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.
Marmite Articles
Explore our collection of articles about Marmite, Britain's most divisive spread.
Showing articles tagged with: marmite | View all articles
If you are vegan, Marmite is doing real work
If you are vegan, your single hardest nutrient is vitamin B12. It is found almost exclusively in animal products, and it does real work: nerve function, red blood cell production, DNA synthesis.
How Marmite is actually made: the yeast that eats itself
Marmite starts as the spent yeast left over from brewing beer. Salt makes the yeast cells digest themselves, the husks are sieved out, and what remains is a thick brown paste full of natural glutamates. The science of the jar, in plain English.
Marmite around the world: New Zealand, South Africa, Vegemite, and why none of them are British Marmite
Yeast extract spreads are a small global family. They are all built from the same trick: take leftover brewer's yeast, autolyse it (let the cells digest themselves with their own enzymes), and concentrate the result.
A NASCAR rookie has called Marmite \"vomit in a can\"
Shane van Gisbergen, the New Zealand-born racing driver currently doing rookie season in NASCAR (and doing it surprisingly well, let me say), went on The Rock's Morning Rumble in Auckland last week and was asked, in a rapid-fire round, his opinion of Marmite.
Cocktails with Marmite in them, briefly and honestly
For the last few years there has been a small but persistent trend in higher-end cocktail bars of using Marmite as a savoury cocktail ingredient.
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.
The Marmite jar has flat sides, which is not news
Last week, the internet collectively discovered that the Marmite jar has flat sides, and you can lay it on its side, and this makes it easier to scrape out the last bits. Greg James called it life-changing on Radio 1. The clip went around TikTok. The Marmite press office got a small flurry of calls.
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.
The M&S Marmite pizza outsold the Margherita
In its first week on shelves, the new M&S three-cheese Marmite pizza outsold the standard M&S Margherita. The Margherita has been an M&S Food fixture for, what, twenty years? The Marmite pizza had been on sale for seven days. That is a properly good launch number.
