In 2011, Denmark enforced a long-standing food regulation that requires added vitamins in commercial food products to be specifically approved by the Danish authorities. Marmite, which is fortified with extra B vitamins (B12 in particular), did not have the approval.
Marmite Articles
Explore our collection of articles about Marmite, Britain's most divisive spread.
Showing articles tagged with: history | View all articles
1984: the year Marmite changed the lid and the nation panicked
For most of its history, Marmite came with a metal screw-top lid. The lid was satisfying. It made the right sound when you opened the jar. It had heft. It felt durable, in the way that midcentury British packaging often did, and it suggested that the contents were a serious product.
Lucy Wills, Marmite, and the discovery of folic acid
Lucy Wills was an English physician who graduated from Cambridge in 1928 and went to work at the Haffkine Institute in Bombay in the early 1930s. She was particularly interested in a severe and often fatal anaemia affecting pregnant women in the Bombay textile mills. The condition was puzzling.
Marmite goes to war: the WWII workers' advertising, the Red Cross parcels, and the Burma broth
By 1916, the British Army Medical Corps had a problem. Soldiers in the trenches were developing beriberi, a nerve disease caused by thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency.
Marmite is a French word, and the jar used to be a pot
The pronunciation argument has been running for at least a hundred years. "Mar-meet" is the original French, and is, technically, correct. "Mar-might" is the British naturalisation, and is what almost everyone in Britain actually says. Both are now acceptable.
How Marmite was invented, by a German chemist and a Burton brewery
Justus von Liebig was one of the most important nineteenth-century chemists, a founder of modern organic chemistry, the namesake of the Liebig condenser still found in every undergraduate lab, and a serial inventor of food products.
Burton-on-Trent, where the Marmite actually comes from
The Marmite factory has been on the same Burton-on-Trent site since 1902. It was not, you will be relieved to hear, chosen at random.
The Mish-mash Dictionary of Marmite
&creativeYou'd be surprised at how few Marmite related books there are, especially as the number of Marmite brands are growing enormously at the moment.
On the origins of the word Marmite
From www.nakedtranslations.com [site appears to be dead] We were looking at the menu of a very nice London restaurant on Saturday when one of my co-lunchers exclaimed: "Monkfish tail "en marmite"??! Whaaaat? Fish in Marmite?" Tut tut. Those Engleesh. I reassured my friend: "Of course not.
Marmite, the essence of Britishness
The savoury spread Marmite was the subject of a Commons motion. Former sports minister Tony Banks said that 2002 marked the 100th anniversary of its creation.
