Aerated Bread Company - End of An Era

End of An Era

1955 saw the end of the Aerated Bread Company as an independent operation. Australian operations had been liquidated in 1951. British operations were forever changed when the company was purchased by Allied Bakeries (now part of Associated British Foods) in 1955 by the "Barnum of Bread," Canadian-born Garfield Weston. With this acquisition, the self-service A.B.C. tea shops would join the high-end, morning-coated service of Fortnum & Mason, already in Weston's corporate empire. As one U.S. magazine of the day put it: "he Piccadilly prince is about to marry the tearoom Cinderella." Allied was expected to pay $8.1 million for A.B.C. ($70 million in current dollars). At that time, Allied itself had a large share of the U.K. baked goods market. Allied's marketshare prior to acquiring A.B.C. was 10% of all U.K. bread production and the sale, per day, of 20 million biscuits (cookies in North America). Allied's sales the year prior were $154 million ($1,333 million in current dollars) with profits of $12.6 million ($109 million in current dollars). Worldwide, companies under Weston's umbrella had sales of over $1 billion in 1954 ($9 billion in current dollars) and profits of over $40 million ($346 million in current dollars). Weston had the golden touch when it came to creating and operating extremely profitable companies during the Great Depression, the war, and the economic slump that was Britain in the immediate postwar years.

With London's ABC shops, where profits have been slipping, Baker Weston once more expects to show Britons how to turn flour into gold. For a starter, he will spend nearly $3,000,000 to expand the business, sell more baked goods, and hopes to push the chain into the No. 1 spot as Britain's biggest low-cost restaurant business.

With this acquisition, Allied would almost double its share of the U.K.'s bread market by the end of the decade.

Under the Allied banner, A.B.C. continued trading until the early 1980s when the name disappeared. For many years it had had a major bakery on the Regent's Canal in Camden Town, London. This closed in the 1980s when A.B.C. ceased operation and today is the site of a Sainsbury's store and Grand Union Walk Housing, both designed by prominent English architect, Sir Nicholas Grimshaw of Grimshaw Architects.

Dauglish's method has since been rendered obsolete in the U.K. by the adoption of mechanical, high-speed dough processes such as the Chorleywood Bread Process (CBP), now responsible for 80 percent of U.K. bread production. One should note that since the new "no time" methods — such as CBP — permit the use of lower grade flours, the resultant product is of less nutritional value than breads made by earlier methods such as Dauglish's aerated bread system.

Nowadays, the only traces of the Aerated Bread Company are faded signs above stores, such as 232 Strand, now a supermarket.