A leather merchant, an American inventor and a railway siding.

Ambrosia began in 1917 at Lifton, a village in west Devon near the Cornish border. English Wikipedia says Alfred Morris founded it to make infant food from dried milk. The fuller story is told by Launceston Then!, a local-history site for the area: Morris was a leather merchant with a First World War contract for army boots, and on a boat to France he met James Hatmaker, an American who had invented a way of drying milk on heated rollers. Morris chose Lifton over a site in Wales for the new business.

The first works, the same history says, was a small building leased from the Great Western Railway beside the sidings at Lifton station, close to the River Lyd, where Hatmaker’s engineer installed the first four drying rollers. On its first day the creamery took in about 50 gallons of milk; fifty years later, the same history says, it was handling more than 40,000 gallons a day. Grace’s Guide, the British industrial-history wiki, says the military bought dried milk in large quantities during the war. Afterwards Morris’s son Oscar joined the business, and its dried milk went to infant welfare centres.

The product that made the name came later. Just before the Second World War Ambrosia began selling creamed rice pudding in a tin, which English Wikipedia and Grace’s Guide both describe as the first of its kind. In wartime the tins went into Red Cross parcels for prisoners of war, Launceston Then! says. When peace came the company restarted with creamed macaroni, returned to rice once restrictions eased and added sago, tapioca and semolina puddings.

From the Bovril group to CPC, Unilever and Premier.

Ambrosia grew within a larger group. A new factory near the original site followed in the late 1950s: Grace’s Guide dates it to 1957, while Launceston Then! says it was announced in 1957 and built by 1959. By the company’s golden jubilee in 1967 Ambrosia was owned by the Bovril group, then chaired by Lord Luke, and was celebrating with a half-million-pound, seven-acre extension at Lifton, the local history says. The same source notes that in 1964 the Bovril group opened a plant in Northern Ireland that traded under the Ambrosia name.

Ownership then followed Bovril’s. Grace’s Guide says the Bovril company, Ambrosia included, was acquired by Cavenham Foods in 1971, and that Ambrosia later passed to the Beecham Group. In April 1990 the American food company CPC International bought Ambrosia, Bovril and Marmite from SmithKline Beecham, according to the International Directory of Company Histories and Grace’s Guide, which cites The Times. CPC later renamed itself Bestfoods, and Ambrosia passed to Unilever with its takeover of Bestfoods in 2000.

Unilever did not keep it long. Premier Foods’ filings show it agreed to buy Ambrosia in November 2003 and completed the deal on 1 December 2003, together with the Brown & Polson brand and the Lifton factory. Premier’s own history lists the purchase under 2003.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all sit in the British store cupboard: Princes, John West, Batchelors, Ambrosia, Bird’s, Paxo and Saxa. British store-cupboard brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from names that still carry a founder’s surname to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A store-cupboard brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the meal or kitchen job it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A centenary, a puppet called Moley and a new custard line.

Ambrosia is still made where it started. The brand says its puddings and custard have been made in Devon for more than 100 years, at the creamery founded in Lifton in 1917, using milk from West Country farms; one example it gives is a family dairy farm on the Lizard, in Cornwall, whose milk goes to the Cornish creamery Rodda’s, which keeps the cream and sends the skimmed milk on to Lifton. When the brand reached its centenary in 2017, the then Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall visited the Lifton factory, the royal household’s website recorded.

Its advertising has long leaned on the place name. The line “Devon knows how they make it so creamy” is a long-running one, and in 2020 it closed the brand’s first television advert in four years, Campaign and Talking Retail reported. Made by the agency McCann London and directed by Johnny & Will through the production company Blinkink, the advert starred Moley, a robotic mole puppet built by John Nolan Studio, set to the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have To Do Is Dream,” and was backed by a £2.5 million campaign.

The range has widened beyond tins and cartons. Premier’s history lists Ambrosia’s first ready-to-eat porridge pots in 2022. In September 2025 Food Manufacture reported a £19 million investment at Lifton in two phases: £9 million for a new custard filling line and high-speed packing, with a switch to recyclable packaging, and £10 million for an extension housing a new custard-making plant. Premier said the work would safeguard more than 320 jobs and cut the site’s energy use by about half.

For a design guide, Ambrosia shows how a single village name and a creamy promise can carry a brand for more than a century. Compare Bovril, its stablemate under the Bovril group and CPC, and Bird’s Custard, the other name on Britain’s custard shelf. For this guide we use a Devon blue, a custard yellow and a rice cream with a soft serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Ambrosia’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.