The businessman who invented the concentrated stock cubes

During the Spanish Civil War, a food product began to gain popularity that helped solve the food shortages of households at that time. It was a cube that concentrated meat and vegetable extracts, and it served to make broth with a certain dignity. The manufacturer was called Gallina Blanca (initially, Gallina de Oro) and behind it was the entrepreneur Lluís Carulla Canals, originally from the Conca de Barberà. That was the first success of a great empire that still has gigantic dimensions today, such as Agrolimen (now The GB Foods). But contrary to what many people think, Carulla was not the pioneer of broth cubes, because long before the war, in Catalonia, those manufactured by the Franco-Swiss multinational Maggi could already be purchased normally.

The company's name comes from its founder, the Swiss of Italian descent Julius Maggi. From a very young age, Maggi inherited his father's mill business, but he soon encountered a crisis in the sector that forced him to seek new horizons. He saw a future in the production of legumes and set to work, mainly to manage to prepare soups that would serve to combat the malnutrition of factory workers at the time. In 1882, he met the doctor Fridolin Schuler, who had the same concerns as him, and both set to work. This doctor was a member of the Schweizerische Gemeinnützige Gesellschaft, an entity that was concerned about the well-being of the Swiss citizens of that time. Precisely, legumes were an interesting food because of the quantity of nutrients they provide at an affordable price (workers rarely could afford to eat meat).

Maggi's goal was to produce flour – his past as a mill owner had made him an expert – but not from wheat or other cereals, but from legumes, and thus the first pea and bean flours were born, which could be easily transformed into soups. In 1885, he introduced the world's first instant soups under the slogan “the best pottage for poor and rich”. Entering the market was not easy, because the lower classes were reluctant to abandon a diet based on potatoes and accompanied by coffee substitutes, while wealthier families did not see the appeal of these soups with their faint taste. A year after the soups, he brought to market the so-called Maggi seasoning, which was a broth concentrate that served as a base for consommés, soups, and sauces. The flavor-enhancing effect on food caused its consumption to spread considerably. He even managed to create more sophisticated tastes to please all those high-income citizens who had rejected his first soups for being bland (one of the seasonings he produced offered a truffle flavor).

The success was immediate and by 1888 Maggi already had branches in neighboring countries such as Germany, France and Italy, but also in the United Kingdom and, even, in the United States. In parallel to this expansion, the company began to adopt social measures that it gradually extended to most of its factories: Maggi workers had housing provided by the company, health insurance, cultural activities, etc. The 1900 Paris Universal Exposition was key to Maggi's life, because the event not only served to project its products internationally, but also, in addition, the entrepreneur decided to move his headquarters to the French capital. A determining factor in the brand's rapid expansion was the intensive use of advertising, with campaigns that featured great writers and painters as creatives.

As a natural evolution of its concentrates, 1907 saw the birth of the famous bouillon cube – the product with which we began this piece – under the commercial name Boullon Kub (the French term boullon means broth, while kub is a phonetic adaptation of cube). The fame of the product was so great that shortly after its launch it was selling by the millions, and Picasso himself included a deconstructed Boullon Kub in the work Paysage aux affiches, from 1912. Maggi's frenetic activity came to a sudden halt one autumn day that same year, because a stroke left him between life and death. He died shortly after in his native Switzerland. For its part, in 1947 the company was acquired by the multinational Nestlé, and since then Maggi has been one of the brands in the extensive product portfolio of those from Vevey.