Two advertising copywriters mixed Jameson, cream, sugar and chocolate powder in 1973; the liqueur reached stores in 1974
Baileys, the world's best-selling cream liqueur according to VinePair, was born from a business problem. In the early 1970s, Gilbeys of Ireland, the Irish arm of International Distillers & Vintners (IDV), a company that later became part of Diageo, wanted a new product to export and take advantage of a tax exemption offered by the Irish government, VinePair reports. IDV owned a small Irish whiskey brand, and a company in the same group ran a dairy plant in Cork that had surplus cream.
Tom Jago, who ran product development at IDV in London, hired two consultants with no drinks experience: advertising copywriters David Gluckman and Hugh Seymour-Davies. The first prototype took about 45 minutes. They bought Jameson whiskey, cream and Cadbury's drinking chocolate powder at a grocery store, mixed it all with sugar and poured it into an empty Schweppes tonic bottle, according to Gluckman's account as gathered by VinePair. The pair were paid about £3,000 for the work.
The name had to sound Anglo-Irish. Gluckman and Seymour-Davies borrowed it from Baileys Bistro, a restaurant next to their office in Soho, London. The bottle was the same one used for Redbreast Irish whiskey, which IDV distributed, and the label with grazing cows was designed by Bob Wagner, chosen from 20 proposals. IDV chemists, at a research facility on the outskirts of London, turned the homemade recipe into a version that could be produced at scale.
The idea was presented to the Gilbeys team in Dublin in November 1973, and Baileys reached the market in 1974. By 1984, it was already selling almost 50 million bottles a year. It hit 1 billion bottles in December 2007, and 2 billion about 12 years later, according to a 2021 VinePair report. At the time, production used more than 200 million liters of fresh Irish milk a year, and 40% of sales took place during the year-end holiday season.
Who created the liqueur is still disputed. At least five people have claimed or been given credit for it: Gluckman, Jago, chemist Mac Macpherson, his assistant Steve Wilson, and their boss, David Dand.
Sources: VinePair (December 23, 2021), VinePair (September 27, 2019).
