“Pure, natural juice from peanuts”

Migros AG got into the cooking oil business early with Amphora. Gottlieb Duttweiler’s central focus was selling hygienic and pure vitamin-rich oil.
In 1927, by which time Migros AG owns its first shop in addition to the sales vans, it starts selling peanut oil. The oil has the melodious name Amphora, which is, not coincidentally, similar to the well-known oil brand Ambrosia. Gottlieb Duttweiler never ceases to remind his customers that Amphora is a “pure, natural product”. It is not refined and therefore contains “the full, undiminished vitamin content which nature provided it with”. That Migros sells the oil in bottles is not usual at this time. Many cooking oils are supplied in metal canisters; customers have their own containers filled with oil in the shop. Migros explains that this is unhygienic and that open oil is no longer fresh, and therefore advertises: “Bottled oil is like bottled wine, much preferable to the open product.” By 1931, Duttweiler reports that Migros has “displaced the overpriced fantasy-brand oils” and is selling 700,000 litres of oil per annum. To manage this quantity successfully, a modern bottling plant is installed in the new distribution centre at Limmatplatz in Zurich. For those customers for whom Amphora is still too expensive, Migros also introduces an oil called La-Du-Typ. This wordplay by Duttweiler underlines the quality of Amphora, as La-Du-Typ means nothing other than Laden-Durchschnitts-Typ (average shop type) – referring, of course, to the shops of his competitors.