Two men at Cerebos and a made-up word.

Bisto came out of a salt company. Cerebos was a table salt developed by George Weddell, a Scottish chemist at the Newcastle firm Mawson & Swan, and Cerebos Ltd was registered as a company in 1894, English Wikipedia says, citing a 2015 history of the firm on the website Let’s Look Again. Its selling point was salt that ran freely instead of caking, and its slogan was “See How It Runs.”

The gravy followed in 1908. Premier Foods, which owns Bisto today, lists 1908 in its company history as the year Bisto gravy was invented. English Wikipedia names the inventors as “Messrs McRoberts and Patterson”; the food reference site CooksInfo calls them Roberts and Patterson, co-workers at the Cerebos salt works, and identifies the first as Jim McRobert, the company’s managing director. The first Bisto was a meat-flavoured gravy powder, stirred into a cook’s own gravy to thicken it and give it a richer colour, taste and aroma, and it soon became a bestseller, English Wikipedia says.

The name is usually read as an acronym for “Browns, Seasons, Thickens In One.” CooksInfo says that reading came later: when the product first went on sale in 1910, Bisto was simply a made-up word.

Over the following century the powder gained siblings. Bisto gravy granules, which dissolve in boiling water without the need for meat juices, arrived in 1979, according to CooksInfo and English Wikipedia. In 1991 came Bisto Best, a richer granule sold in a glass jar. English Wikipedia, citing ACNielsen figures, says Bisto gravy granules held more than 70% of the British market in 2005. The original powder is still sold alongside them, with flavoured granules, gravy pots and cooking-sauce mixes, and Bisto-branded frozen ready meals are made under licence by other companies.

A boy, a girl and the smell of gravy.

Bisto’s most famous asset is a drawing. In 1919 the Bisto Kids appeared in newspaper advertising, English Wikipedia says. They were created by the illustrator Will Owen (1869–1957). It describes them as a boy and a girl in ragged clothes, catching the smell of Bisto on the breeze and sighing “Ah! Bisto.” Owen was an English book illustrator, cartoonist and poster artist, trained at the Lambeth School of Art, who illustrated W. W. Jacobs’s stories for The Strand Magazine; English Wikipedia says he is perhaps best known for his images of the Bisto Kids and for advertising work for Bovril, Lux and Lifebuoy.

The Kids stayed in the brand’s advertising for most of the 20th century. Then, in 1996, they were dropped: the Independent reported that the Bisto Kids would no longer appear in the brand’s advertising, and English Wikipedia says they have not featured in it since. The phrase they introduced lasted longer than they did, and “Aah, Bisto” is still the brand’s tagline.

Television and sponsorship kept the name visible. In Ireland, Children’s Books Ireland says, its annual children’s book prizes, first presented in 1990, were known as the Bisto Book of the Year Awards until 2011; they now carry another sponsor’s name. In January 2025 Bisto announced a brand partnership with Aardman Animations’ Wallace & Gromit, putting the characters on Bisto packs, the trade site Talking Retail reported, and in February 2025 the Ham & High reported on “The Gravy Boat,” a gravy-themed pop-up restaurant at Paddington Basin in London tied to the partnership.

The Kids also survive in brick. In August 2009 the Crewe Chronicle reported that a brick sculpture of the Bisto Kids, weighing more than a tonne, had been rescued from the former Bisto factory in Middlewich, Cheshire, and installed at the town’s library, where the town centre manager described the factory as a very important part of the town’s history.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make sauces, pickle, gravy or savoury spreads, and all of them come from Britain or Australia: HP Sauce, Lea & Perrins, Branston, Bisto, Marmite, Bovril and Vegemite. British and Australian pantry 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 sauce or spread brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single recipe than by a bottle, a jar, a name and the meal 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 jars and bottles are actually filled.

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.

Cerebos, RHM, Premier Foods and a move to Worksop.

Bisto has had three owners. It stayed with Cerebos until 1968, when the flour and bread group Rank Hovis McDougall bought the Cerebos food group, bringing with it, English Wikipedia says, a number of popular food brands and interests overseas. In March 2007 RHM was in turn bought by Premier Foods for about £1.2 billion, English Wikipedia says, citing The Times and the International Herald Tribune. Premier, based in St Albans, Hertfordshire, and listed on the London Stock Exchange, lists 2007 as the year Bisto, Mr Kipling, Sharwood’s and Paxo joined the group.

Where Bisto is made changed soon after. In July 2007 Premier announced that it would close several former RHM sites, including the one at Middlewich in Cheshire, which made Bisto and Saxa salt, English Wikipedia says. In June 2008 the Crewe Chronicle reported that the closure would cost more than 280 jobs and that production of Bisto gravy granules and Saxa salt would end there in September 2008, moving to Premier’s factory in Worksop, Nottinghamshire; Middlewich staff built up stockpiles and trained Worksop workers to keep supplies flowing. Premier said the closure followed a review of 11 sites, of which it would close six and invest significantly in the other five.

Worksop remains Bisto’s home. The trade magazine Food Manufacture reported in January 2022 that Premier makes about 50 million Bisto drums a year there, and that it had cut 8mm from the height of the paperboard drum, made by Sonoco, saving 40 tonnes of packaging a year; the drum is 95% paperboard. In November 2025 Food Manufacture reported a £36 million investment in the Worksop site, phased to 2029 and mainly for cooking sauces, describing the factory, which employs about 500 people, as home to Bisto, Oxo, Saxa, Batchelors and others. Premier lists Bisto for Sausages gravy granules among its 2024 launches.

For a design guide, Bisto shows how one drawing and one sigh, “Ah! Bisto,” can outlast the advertising that created them. Compare Bovril, another British savoury brand Will Owen drew for, and Marmite, a fellow British kitchen staple. For this guide we use gravy brown, a packet red and a roast gold with a warm serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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