A stock cube in wartime: the origins of Gallina Blanca

The stock cube that built a fortune in the middle of the civil war

It was 1937 in Barcelona. The city was holding out as best it could against the war, and store shelves were running short of almost everything: meat, coal, fats. A young law graduate studying for the notary exams spotted a gap. He was not going to win the war, but he could make a living. Lluís Carulla began producing a stock concentrate modelled on the Swiss Maggi, but adapted to the ingredients available in an autarkic economy. That was the birth of Gallina Blanca.

The recipe for success in times of hardship

Carulla's cube was not a revolutionary invention - Maggi had been around in Europe for decades - but it was a clever adaptation to Spanish conditions. While in Britain the substitutes were yeast-based concentrates like Marmite, in Spain glutamate and animal fat could give flavour to a nearly empty stew. Far from holding Carulla back, autarky handed him a captive market: his was one of the few products that added some taste to the postwar diet.

From shop to empire

What began as a homemade operation in a besieged Barcelona grew until the Carulla family became one of the great names of the Catalan bourgeoisie. The company not only survived Franco's regime but learned to navigate it: it sponsored literary prizes in Catalan - the Sant Jordi prize, since 1947 - without the regime banning them, and knew how to be on the right side of every political transition. A lesson in old-school capitalism: rather than innovating, it was about reading the moment and adapting.

Today, Gallina Blanca is still on the stoves of half of Spain, and its story is a metaphor for how Spanish capitalism was built on ingredients of opportunity, pragmatism and influence. The stock cube is still there: two centimetres of power.