Halloween is a Time to Remember Dead Brands

I became addicted to Britannia’s Petit-Beurre biscuits back in the early 1990s. I had started working in Mumbai and was living in paying-guest accommodation. These converted servant quarters rarely had kitchen access, so you had to make do with an electric kettle and ready-to-eat foods.

Biscuits were ideal, but which? Marie and Parle-G were sweet and boring, Monaco too salty and cream crackers made a crumbly mess. Petit-Beurre were perfect. They had a delicious buttery taste, neither too salty nor sweet and were firm enough to eat without problems. A packet was breakfast. Then Britannia discontinued them. For weeks I stalked kirana stores for their last packets.

Since then, I have discovered that Petit-Beurre still exists, in different places. As the name indicates, it was originally French, first created in 1886 by the Lefèvre-Utile company in Nantes, in a region known for good butter. Other companies copied it, down to its rectangular shape with tiny ‘ears’ at each corner which, by tradition, French children always bite off first.


The original company, now part of Mondelez, still makes it abroad. Some Indian companies also make it, including Britannia, which now calls it Marie Gold Petit Beurre, the kind of corporate confusion you get when the brand manager is probably already looking for another job. I’ve tried some of these Indian versions, and none are quite what I remember eating.

In the run-up to Halloween, all dead and not quite dead things are in vogue. We should include dead brands and the zombie versions can linger on. Dead brands can elicit an emotional response that more than qualifies them for the festival. I learned this many years back when I did a story for ET on why companies discontinue brands and how small groups of consumers continue to long for them.

As part of the story, I asked friends and colleagues which brands they missed. I was flooded with responses: Double Cola, Appela, Do It and Thrill soft drinks; Cookie Feast and Cream Puff biscuits; Lipton Covo chocolate spread, Polson’s butter, Kwality’s Black Magic frozen desserts. Then the story was printed and so many readers wrote in with memories of dead brands that we printed two more stories just from these responses.

The dead brands weren’t all edible. Several people recalled toothpastes, like Signal, Kolynos and Forhans, though perhaps taste played a role here too. Smokers recalled cheap cigarettes like Blue Bird and Guinea Gold which they probably started smoking with. A Goan friend recalled her aunts insisting she hunt through Mumbai for Libertina bras. Many readers recalled this brand as well, a testament to the brand power that personal comfort brings.

But food brands easily led the list, a sign perhaps of how readily food companies rationalise their portfolios, despite consumer feelings. There have been several examples of food brands being revived due to consumer outcries, which are easily amplified on the Internet. In the US, for example, Hostess Twinkies, small, cream filled cakes were known, rather dubiously, for almost never going bad. Health concerns lead to declining sales and the company producing them went bankrupt in 2012. But outcry at their impending extinction led to the brand being bought and other companies producing them, with just a few months gap. Reliance’s relaunch of Campa is an attempt to build on this appeal.

Companies are sometimes willing to do special production runs for devoted customers, but this can backfire. The eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes was known for eating Baskin-Robbins banana-nut ice-cream every day. When his staff learned that the flavour was being discontinued, they paid Baskin-Robbins to do a special production run. A few weeks later, Hughes suddenly switched to French vanilla, and his staff was left with gallons of banana-nut ice-cream. They were, apparently, eating it for years. A banana-nut themed Halloween costume might seem unusual, but it would be a testament to the curious power of dead brands.