Hovis Ltd is a British company that produces
flour
Flour is a powder made by grinding raw grains, roots, beans, nuts, or seeds. Flours are used to make many different foods. Cereal flour, particularly wheat flour, is the main ingredient of bread, which is a staple food for many cul ...
and
bread
Bread is a staple food prepared from a dough of flour (usually wheat) and water, usually by baking. Throughout recorded history and around the world, it has been an important part of many cultures' diet. It is one of the oldest human-made f ...
. The brand originated in Stoke-on-Trent and was first mass-produced in
Macclesfield
Macclesfield is a market town and civil parish in the unitary authority of Cheshire East in Cheshire, England. It is located on the River Bollin in the east of the county, on the edge of the Cheshire Plain, with Macclesfield Forest to its eas ...
,
Cheshire
Cheshire ( ) is a ceremonial and historic county in North West England, bordered by Wales to the west, Merseyside and Greater Manchester to the north, Derbyshire to the east, and Staffordshire and Shropshire to the south. Cheshire's county tow ...
, in 1886. It became part of
Rank Hovis McDougall
RHM plc, formerly Rank Hovis McDougall, was a United Kingdom food business. The company owned numerous brands, particularly for flour, where its core business started, and for consumer food products. It was listed on the London Stock Exchange an ...
(RHM) in 1962 after a succession of mergers. RHM, with its brands including Hovis and
Mother's Pride
Mother's Pride is a brand name for a variety of breads produced by British Bakeries, a division of Premier Foods. The company also bakes Nimble (reduced calorie) and Hovis branded loaves as well as supermarket 'own brand' ranges.
British Bake ...
, was acquired by Premier Foods in 2007.
Hovis became a limited company in April 2014, after
Premier Foods
Premier Foods plc is a British food manufacturer headquartered in St Albans, Hertfordshire. The group owns many well-known brands, including Mr Kipling, Ambrosia, Bird's Custard, Angel Delight, Homepride cooking sauces, Lyons, Sharwood's, Loy ...
sold a 51% stake in the business to
The Gores Group to form a joint venture between the two companies.
In November 2020, it was announced that both the Gores Group and Premier Foods had sold their stakes in the business to British-based private equity firm Endless LLP.
Hovis specialises in high
wheatgerm wholemeal flour, the bread being baked independently. It also produces the Nimble brand reduced-calorie bread.
History
The brand began in 1886;
the Hovis process was patented on 6 October 1887 by Richard "Stoney" Smith (1836–1900), and S. Fitton & Sons Ltd developed the brand, milling the flour and selling it along with Hovis-branded baking tins to other bakers. The name was coined in 1890 by
London
London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...
student Herbert Grime in a national competition set by S. Fitton & Sons Ltd to find a trading name for their
patent
A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A p ...
flour which was rich in
wheat germ
Cereal germ or Wheat germ:
The germ of a cereal is the reproductive part that germinates to grow into a plant; it is the embryo of the seed. Along with bran, germ is often a by-product of the milling that produces refined grain products ...
. Grime won £25 when he coined the word from the
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
phrase ''hominis vis'' – "the strength of man".
The company became the Hovis Bread Flour Company Limited in 1898.
When the abundance of certain
B vitamins
B vitamins are a class of water-soluble vitamins that play important roles in cell metabolism and synthesis of red blood cells. Though these vitamins share similar names (B1, B2, B3, etc.), they are chemically distinct compounds that often coexi ...
in wheatgerm was reported in 1924, Hovis increased in popularity.
Advertising
In 1915, when the
London and South Western Railway
The London and South Western Railway (LSWR, sometimes written L&SWR) was a railway company in England from 1838 to 1922. Originating as the London and Southampton Railway, its network extended to Dorchester and Weymouth, to Salisbury, Exeter ...
inaugurated their first
electric train services, they introduced alphabetical
head-codes in lieu of the traditional discs used on
steam locomotives
A steam locomotive is a locomotive that provides the force to move itself and other vehicles by means of the expansion of steam. It is fuelled by burning combustible material (usually coal, oil or, rarely, wood) to heat water in the locomot ...
so that the general public could more easily identify their train. A 1926 advertisement widely deployed on the railways showed five such trains carrying headcodes H ō V I S along with an explanation (H-Hampton Court, ō-Hounslow, V-Kingston
for Thames Valley I-Dorking North & Effingham, and S-Shepperton). The fact that the "clockwise" Hounslow Loop head-code was a slightly height-reduced 'O' topped by a bar led to the rendering of the brand as HōVIS – a rendering that significantly outlasted the advertising campaign.
![Gold Hill, Shaftsbury, Dorset, England](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/42/Gold_Hill%2C_Shaftsbury%2C_Dorset%2C_England.JPG)
In 1973, Hovis ran a television advertisement, ''
Boy on the Bike'',
written by advertising agency
Collett Dickenson Pearce
Collett Dickenson Pearce & Partners (CDP) was a British advertising agency which operated from 1960 till 2000. It was founded by John Pearce and Ronnie Dickenson who bought an existing agency owned by John Collett. The agency played a pivotal ro ...
and filmed by CDP's photographer Jack Bankhead under the direction of
Ridley Scott
Sir Ridley Scott (born 30 November 1937) is a British film director and producer. Directing, among others, science fiction films, his work is known for its atmospheric and highly concentrated visual style. Scott has received many accolades thr ...
, who later directed ''
Alien
Alien primarily refers to:
* Alien (law), a person in a country who is not a national of that country
** Enemy alien, the above in times of war
* Extraterrestrial life, life which does not originate from Earth
** Specifically, intelligent extrater ...
''. The advert featured the slow movement of
Antonín Dvořák
Antonín Leopold Dvořák ( ; ; 8 September 1841 – 1 May 1904) was a Czechs, Czech composer. Dvořák frequently employed rhythms and other aspects of the folk music of Moravian traditional music, Moravia and his native Bohemia, following t ...
's
Symphony No. 9 rearranged for
brass
Brass is an alloy of copper (Cu) and zinc (Zn), in proportions which can be varied to achieve different mechanical, electrical, and chemical properties. It is a substitutional alloy: atoms of the two constituents may replace each other with ...
. Filmed on
Gold Hill Gold Hill may refer to:
Canada
* Gold Hill, British Columbia
United Kingdom
* Gold Hill, Shaftesbury, Dorset, a steep street used in Hovis commercial
United States
;Alabama
* Gold Hill, Alabama
;California
* Gold Hill, El Dorado County, C ...
in
Shaftesbury
Shaftesbury () is a town and civil parish in Dorset, England. It is situated on the A30 road, west of Salisbury, near the border with Wiltshire. It is the only significant hilltop settlement in Dorset, being built about above sea level on a ...
,
Dorset
Dorset ( ; archaically: Dorsetshire , ) is a county in South West England on the English Channel coast. The ceremonial county comprises the unitary authority areas of Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole and Dorset (unitary authority), Dors ...
, Scott's advert has been voted Britain's favourite advertisement of all time.
An original film print was restored by the BFI in 2019 and is available on their Advertising Collection.
This advertisement was repeated on
British television
Regular television broadcasts in the United Kingdom started in 1936 as a public service which was free of advertising, which followed the first demonstration of a transmitted moving image in 1926. Currently, the United Kingdom has a collection ...
for a 10-day run in May 2006 to commemorate the firm's 120th anniversary. The soundtrack had to be re-recorded to meet advertising standards.
[ The boy on the bike, Carl Barlow, then aged 13, left acting and eventually became a firefighter in ]East Ham
East Ham is a district of the London Borough of Newham, England, 8 miles (12.8 km) east of Charing Cross. East Ham is identified in the London Plan as a Major Centre. The population is 76,186.
It was originally part of the Becontree Hun ...
in 1979.
In 2008 Hovis departed from the "boy on a bike" format by commissioning ''Go On Lad
"Go On Lad" is a British television and cinema advertisement launched by Premier Foods in 2008 to promote its Hovis brand of bread. The 122-second piece was commissioned as part of a £15,000,000 brand relaunch designed to reverse Hovis' declinin ...
'', a retrospective advertisement documenting the 122 years of British history since the brand's launch. ''Go On Lad'' was voted "Advert of the Decade" by the British public in December 2009.
Hovis map books
Hovis Ltd. published a series of map books which included advertisements for their products. In 1899 the company produced eight books of maps, covering England and Wales, designed for cyclists. In 1920 the company published ''Where to Go and How to Get There: Hovis Road Map of England, Wales and Scotland'', and several versions of this book were later printed.
Hovis biscuit
Since 1980, Hovis have licensed Jacob's
Jacob's is a brand name for several lines of biscuits and crackers in the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom. The brand name is owned by the Jacob Fruitfield Food Group, part of Valeo Foods, which produces snacks for the Irish market. ...
to produce a digestive biscuit
A digestive biscuit, sometimes described as a sweet-meal biscuit, is a semi-sweet biscuit that originated in Scotland. The digestive was first developed in 1839 by two Scottish doctors to aid digestion. The term ''digestive'' is derived from th ...
, branded as Hovis. Now a United Biscuits
United Biscuits (UB) is a British multinational food manufacturer, makers of McVitie's biscuits, Jacob's Cream Crackers, and Twiglets. The company was listed on the London Stock Exchange and was once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. In ...
product, they are shaped like a miniature flat copy of the traditional Hovis loaf
A loaf ( : loaves) is a (usually) rounded or oblong mass of food, typically and originally of bread. It is common to bake bread in a rectangular bread pan, also called a loaf pan, because some kinds of bread dough tend to collapse and spread ...
, and like the bread have the word "HOVIS" stamped on their top surface.
The Bread Bag Recycling Programme
In a bid to help the environment and sustainability, Hovis collaborated with TerraCycle
TerraCycle is a private U.S.-based recycling business headquartered in Trenton, New Jersey. It primarily runs a volunteer-based recycling platform to collect non-recyclable pre-consumer and post-consumer waste on behalf of corporate donors ...
in The Bread Bag Recycling Programme. The objective of the programme is to drop-off used bread bags at public drop-off locations across the UK, or mail them to delivery services like those provided by UPS
UPS or ups may refer to:
Companies and organizations
* United Parcel Service, an American shipping company
** The UPS Store, UPS subsidiary
** UPS Airlines, UPS subsidiary
* Underground Press Syndicate, later ''Alternative Press Syndicate'' or ...
. These are all listed on an interactive map. After that the bags are recycled in a specialist plant. Those who take part in the programme are able to get TerraCycle points. These can be redeemed for a variety of charitable gifts or a payment to the non-profit organisation.
References
External links
*
Hovis
on Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...
*{{YouTube , user = hovisbakery
Hovis
profile on Twitter
Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...
Products introduced in 1890
Bakeries of the United Kingdom
British brands
Companies based in Buckinghamshire
Food brands of the United Kingdom
Food manufacturers of the United Kingdom
Premier Foods brands
British companies established in 1898