Food and Drink
The Story of Polson Butter
A few entrepreneurs, then the government as well, set up dairy operations in the area that made and sent butter to Bombay, but the real growth was to come from a dynamic young Parsi named Pestonji Edulji Dalal who in 1888, aged just 13, started a small shop to roast and grind coffee. According to Ruth Heredia’s The Amul India Story, Dalal’s nickname was Polly, which he adapted into the British sounding Polson’s for this brand name.
Polson’s coffee soon got regular customers among the British and by 1910 Pestonji was well established and looking for new opportunities. So when a customer in the Supply Corps told him of the problems the army still had getting butter, he decided to jump in. Pestonji set up a dairy in Kaira and used his army and railways contacts to ensure that Polson’s was so widely supplied that it became synonymous with butter.
By 1930 Polson’s had opened the most advanced dairy plant in India and dominated the butter business. But as Heredia’s book points out, it was this dominance that caused Polson’s downfall, since it provoked a Gandhian called Tribhuvandas Patel to organise the co-operative that would ultimately become Amul.
Read entire story here
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Polson was one of the tastiest butters from 1963, the time I started eating Bread, Butter and Jam. Polson was always fresh, delectable and came in very small butter-paper packs. This is now attempted by “Amul”, in fact packaging wise. However as far as taste is concerned, breakfast time would have be conspicuous by its absence. Polson butter thereafter became a Generic word indicating butter and people used it even as colloquial meaning buttering a person. I have seen it vanished from the Parsi Irani shops since 1972 or may be phased out later after Amul butter, a product of Anand Dairy entered the competition in a big way.Polson was always the king of Butter.