Credited to Uruguay. The extract recipe was devised in Germany by chemist Justus von Liebig; Uruguay is where it was first produced industrially, and sources give founding dates between 1859 and 1865.
How it began
The German chemist Justus von Liebig worked out a formula for a concentrated beef extract by 1847, hoping it could feed Europe's poor cheaply. It took roughly 30 pounds of meat to make one pound of extract, and cattle in Germany were too expensive. Liebig published the formula and offered to go into business with anyone who could make it pay.
In 1862 George Christian Giebert, an engineer working in South America, proposed making it where cattle were cheap. The story goes that he had seen hides taken for leather and the carcasses left to rot. He set up a small factory at Fray Bentos, a port on the Uruguay River, on a site where a meat-salting plant had been founded in 1859. The first batches reached Europe in early 1865, and that year Liebig's Extract of Meat Company was formed in London with Liebig as scientific director.
Before it existed
Before the extract, the beef of the River Plate grasslands had little export value. Cattle were raised largely for hides, and the meat that was kept was salted. Fresh meat could not survive the voyage to Europe, where beef was costly. In the years before the factory opened, pharmacists made Liebig's extract in small batches and sold it as a tonic.
How it works
At Fray Bentos the beef was pulped with iron rollers and soaked in hot water. The fat was skimmed off the liquid, and heat and pressure reduced what remained to a thick, dark paste like molasses that kept without refrigeration. The site handled the whole chain, from pasture and cattle handling to processing, packing and loading at its own river port.
Who pushed back
As sales grew, chemists who tested the extract found it held very little fat or protein, and critics accused the company of misleading buyers with the claim that 34 pounds of meat went into each pound. In 1868 the German physiologist Edward Kemmerich reported that dogs fed only on the extract had died, and called it poisonous. The company responded by dropping its medical claims and selling the extract as a flavoring and a quick base for soups and stews.
What changed first
The first jars were promoted through doctors and apothecaries, and by the late 1860s one London hospital reported using 12,000 pots a year. By the early 1870s the extract was a staple of middle-class kitchens across Europe, and the company added canned corned beef, sold from 1873 under the Fray Bentos name. By the end of that decade the firm was producing 500 tons of extract a year.
What lasted
UNESCO describes Fray Bentos as a place where German research and technology combined with English enterprise to supply a global market, including the armies of two world wars. Workers came from more than 55 nations. From 1924 the Anglo plant on the same site exported frozen meat. The company's collectible trading cards, issued from 1872, ran to more than 11,000 designs and were among the notable advertising campaigns of the period.
Where it stands today
The Fray Bentos Industrial Landscape was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2015. Its buildings form part of a Museum of the Industrial Revolution, and the workers' housing is still lived in, often by families with ties to the plant. The site keeps an archive of technical documents from its working years.
