Rank Hovis McDougall
former United Kingdom food business
RHM plc, formerly Rank Hovis McDougall, was a United Kingdom food business. The company owned numerous brands, particularly for flour, where its core business started, and for consumer food products. It was listed on the London Stock Exchange and was once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index but was acquired by Premier Foods in March 2007; many of its brands continue to be produced.
History
Early years
The company was founded by Joseph Rank in 1875 as flour milling business when he rented a small windmill. He initially lost money and therefore took a co-tenancy at West's Holderness Corn Mill. In 1885 he built a mechanically driven flour mill in Hull in order to beat competition from abroad. He used steel rollers instead of mill stones thereby producing six sacks of flour an hour instead of one and a half. In 1888 he built another steel-roller plant in Lincolnshire, and soon after, built a more modern plant, producing 20 sacks of flour an hour.
As he strove for greater productivity he installed equipment that produced 30 sacks of flour an hour, and then 40 sacks an hour. He also set up agencies to distribute his flour in parts of England where it previously had not been sold.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rank Hovis McDougall” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.