History and development of evaporated milk

Evaporated (condensed) milk, like sweetened condensed milk was first developed in the early 19th century and has been available as a canned product for well over a century.

French scientist Nicholas Appert, whose work on food preservation began in 1795, was the first person to evaporate milk by boiling it in an open container and then preserving it by heating the product in a sealed container.

In the 1860s, Borden and Nestle created an evaporated milk preserved in sugar. Patent dealing with preserving of milk after evaporation in a vacuum were granted to Gail Borden by the United States and England in 1856. These patents applied to concentrating milk without addition of sugar.

Milk in the 1850s was considered a child’s drink, highly perishable and likely to carry germs, Evaporating the water and condensing the milk, with addition of sugar yielded a safe, germ free environment resulting in sweet and condensed milk. Borden later added evaporated milk (sugar free) to his production. This new and transportable product became a staple for Civil War soldiers.

In 1884, US patent number 308,421 was issued for ‘an apparatus for preserving milk’ and in 1885, the first commercial evaporated milk plant in the world was opened in a converted wool factory in Highland, IL, where ’evaporated cream’ was manufactured and sold.

By the 1880s, a new technology allowed unsweetened evaporated milk to be produced from a fine curd and to be preserved without sugar.

Borden introduced a formula similar to Mead Johnson’s Dextri-Maltose in the 1920s. In 1927, William M. Marriot, a physician, first recommended the use of evaporated milk in the production in infant formula.
History and development of evaporated milk