150 years of Maggi – NRC

‘Even the little children know that, with seasonings the soup becomes very fine. That’s why Greetje is very happy, the Maggi bottle is down.’

Frank Wedekind’s slogan to promote the Swiss tastemaker dates from 1886. Until the then unknown poet resigned from Maggi after a few months because he refused to ‘sell his body and soul’. Nevertheless, copywriter Wedekind stood at the cradle of the global success of Julius Maggi (1846-1912). His factory for instant soup based on peas and bean powder with a meat flavor is 150 years old this year.

The affordable ‘quick’ soup, a symbol of health and modernity, was intended for the working woman to put an evening meal on the table in a short time. Lacking enough vegetables, Julius Maggi bought land from small farmers who he then offered work in his factory. At the beginning of the twentieth century he could call himself the largest landowner in Switzerland.

Visionary Maggi introduced an advertising department into his company, a novelty in those days. He himself designed the yellow-red label for the brown Maggi bottle with the liquid flavor enhancer. Advertising campaigns with colorful posters, stamp booklets with premium and decal books for young people were also intended to give the brand, enriched with the stock cube since 1908, also European fame. In France, the Maggi advertisements appeared on the tour boats on the Seine and Pablo Picasso was inspired in 1912 for his ‘Paysage aux affiches’. Sixty years later, visual artist Joseph Beuys placed the Maggi bottle in the inner lid of a briefcase for his work: ‘I don’t know a weekend’.

The first Dutch Maggi factory on Amsterdam’s Haarlemmerweg dates from 1934. ‘Mother, that was still missing, Maggi’s aroma’, according to the Dutch advertising slogan on the poster with a broadly smiling man in a suit inviting the Maggi bottle over his plate of soup. presents. More recently, the slogan is: ‘A little bit of yourself and a little bit of Maggi.’ The iconic brown bottle, whether or not sticky due to use, has been on Dutch kitchen shelves for decades and has adorned many restaurant tables with salt and pepper in a specially designed stainless steel set. And Maggi, since 1946 owned by the Swiss multinational Nestlé, is still produced worldwide.

Maggi’s commercial spirit has never been dictated by politics. During the Second World War, the German subsidiary in Singen ensured a record turnover of food for the German army with the use of forced laborers. After the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine, Nestlé refused to follow EU sanctions policy, invoking the UN’s right to food. Only after heavy international pressure did the food company, with an annual Russian turnover of 1.6 billion euros, only continue the production of ‘essential food products’, such as baby and medical nutrition, in its factories in Russia. The answer to the question whether the production of Maggi in Russia has also stopped, has not yet been answered.