RYVITA, the world-renowned crispbread baked in Poole, has remained relatively unchanged for 86 years – but its product marketing and endorsement has really moved with the times.

The rye snack all began with an enterprising Englishman, Campbell-Garrett who founded the Ryvita company on 4 April 1925 after seeing crispbread abroad.

Soon afterwards, the Honourable Mrs Victor Bruce claimed it was Ryvita that kept her going throughout her record breaking round-the-world flight.

After one of the original mills in Birmingham was bombed during the Second World War, it set up its current bakery and mill on Old Wareham Road in Poole. The location was chosen because of Poole’s thriving port.

During the war Chocolate Ryvita was manufactured so that people could eat chocolate without using up precious ration coupons.

Due to wartime paper rationing there was little advertising until the 1950s. It was in this decade that Ryvita’s ads became truly iconic, starting with Dior’s ‘New Look’ which virtually turned Ryvita into a fashion accessory.

This was also the era of royal approval. At the beginning of the decade Ryvita was appointed crispbread manufacturers to King George VI – the Queen’s father. They would, 35 years later, be appointed manufacturer of crispbread to the Queen.

The credits kept coming. In 1961 Ryvita was photographed on the summit of Mount Everest as a thank you for providing the ‘daily bread’ for the intrepid explorers.

From then on, celebrities such as Julie Andrews, Jan Harvey and the Royal Ballet’s Svetlana Beriosova all starred in Ryvita ads featuring clothes supplied by Fortnum and Mason.

In more recent times Ulrika Johnson, Ruby Wax and Fern Britton have all put their faces to the product.

At this time, it was largely thought of as an aid to slimming. In the 1970s the inch war campaigns depicted women as striving for the perfect body, but were later criticised as showing women as ‘slaves to their waistlines and the desires of men’.

This was sharply contrasted in the mid-1990s with a controversial ad campaign showing a woman covered in strawberries and cream sandwiched between two slices of Ryvita with the slogan: “Forget the F-Plan. Go for the F-it Plan”.

Ryvita said that women were wising up and knowing they didn’t have to look like supermodels. The advert also declared: “The war’s over. Enjoy the liberation”.

A year later they unveiled a daring £1.5 million ad campaign with an even more “liberated message for the 1990s”.

In one television advertisement, a woman was seen performing a sizzling striptease in a busy airport lounge “for no other reason than she feels like it”. In another, a more mature woman succumbed to the temptation to plant a kiss on the lips of a young man sitting next to her on a bus.

Ryvita marketing manager Chris Sebire said at the time: “This new ad is a little bit of social history and charts how far women have come. This will certainly strike a chord with the ’90s woman.”

The communications team were obviously doing something right.

In 1999 the company won a NatWest award in the DTI’s National Languages for Export Campaign. Its exports accounted for 40 per cent of its total output – more than any other food manufacturer in the UK.

Today, Ryvita goes from strength to strength, with 19 products under its belt, available in dozens of different countries as far afield as Ghana, Barbados, Iceland and Kuwait.

In early 2009 Ryvita merged with Jordans breakfast cereal business under Associated British Foods.

The head office moved to Bedfordshire but the crispbrad-producing factory, employing 160, remains at Old Wareham Road in Poole.