researchers who joined the firm later were Andy Bechtolsheim on the hardware side and Bill Joy on the software side.

The name Sun comes from initials of the Stanford University Network.

In their first year they released their first workstation based on hardware developed at Stanford University and on the BSD operating system. Ever since its inception, Sun Microsystem has maintained a singular vision of ‘The Network is the Computer.’

This vision has helped Sun Microsystems remain as one of the leading providers of industrial-strength hardware, software, and services to aid companies across the world.

In 1987 Sun and AT&T joined forces to develop UNIX System V Release 4, which combined the best of SunOS and System V Release 3.2.

By the end of it fiscal year 1992 it had surpassed over $3.5 billion dollars in sales and firmly held the market share lead in the fast growing workstation industry segment.

In 1995, Sun Microsystems unleashed Java technology, which was the first universal software platform designed for the internet and corporate intranets.

In April 2009, Oracle, another software giant, acquired Sun at a transaction value of $7.4 billion. This acquisition made both Oracle and Sun leading software-developing companies.
History of Sun Microsystems

Business history of Hires root beer

Root beer has been a common beverage in America since at least the eighteenth century. In 1875, Philadelphia pharmacist, Charles E. Hires began to experiment his new formula and finally produce Hires’ Root beer Household Extract, to be used for making root beer at home.

He sold it from a booth at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876 and he introduced it to drug store fountains.

At first packages of the dried roots, bark, and herbs were sold, and from 1893, both bottled beverage and in three-ounce bottles as a brewing extract.

The initial response to Hires Root Beer was so enthusiastic that Hires soon began nationwide distribution.

In 1890, the Charles E. Hires Company was incorporated for the large-scale manufacture and sale of Hires’ root beer, cough syrup and vegetable extracts and compounds.

Over the next few years, extensive advertising played a crucial role in the company’s expansion. For example, in a three month period in 1893, Hires spent more than $200,000 on newspaper ads, signs, trade cards, posters and other form of advertising.

Hires’s root beer, being nonalcoholic, was promoted as a health beverage. Advertising for the new product encouraged coal miners to switch from hard drinks to his root beer, which was advertised as ‘the National Temperance’ drink and ‘the Greatest Health Giving Beverage in the World’.

In 1962 Crush International bought Charles E. Hires Co. In 1980 Crush International, together with Hires Root Beer was sold to Procter and Gamble, who later sold it in 1989 to Cadbury Schweppes Americas Beverages, a subsidiary division of Cadbury Schweppes.
Business history of Hires root beer

Milton Snavely Hershey

Milton S. Hershey was born on September 13, 1857 in a stone farmhouse on what is now the campus of Milton Hershey School in the town of Derry Church, Pennsylvania.

The family was constantly on the move, Milton received little formal education or continuing in his study. 

Leaving school at age thirteen, he got a job learning to run a printing press but he was fired later. His mother found him a job at Joseph Royer’s ice cream and candy shop in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Following a four year apprenticeship, in 1876, Hershey opened a taffy shop in Philadelphia, which failed six years later.

Then, in 1886 Hershey opened the Lancaster Caramel Company which became a tremendous success. Within four years Hershey was hailed as one of Lancaster’s most successful citizens.

With financial assured, Milton Hershey was able to purse new interest. He began travelled abroad. Hershey hired chocolate makers and launched the Hershey Chocolate Company after visited Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, where he was fascinated by the exhibit of a German supplier of chocolate making equipment.

In 1900, Hersey began manufacturing milk chocolate candies while he continued to revise formula, which he continued to perfect through 1905.

Hershey and his wife were childless, so together they founded a school for needy orphans, which is now recognized as one of the most generous of its kind in the country.

Following his wife premature death in 1915, Hershey donated an estimated $60 million in trust to the school. He died on October 13, 1945.
Milton Snavely Hershey

Apple Computer

Apple Computer
On April 1, 1976, two college dropouts, Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, founded the Apple Computer Company. They began operating out of garage building the Apple I, which some claim to be the first personal computer to be sold as a fully assembled package.

In the early 1970s, before the introduction of the Apple I, the personal computing products available in the market had limited appeal. They were generally sold by small electronics firms and individual hobbyists through clubs. In many ways, Wozniak’s Apple I still typified the early merchandise. It consisted of an unpacked circuit board wired by Wozniak so that a purchaser could hook it up to a power supply. Within a few years, however astonishing advances in integrated circuitry provided the critical raw materials needed. And programmers began writing software to make the machines appealing to people.

In 1977, Wozniak and Jobs introduced the Apple II. In stark contrast to the Apple I, fundamentally a kit computer with limited appeal though creatively priced at $666, the $1298 Apple II is considered by many to be the first personal computer designed for the mass market. Market appeal came from its attractive physical design, and the fact that it came fully assembled with a standard keyboard, integrated power supply, and color graphics capability.

In 1985, President Ronald Reagan awarded both Wozniak and Jobs the national Medal of technology, the highest honor bestowed on America’s leading innovators, for their achievement at Apple Computer and their contributions in bringing the power of personal computing to the general public.

The success of the Macintosh put Apple Computer in the map. It also resulted in Microsoft recognizing the importance of GUI to future sales. Eventually, the personal relationship between Jobs and Bill Gates led to a period of cooperation, where Microsoft learned the basics of GUI technology, allowing Microsoft to begin its own project: Windows.
Apple Computer