ANNIVERSARY NUMBER 1919 



125 



The 'Philippine Vegetable Oil Company 



PIONEER IN THE PHILIPPINE COCONUT OIL TRADE 



IN the old days before the war changed 

 our notions, it was considered droll that an 

 Eskimo should dine on tallow and blubber. 

 When we heard that certain Icelanders could 

 relish a cake of soap without anything to 

 wash it down we laughed considerably. But 

 all this merriment suddenly 'ceased when it 

 was discovered that the world's stomach was 

 crying for fats, and the vegetable oil boom 

 in Manila took its place as one of the world's 

 greatest commercial romances. 



The humble coconut tree, which at one 

 time was good for nothing but confectionery- 

 store sweets, puffed out its chest and stepped 

 forth as a savior of the human race, and the 

 Philippine Vegetable Oil Company, now one of 

 the greatest industries of the islands, em- 

 barked in an enterprise, the magnitude of 

 which was not dreamed of. 



This industry had been developed in the 

 Philippines for five years previous to the 

 World War, but the oil was used mostly for 

 the manufacture of soap, and the fact that 

 this had only the limited use of getting dirt 

 off the features of a few who wished to be 

 without it did not favor the creation of a 

 plant that would cover 110 acres of 1 nd. 

 The idea that this oil, which was good for 

 the manufacture of soap, should also be good 

 to eat was queer, but the world needed fats 

 and copra consisted of from 0.450 not to 

 exceed 5% fat acid. 



Another, and more direct demand for the 

 oil contained in copra was the need of gly- 

 cerine for the manufacture of munitions. 

 Copra contained from 8 to 14 per cent gly- 

 cerine, and the result was that glycerine 

 prices on the New York market careened 



OFFICE BUILDING 



moonward with the boom of the first big 

 gun in Flanders. 



Now the only market that the Philippine 

 Vegetable Oil Co. could ever find for their 

 product before the war was in Marseilles, 

 France, and here was an American market 

 for the first time. 



So the directors of the Manila copra con- 

 cern went and got an engineer and told him 

 to get up some plans that would provide for 

 a million dollar plant or a two million dollar 

 plant or something like that. It made no 

 particular difference how much it was going 

 to cost, they said, but hurry. New York 

 was howling for glycerine for munitions and 

 the world was likely to starve for fats. And 

 so the architect hurried. 



New machinery was ordered from the 

 States in large quantities and the company 

 placed agents throughout the Philippine 

 Islands with orders to buy everything that 

 looked like a cocoanut. Additional ground 

 was secured at the plant of the company in 



Santa Mesa and preparations were made on 

 a large scale to get vegetable oil to the market 

 with the least possible delay. 



The plant grew like a mushroom. The 

 old method of shipping oil in drums and 

 barrels was discarded, and the company 

 prepared to pump the oil directly into oil 

 barges and from these to tank steamers in 

 the bay. The matter of getting the .oil 

 barges up to the plant on the Pasig river seem- 

 ed troublesome, so the company managed 

 to get hold of machinery to equip a dredge, 

 and this was set to work in the shallow places 

 of the river channel just below the plant. 



One day it suddenly occurred to the en- 

 gineer in charge of the construction of the 

 plant, that something might go wrong with 

 the city power plant some day, and it gave 

 him a cold chill to think of the possibility 

 that the big grinders and cookers and ex- 

 pellers and filters might lie idle for want of 

 electricity. 



RIVERSIDE VIEW OF WAREHOUSES AND FACTORY' 



