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The Dairy Farm Ice and Cold Storage Company Limited
The supply of ice for the preservation of food is obviously important in the tropics. George Wingrove Cooke, correspondent for The Times, in 1857 provided a vivid picture:
In Hong Kong and Shanghai, a dinner table in the summer season is a melancholy spectacle of spoiled food. The creatures to be eaten were necessarily killed the same day, and the tough tissues are as hard as death stiffened them.”
In the 1850s, large expatriate households often owned at least one cow, and a block of ice bought from George Duddell prevented the milk from going sour. The selling of ice was one of the earliest trades in Hong Kong, and the first consignment of ice was imported by Jardine's in 1843. The Ice House Company was established in 1845. The price fluctuated depending upon the season and the demand and varied, in 1849, from three to six cents a pound. The ice was stored in a specially constructed building at the corner of Ice House Street at the southern side of Queen's Road. Importers often lost money. Although the Tudor Company imported ice from North America in the early days, by the 1870s ice manufacturing apparatus was shipped into Hong Kong, and, in 1874, the Hong Kong Times reported the ice making establishment at East Point was completed. In 1881, the Hong Kong Ice Company was founded with its headquarters at East Point.
Later the Hong Kong Ice Company was taken over by Jardine's, although Butterfield and Swire was the first company to diversify into selling Australian butter, and, later still, frozen foods including poultry, pigs, and the provisioning of ships. B&S was also the first to sign a contract to supply the armed forces. The frozen food business was taken over from Butterfield and Swire, by Dairy Farm, in 1904.
Dairy produce
In those early days milk was obtained from native buffaloes and a few sickly cows. Then, John Kennedy, a veterinary surgeon who died in 1902, imported cows from Britain, and, in 1880, the dairy (established 1856) stood next to the Horse Repository close to where the Peak Tram is now situated in Garden Road. At a time when expatriates