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Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

If you're like most Americans, you probably visit a grocery store once or twice a week.

But you probably don't know that one single grocery item is responsible for the rise of

supermarkets as we knew now. It's baking powder. Baking powder.

Really? Back in the 1800s in New York, the proprietors of the Great Atlantic and Pacific

Tea Company faced a problem. Tea, an industry they had controlled for decades, had become widely

available. Prices fell fell and it appeared Great

Atlantic and Pacific would too. The Hartford family, the owners of the company,

decided to diversify. They added a new product, baking powder. Housewise loved

the stuff. It made bread rise faster. Baking powder became so popular that

unscrupulous producers,

in rushing the product to stores, weren't exactly delivering the real deal.

But folks couldn't tell which products were fake and which were real.

So the Hartford's decided to set themselves apart by making their own high-quality baking powder.

They even hired a chemist. And then they packaged the powder in red

tins, labeling it A&P, leveraging the Atlantic and Pacific company named to denote quality.

Historians would later call baking powder the most important product in the history of retailing.

Most merchants back then were just essentially selling generic products. By selling

branded baking powder, the Hartford's were transitioning from being tea merchants to being

grocers. In selling their powder in a tin, the Hartford's were ahead in another important way,

packaging. Later on, they would seize on a new invention called cardboard. The company could now brand, make, and sell its own condensed milk, butter, spices, just about any staple of the kitchen.

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