The Marmite A-List: famous faces and their real, sourced Marmite verdicts, from Daniel Craig and Helen Mirren to Madonna and Gary Lineker. Lovers and haters, all on the record, with the genuine quotes named and dated. Updated as new names are added.
Love It or Hate It Phenomenon
The polarizing nature of Marmite: taste science, genetic factors, psychological aspects, and the "Marmite effect" as a cultural metaphor.
Category: Love It or Hate It Phenomenon | View all articles
Daniel Craig and Marmite: the James Bond star who was once 'Mr Marmite'
Before he was James Bond, Daniel Craig handed out samples as 'Mr Marmite' at a Reading supermarket, the job that earned him his Equity card. And despite the rumours, he is a lover: asked his biggest misconception, he chose 'That I don't like Marmite?'
The internet was arguing about Marmite in 1985
We treat 'love it or hate it' as if the 1996 advert invented it. The OED traces Marmite to a 1985 post on a Usenet cooking group explaining the jar to Americans: people fall into two groups, those who love it and those who would not stay in the same room as it. The divide, online, eleven years early.
The first Marmite man was Rab C Nesbitt
The OED dates the adjective 'Marmite' to a single 1994 citation. Look at what it actually is and you find a Sandwell Evening Mail review calling Gregor Fisher's Rab C Nesbitt 'the Marmite man of comedy.' By the dictionary's own reckoning, the first Marmite man wore a string vest.
"Love it or hate it": where the Marmite slogan came from, and how it rescued a struggling brand
Where 'love it or hate it' came from: the 1996 BMP DDB campaign that rescued a fading brand by leaning into the half of Britain that hated the taste, and how the slogan escaped into everyday language.
Why does Marmite taste like that? The science of the savoury hit
Marmite tastes the way it does because it is loaded with natural glutamates (the umami compounds), a lot of salt, and the dark, malty, slightly bitter notes from heating concentrated yeast. The intensity is the point, and it is why it divides people.
A bit Marmite: the jar that became an adjective
To call something 'a bit Marmite' is now official: the OED lists Marmite as an adjective for anything that splits people into love-it and hate-it camps, and it dates the metaphor to 1994, two years before the famous advert everyone credits.
Marmite in British popular culture: the verb, the meme, and the brand-name shorthand
It is hard to think of another food brand that became a word in normal British English. Hoover, in its day. Tippex. That is most of the list. Marmite is in it. If you describe a film, a politician, a footballer or a piece of new architecture as "a bit Marmite", everyone in the room nods.
Marmite is one of the longest-running memes on the internet
Bartle Bogle Hegarty wrote "Love it or hate it" for Marmite in 1996. Twenty-nine years later, half the internet is still using it. That is the kind of longevity ad agencies dream of and almost never achieve. The reason it travelled is that it does not actually sell Marmite.
London loves Marmite, Glasgow really does not
Consumer surveys have repeatedly shown the same pattern. In London and the south-east, roughly six in ten people say they either love Marmite or are happy to eat it. In Scotland and the north of England, that figure drops to closer to three in ten. The midlands sit somewhere between.
