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Democratizing Luxury and the Contentious “Invention of the Technological Chicken” in Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 April 2011

Andrew Godley  and
Bridget Williams
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Abstract

In 1950, poultry comprised 1 percent of the total meat consumed in Britain. But over the next thirty years, chicken consumption grew at the rate of 10 percent per annum, while overall meat consumption remained stagnant. By 1980, poultry made up a quarter of the total share of the market, replacing beef, mutton, and bacon in the British diet. This transformation was made possible by dramatic changes in production, dependent on technological innovations across several unrelated sectors. While the widespread distribution of cheap chicken led to its mass adoption, the transformation in meateating habits was not without its controversies. The leading retailers, in particular J. Sainsbury, acted as critical intermediaries in this contested market, reconciling consumer uncertainty by attaching their own reputations to product quality, and then by intervening in the quality standards employed in their supply chains.

Type
Articles
Information
Business History Review , Volume 83 , Issue 2: A Special Issue on Food and Innovation , Summer 2009 , pp. 267 - 290
Copyright
Copyright © Harvard Business School 2009

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References

1 The phrase “invention of the technological chicken” is from Talbot, Ross, The Chicken War: An International Trade Conflict between the United States and the EEC, 1961–1964 (Ames, Iowa, 1978), 3.Google Scholar

2 There is a vast literature on modern food provisioning and its wider ecosystem. For the U.K. see Oddy, Derek, From Plain Fare to Fusion Food: British Diet from the 1890s to the 1990s (Woodbridge, U.K., 2003)Google Scholar; Pollan, Michael, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (London, 2006)Google Scholar; and Schlosser, Eric, Fast Food Nation: What the All- American Meal is Doing to the World (London, 2002)Google Scholar for the U.S.

3 BOCM survey reported in Poultry Farmer, 30 Oct. 1954, 7. BOCM was the principal Unilever animal-feeds subsidiary. See Wilson, Charles, The History of Unilever (London, 1954)Google Scholar and Unilever, 1945–1965 (London, 1968)Google Scholar. See also Godley, Andrew C., Jewish Immigrant Entrepreneurship in New York and London, 1880–1914 (Basingstoke, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ch. 4, on the London and New York Jewish populations.

4 Poultry Farmer, 26 Sept. 1953. Temperton was director of the renowned National Institute of Poultry Husbandry at Harper Adams Agricultural College.

5 The description is from Farmer's Weekly, 19 May 1961, a copy of which is in the Denby Wilkinson archive held at the Museum for English Rural Life, University of Reading (MERL DW). Elsewhere Sykes was described as the “High Priest” of the industry; see JS Journal Mar. 1958, 6, for example (Sainsbury Archive, Museum in Docklands, London).

6 Sykes, Geoffrey, Poultry—A Modern Agribusiness (London, 1963)Google Scholar; his biographical information is on the jacket blurb. Also see , Sykes, “Letter to the Editor,” Agricultural History Review 18, no. 1 (1970): 51Google Scholar (our thanks to Paul Brassley for this reference). See the Farmer's Weekly photographic archive, held at the MERL, for several photographs (used by the journal) of Sykes's experiments. Also see Poultry Farmer, 3 May 1953 and 13 June 1953 for a description of Sykes's farm. Shortly afterward, he became one of Poultry Farmer's regular correspondents.

7 Horowitz, Roger, Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation (Baltimore, 2006)Google Scholar, ch. 5; and Boyd, William, “Science, Technology, and American Poultry Production,” Technology and Society 42, no. 4 (2001)Google Scholar, are the best recent summaries of U.S. developments. The Denby Wilkinson archive contains copious notes on the origins of the American industry (MERL DW/AD8/4. Denby Wilkinson was secretary of the official British National Broiler Tests, on breed selection, from 1959 onwards) and is reported in Andrew Godley and Bridget Williams, “The Chicken, the Factory Farm, and the Supermarket: The Industrialization of Poultry Farming in Britain and the United States, 1950–1980,” in Food Chains: Provisioning, from Farmyard to Shopping Cart, ed. Roger, Horowitz and Warren, Belasco (Philadelphia, 2008)Google Scholar, which compares developments in Britain and the U.S., building on the contemporaneous accounts in Sykes, Poultry and Talbot, Chicken.

8 Jacobs, Meg, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (Princeton, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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10 Poultry Farmer, 14 Mar. 1953,1.

11 Poultry Farmer, 26 Nov. 1955,28 Mar. 1953 on laying hens for meat, and 16 May 1953 on Reading trials. Roe was the chairman of Suprema, a Somerset poultry producing cooperative.

12 With vitamin D supplements. Poultry Farmer, 10 Sept. 1955,1, 5; and 16 Oct. 1954.

13 Poultry Farmer, 3 May 1953 and 13 June 1953.

14 Poultry Farmer, 10 Sept. 1955, 1; Frost, Gerald, Sir Antony Fisher: Champion of Liberty (London, 2002)Google Scholar; McCord, Norman, “Fisher, Sir Antony George Anson (1915–1988),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004.Google Scholar

15 Sykes, Poultry, 1–2. George W. Padley in Lincoln and Marshall's in Scotland also began to experiment, along with Lloyd Maunder and Buxted. Between them, they dominated British poultry production for decades.

16 Poultry Farmer, 19 Dec. 1953.

17 Poultry Farmer, 10 Dec. 1955, 1. Sykes earlier stated that there were “well over 1 m broilers” in 1955; Poultry Farmer, 29 Oct. 1955, 20.

18 Frost, Fisher, citation p. 21, pp. 6–21, on his early years. He was a devout Christian Scientist, lifelong teetotaler, and, despite this deliberate flouting of customs rules, a man of high principles. He established the Institute of Economic Affairs, after economist Friedrich Hayek convinced him of the superior gains to be achieved by investing his profits in intellectual rather than political capital to promote the free market agenda.

19 Frost, Fisher, 48–49. Poultry Farmer, 6 Aug. 1955,13, on artificial insemination. Sykes in Poultry Farmer, 27 Oct. 1956, 16, on crossing White Rocks, Rhode Island Reds, and New Hampshires (all U.S. strains) with Light Sussexes; and Sykes, Poultry, 142, on breed requirements. Sykes left production and moved into commercial breeding.

20 Citation from Frost, Fisher, 46, and 46–48 on U.S. visits.

21 Poultry Farmer, 27 Oct. 1956,10.

22 Sykes, Poultry, 104.

23 Sykes in Poultry Farmer, 27 Oct. 1956,15, on John Ogier design of shed and mechanical feeding.

24 Sykes, Poultry, 103–4.

25 Campbell, William, “History of the Discovery of Sulfaquinoxaline as a Coccidiostat,” Journal of Parasitology 94 (2008)Google Scholar. Also see Galambos, Lou, Networks of Innovation: Vaccine Development at Merck, Sharp & Dohme, and Mulford, 1895–1995 (Cambridge, U.K., 1999)Google Scholar, 127n7. Combs's speech was reported in “Feed Revolution Took 25 Years,” Poultry Farmer, 3 Sept. 1955,10.

26 Poultry Farmer, 10 Sept. 1955; Sykes, Poultry, 85.

27 Poultry Farmer, 27 Oct. 1956.

28 Fortune, Mar. 1952, 118–40, and cited by Bud, Robert, Penicillin: Triumph and Tragedy (Oxford, 2007), 169Google Scholar. For U.S. developments, see Boyd, “Science.”

29 Bud, Penicillin, 163,169.

30 Sykes, Poultry, 177 and 86–87; and in Poultry Farmer, 21 Oct. 1959, on his contention that British feedstuffs producers were “inefficient” and the “laggard” in the poultry business.

31 Sykes in Poultry Farmer, 10 Apr. 1954, on three cycles per annum in 1954; Poultry Farmer & Packer, 17 July 1963; Sykes, Poultry, 102–5, on increasing the speed of cycles to five per annum by 1964.

32 “Feed Revolution Took 25 Years,” Poultry Farmer, 3 Sept. 1955, 10; and Sykes in Poultry Farmer, 27 Oct. 1956.

33 Sykes in Poultry Farmer, 29 Oct. 1955. Pigs typically required four pounds of feed per one pound of meat gain, for example. JS Journal, Mar. 1958, 9.

34 Sykes, Poultry, 149 on convergence. Coles in Poultry Farmer, 25 Oct. 1958, claimed parity with American farmers' conversion rates by then.

35 Citation from Talbot, Chicken War, 9. When animals convert their food into heat, activity, and excreta as well as muscle growth, the first law of thermodynamics (that the total amount of energy in a system remains constant) implies that the feed conversion rate can never be 1:1. By 2000, after a further forty years of nutritional advance, the feed conversion rate has fallen only to 1:9. Andrew Sheppard, “The Structure and Economics of Broiler Production in England,” Centre for Rural Research, University of Exeter, 2004.

36 The egg-collecting industry remained extremely inefficient, even as late as 1960. The number of stations able to process birds was “about 300,” Poultry Farmer, 30 July 1955, 1. Clarke and Binding, Lloyd Maunder, purchased a plucking machine in 1933, 64.

37 Maunder interview.

38 Most packers had to drive twenty to thirty miles to pick up just a few dozen birds. Poultry Farmer, 10 Dec. 1955 and 26 Feb. 1955. Frost, Fisher, 50, says processing costs as high as one shilling per pound of dead-weight bird in 1954–55.

39 Poultry Farmer, 27 Oct. 1956,15.

40 Max Justice, “Chickens Cheep,” JS Journal (Mar. 1958), 8. Tony Pendry wrote, in October 1959, that it was “only a year or two ago since the majority of retailers preferred to buy uneviscerated birds.” Poultry Farmer, 31 Oct. 1959, 30.

41 Shrimpton, D. H., Quality Control in Marketing Fresh Poultry, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, Food Investigation, Technical Paper no. 7 (London, 1959)Google Scholar; also see Shrimpton in Poultry Farmer, 25 Nov. 1959.

42 Shrimpton, Quality Control, 9–11, on the trial comparing the effectiveness of the major antibiotics on delaying bacterial degradation: American Cyanamid's Aureomycin and Pfizer's Terramycin. Poultry Farmer, 31 Oct. 1959.

43 Poultry Farmer, 23 July 1955, reporting original U.S. experiments. Shrimpton, Quality Control, 10, “The details of the mode of action of the antibiotics in delaying greening are not yet known,” and pp. 9–11 on the impact of high-dosage Aureomycin and Terramycin and other antibiotics on rates of degradation and subsequent high-residue levels.

44 Max Justice cited in Poultry Farmer, l Nov. 1958, 11. Also see 25 Oct. 1958 discussion on Sainsbury's advertising strategy. Speech reported in Poultry Farmer, 10 Sept. 1955, 5.

45 Max Justice, “Chickens Cheep.” This led to a “dramatic” increase in demand, according to Sykes, Poultry, 44. Also see Emerson, Giles, Sainsbury's: The Record Years, 1950–1992 (London, 2006), 49–50Google Scholar; and letter from Jim Woods to Anthony Tennant of Mather & Crowther advertising agency, 20 Jan. i960 (Sainsbury Archive).

46 Pendry in Poultry Farmer & Packer, 31 Oct. 1959, 23. Sainsbury's Financial Report, 1961 (Sainsbury Archive).

47 Sykes, Poultry, 197.

48 Ibid., 198.

49 Poultry Farmer, 27 Oct. 1956, 10; Sykes, Poultry, 8; and contrast with the picture in Boyd, “Science.”

50 Boyd, “Science.”

51 Poultry Farmer, 14 Nov. 1953.

52 Ibid., 27 Oct. 1956.

53 Bud, Penicillin, 171, a n d 173–7411.25.

54 Ibid., 174.

55 Sykes, Poultry, 102–5; and Farmers Weekly, 19 May 1961, on the RSPCA's lesser concern with “deep-litter” rearing practices (MERL DW/AD8/4).

56 The campaign is reported in Poultry Farmer & Packer, 12 Sept. 1959,17.

57 Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring (New York, 1962)Google Scholar; Harrison, Ruth, Animal Machines: The New Factory Farming Industry (London, 1964).Google Scholar

58 Bud, Penicillin, 175–77, citation, 163. Bud reports a survey of scientific papers from 1970, showing that ten times as many papers were directed toward the problem of antibiotic resistance to human health compared with chemical residues from antibiotics, 173.

59 Bud, Penicillin, 182ff.

60 Inferred from Poultry Farmer, 30 July 1955, “leading seller 1 million, a number of others half a million a year.”

61 Maunder interview, and in subsequent quotations.

62 Godley and Williams, “The Chicken, the Factory Farm, and the Supermarket,” covers this in more detail.

63 There is a very great deal in the company's official histories about the commitment to quality, Williams, Best Butter, 104–5; and Emerson, Sainsbury, 32, for example. But it permeates the internal testimonial evidence and documentation too. See, for example, J. D. Sainsbury, “Merchandising of Home Grown Produce,” a paper for the “British Growers Look Ahead” conference, 2 Apr. 1968, 11–14, or, the article in Management Today (Apr. 1967), based on extensive interviews with senior executives, which summarized the firm's position in this way: “What attracts the customers is the Sainsbury reputation for freshness and quality, combined with keen prices.”

64 Maunder interview. The U.S. contract system, described by Fisher in Sykes, Poultry, 33–35, appears to have been more focused on securing supply in quantitative, rather than qualitative, terms.