The shortage of Royal Baking Powder comes at a time when Irish food distribution is taking a hammering, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
THERE IS a shortage of Royal Baking Powder. Sources close to The Irish Timeshave been unable to buy Royal Baking Powder at supermarkets in Dublin; sources slightly more distant from The Irish Timesconfirmed that they were unable to buy Royal Baking Powder in either Tesco or Dunnes in Douglas, Cork. Royal Baking Powder has been replaced by other brands – Dove Organic and Dr Oetker – and the supermarkets' own brands. Tesco baking powder is just 95 cent.
This may not mean very much to you, but for the bakers of Ireland it is most significant. Royal Baking Powder, in its distinctive and beautiful tin, has been part of the Irish kitchen for generations. (This isn’t the usual hyperbole; Royal Baking Powder first came on the market in 1866.) Now it appears to have vanished from our shelves, just as the busiest baking months of the year are upon us.
It is another of those unremarked shortages, rather like the one in which Irish icing sugar vanished from our shelves for a couple of months, I believe, last year.
In Ireland, until very recently, Royal Baking Powder was distributed by Jaymark Sales and Marketing, which is based in Ballymount, Walkinstown. In the UK it was distributed by Trustin foods, which is based in Bury St Edmunds. The distributors have had difficulties in obtaining Royal Baking Powder, they say, since the end of May, beginning of June.
Royal Baking Powder is owned by Kraft. There are suspicions that Kraft planned to cease stocking Royal Baking Powder altogether at the end of this year, something that Kraft denies absolutely. “I’m not aware of any plans to discontinue the product,” says Derek Caswell, commercial director of Kraft Ireland. “Royal Baking Powder is an iconic brand.”
The problem, according to Kraft, is that when it bought Royal Baking Powder from Danone 2½ years ago, it inherited a complex distribution chain that has recently broken down. Kraft is getting plenty of calls from consumers wondering where Royal Baking Powder has vanished to. The distributors are also receiving these calls, and keeping an eye out for Royal Baking Powder, now rarer than the unicorn.
Royal Baking Powder comes in two sizes, 113 grammes and 226 grammes. “There’s about 20 units of the 226 size and 30 units of the 113 size in the Spar near the Artane roundabout on the Malahide Road,” said a spokesman for Jaymark.
The Royal Baking Powder crisis comes at the end of a summer in which food distribution in Ireland has taken a terrible hammering. Tesco, for example, has been leapfrogging Irish food distributors and dealing directly with distributors in the UK. Shelves have been looking rather empty and customers are growing tetchy. The politics of food distribution are cut-throat and the food industry itself is fascinating even to the most casual observer. “Kraft Foods Europe to invest €15m in new biscuit research,” reads one irresistible headline.
Baking powder is a leavening agent, which is made up of bread soda, cream of tartar and cornstarch. If you’re stuck, then you can substitute by combining two parts cream of tartar with one part baking soda – there is no need for the cornstarch if you are going to use your baking powder immediately, because the cornstarch is present only in order to keep the mixture dry.
This information came from the website O Chef, which passed on the recipe for baking powder from Edna Lewis’s book, The Taste Of Country Cooking. Edna started making her own baking powder because she didn’t like the taste of the commercial stuff.
Truly the world is full of very sensitive people, and the cookery underground is full of tips to help them to survive and to cook in a world that is hostile to good food, and, worse, refuses to acknowledge that cooking is important.
According to my fairly brief researches, baking powder began to be produced just as soon as food production became industrial. Alfred Bird, of custard fame, produced a baking powder in 1843.
Grapes were the only source of tartaric acid (for the cream of tartar, presumably), which is a by-product of wine manufacture. (When Kraft Europe acquired Royal Baking Powder from Danone recently, it also acquired the factory in Spain that manufactures it. Derek Caswell does not know whereabouts in Spain this factory is located.)
When the Hoagland brothers, Cornelius and Joseph, who were druggists, began to make baking powder in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1863, they had to import their vital ingredients from Europe. They also had to differentiate their Royal Baking Powder from all the other baking powders being produced. The Hoaglands did this by pouring an enormous amount of money into advertising. They also managed to blow up five city blocks of Fort Wayne in what was called “a cataclysmic explosion”.
But Royal Baking Powder continued to be manufactured in Indiana into the early 20th century. I’m not sure where it was made after that, but Royal Baking Powder was sponsoring books of recipes in the US at the end of the first World War, so it was very much a social force to be reckoned with, much as our own Odlums was in Ireland later on.
This is a cursory look at baking powder, its history and its politics. But it does make you think about what we lose when old brands vanish, without public explanation, from our shelves.
Both the distributors and Kraft say that they very much want Royal Baking Powder to return, and both say they are working to that end.