Vegemite flopped at first, and a pun-based rebrand only made it worse
Australia's most famous spread began as brewery waste and sold poorly for years. Its makers even renamed it Parwill to run the slogan Marmite but Parwill: if Ma might, then Pa will. The joke failed. What finally saved Vegemite was free samples, American cars as prizes and a jingle.
After World War I disrupted imports of British Marmite, the Melbourne firm Fred Walker and Co. asked chemist Cyril Callister to make a spread from used yeast that breweries were throwing away. He broke down yeast cells from a local brewery, concentrated the liquid and blended it with salt, celery and onion extracts into a sticky black paste. The name came out of a public competition, picked by Walker's daughter, and the product reached shops on 25 October 1923.
Sales were weak, and competition from Marmite grew. The Parwill experiment ran from 1928 to 1935 without winning back customers. Walker then leaned on his successful cheese joint venture with Kraft, giving Vegemite away with cheese products and running poetry contests with imported Pontiac cars as prizes. Sales recovered, the British Medical Association endorsed it in 1939 as a rich source of B vitamins, and it went into army rations during World War II. By the late 1940s nine in ten Australian homes used it.
Advertising sealed its place. From 1954, a cheerful jingle about happy little Vegemites ran on radio and then television, and when Kraft set out in 2007 to find the eight children from the original commercial, all were traced within eight days. In 1984 a jar became the first product scanned electronically at an Australian checkout.
Not every idea worked. A milder cream-cheese version launched in 2009 was named iSnack 2.0 and met instant ridicule. After decades under American ownership, the brand returned to Australian hands in 2017 when the Bega Group bought it from Mondelez.
Source: Vegemite
