The man who invented the digestive biscuit also bankrolled Scotland's national library
McVitie's grew from a Dumfries baker's Edinburgh provision shop into Britain's top-selling biscuit maker. Its first big hit, the digestive, came from a young employee named Alexander Grant, who later ran the firm, endowed the National Library of Scotland and gave a prime minister a car.
Robert McVitie, born in Dumfries in 1809, trained as a baker and settled in Edinburgh in 1834, running a provision shop on Rose Street in the New Town. The business moved among several addresses as it grew, calling itself a baker and confectioner by 1856. His son, another Robert, took charge in the 1880s. Charles Edward Price, a gifted salesman who had joined in 1875, became a partner in 1888, and McVitie and Price built the large St Andrews Biscuit Works in Gorgie that year. It burned down in 1894 and was rebuilt within the year to a better standard.
Grant, a biscuit maker from Forres, devised the digestive in 1892. The name reflected a belief that its generous dose of baking soda helped digestion. The chocolate-coated version followed in 1925, Jaffa Cakes in 1927 and Hobnobs in 1985. Britons now get through more than 71 million packets of chocolate digestives a year, about 52 biscuits every second. Even the Rich Tea was reshaped: in 1891 the London salesman persuaded the firm to shrink it for southern tastes.
After the younger Robert died childless in 1910, the company was incorporated with Grant as managing director and main shareholder. He gave 100,000 pounds in 1923 to help found the National Library of Scotland and the same again in 1928 for its building. He also landed at the centre of a scandal. In 1924 Ramsay MacDonald, Labour's new prime minister and Grant's childhood friend, admitted receiving a Daimler and 30,000 pounds of McVitie's shares, and soon afterwards Grant received a baronetcy, an episode many saw as corrupt.
A 1948 merger with Macfarlane, Lang created United Biscuits, sold in 2014 to Yildiz of Istanbul and folded into Pladis in 2016. The Gorgie works stopped production in 1969 as output shifted to England, and in 2022 the last Scottish factory closed, ending 192 years in the country. Royal cakes are a sideline with history: a wedding cake over 2 metres tall for the future George V in 1893, the main cake for Princess Elizabeth in 1947, and a chocolate biscuit groom's cake for Prince William in 2011.
Source: McVitie's
