Solid roux and a nationwide TV blitz: Vermont Curry (1963)

Widening the market from cooks to people who merely want to cook

The heart of this decision was not a better curry but a redefinition of who curry was for. S&B held the market with a connoisseur’s powder aimed at experienced cooks and moved it through the primary-wholesaler network. House did the opposite on both axes: it built its own route to the shelf through secondary wholesalers, and it replaced the powder — which asked the cook to blend flour, fat and spice at home — with a solid block that only needed dropping into a pot. Sealing the cooking process into the product itself was what let House carry curry from the household that could already cook to the household that merely wanted to.

Vermont Curry in 1963, fired nationwide by television, was the moment those preparations were released. The apple-and-honey mildness aimed the dish at children; the advertising made solid roux the default standard of the Japanese home kitchen and prised the market loose from S&B. What House won here it has held for sixty years — a number-one share in home curry that still earns the larger part of group operating profit. The same act that opened the market also fixed the company’s centre of gravity onto a single domestic staple, a dependence that would define both its strength and, as the home-cooking market shrank, its limits.