On this day in vegan history · March 9, 1940
Vitasoy Starts Its First Delivery Round
A Hong Kong businessman built a soy milk company on a fact dairy sellers were ignoring: most of his customers couldn't actually digest cow's milk.
The facts
- Date
- 9 March 1940, Hong Kong
- Founder
- Lo Kwee-seong (1910-1995)
- Original method
- soy milk delivered by bicycle to homes before retail sales began
- Later milestones
- new factory by 1950; sterilization technology in 1953; Tetra Pak packaging in 1975
On 9 March 1940, Lo Kwee-seong founded Vitasoy in Hong Kong, sending soy milk out by bicycle to people's doorsteps. He picked soy milk because so many Chinese customers were lactose intolerant, a plain physiological reality that most milk sellers of the era simply worked around instead of addressing. The doorstep runs eventually gave way to retail shelves, and the company kept building: a new factory by 1950, a sterilization process in 1953 that let bottles sit without refrigeration, and Tetra Pak cartons in 1975. What began as one man's delivery route is now sold across Asia, North America, and beyond, still resting on the same insight that started it.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
-
The soy milk was first delivered to people's homes on bicycle, but then began selling through retail outlets.
Vitasoy article, Wikipedia
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
Vitasoy showed that a dairy-free product could scale for reasons that had nothing to do with animal welfare and everything to do with who could actually drink what was on the shelf. It's one of the oldest continuously operating plant-milk companies in the world.
Sources
This history is still being written.
Every morning the brief covers what moved veganism forward, and every day one more verified piece of that story joins this almanac. Free, and tomorrow’s lands in your inbox.
Free, every morning. No guilt. No preaching.