Cannings Foods Limited was a

Trinidad and Tobago Trinidad and Tobago (, ), officially the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, is the southernmost island country in the Caribbean. Consisting of the main islands Trinidad and Tobago, and numerous much smaller islands, it is situated south of ...

company founded in 1912 by Ernest Canning, a British-born businessman. The enterprise began as a grocery store. Then it introduced dairy products (including ice cream), baked goods, poultry processing, and soft drinks. Cannings acquired the

Coca-Cola Coca-Cola, or Coke, is a carbonated soft drink manufactured by the Coca-Cola Company. Originally marketed as a temperance drink and intended as a patent medicine, it was invented in the late 19th century by John Stith Pemberton in Atlant ...

franchise for Trinidad in 1939. The supermarket HiLo, started in 1950, was the first self-service store in Trinidad and Tobago. Cannings was taken over by Neal and Massy in 1975.Daniel Miller, "Coca-Cola: A black sweet drink from Trinidad", in Daniel Miller, ed., ''Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter'' (

Routledge Routledge () is a British multinational publisher. It was founded in 1836 by George Routledge, and specialises in providing academic books, journals and online resources in the fields of the humanities, behavioural science, education, law ...

, 2002), , pp. 173–175
Excerpts available
at

Google Books Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical ...

. In the 1990s, the Cannings Group ceased to operate – with the exception of the HiLo supermarket. The Cannings soft drink brand was sold to

, and continues to be produced. Cannings, and its relationship with Coca-Cola, are treated in fictionalized (and renamed) fashion in

V. S. Naipaul Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (; 17 August 1932 – 11 August 2018) was a Trinidadian-born British writer of works of fiction and nonfiction in English. He is known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad, his bleaker novels of alienati ...

's 1967 novel ''

The Mimic Men ''The Mimic Men'' is a novel by V. S. Naipaul, first published by Andre Deutsch in the UK in 1967. Introduction Not long after finishing '' A Flag on the Island'', Naipaul began work on the novel ''The Mimic Men'', though for almost a year he d ...

''.

References

Food and drink companies of Trinidad and Tobago Coca-Cola brands {{Trinidad-company-stub