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.
Marmite Articles
Explore our collection of articles about Marmite, Britain's most divisive spread.
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Marmite at 125, with a new American owner in the room
Marmite turns 125 in 2027, just as McCormick takes over. What a serious anniversary year should look like, and what we should probably expect instead.
Marmite facts: 15 things you (probably) didn't know, plus a bonus you won't believe
Most Marmite fact lists are the same five lines copied off each other. This is the proper version: fifteen things about Marmite that are actually surprising and actually true, from the French pot on the label to the doctor who used it to discover folic acid, each one followed up in full if you want to go deeper.
The Marmite WWII workers' campaign: how a brown jar became part of the war effort
Marmite's Second World War story: the B-vitamin workers' advertising in factory press, the Red Cross parcels to prisoners of war, the desert and jungle field rations, and what the wartime ads actually looked like.
Marmite went to war, and the B vitamins came with it
Marmite spent both World Wars in British army ration tins. Not as a luxury, as a piece of medicine.
Is Marmite actually British? The German invention behind the very British jar
Marmite is the most British thing in the cupboard, and the invention behind it is not British at all. The discovery that brewer's yeast could be turned into an edible savoury extract was made by a German chemist, Justus von Liebig. Britain did not invent Marmite. It commercialised someone else's idea, brilliantly, in 1902.
Why is Marmite called Marmite? The French pot on the label
Marmite is named after the picture on its own label. A marmite is a French cooking pot, and the spread was first sold in little earthenware versions of one in 1902. The pot stayed on the jar long after the jar stopped being a pot. And the French word itself has a much stranger past: it once meant a hypocrite.
Why Marmite is made in Burton: how the spread became a Midlands accident
Marmite is made in Burton-on-Trent for one practical reason: it was the brewing capital of Britain, with roughly a quarter of the nation's beer and a mountain of spare yeast. The jar exists because of the pint, and it always has.
Ma'amite, the Diamond Jubilee Marmite
Marmite's marketing team are usually quite restrained. The name "Ma'amite" was the exception. Ma'am as in the way one addresses the Queen, mite as in Marmite.
The Marmarati, the fake secret society Marmite invented
Marmite XO (the extra-strong, double-aged version) launched in 2010. The standard launch playbook for an extension of a heritage brand is, broadly, "advertise on television, put it in supermarkets, hope for the best". Marmite did not do that.
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