"My mother would buy paIe white margarine in a soft plastic pouch, with an orange dot in the middle"
Food Reference website
In 1867 the French President, Napoleon III, offered a prize to the inventor of a butter substitute that would keep well, for use by the army, and be a cheap alternative for the poor.
French chemist, Hippolyte Mege-Mouries won the prize with a substance he called oleomargarine, which he had developed from margaric acid, a mixture of palmitic and stearic acids. He established the first margarine factory in France and later expanded the business to the United States. But the business foundered and he died in obscurity in 1880.
Mege-Mouries had, however, sold his product to the Dutch businessman Anton Jurgens who built a margarine business that merged with the Lever Brothers' business to form Unilever in 1929. Demand for margarine in Europe grew as World War II resulted in butter rationing.
The American margarine market also took off and by 1877 the dairy industry in the United States found itself engaged in a bitter struggle to protect its market position, Bythemid-1880s the U.S. federal government had introduced an expensive license scheme for the manufacture and sale of margarine. A ban on the addition of yellow colorings to the naturally white margarine proved to be the most effective means of slowing the growth in sales and remained in force in some places for over a hundred years.
