Caesar salad
Caesar salad was invented by restaurateur Caesar Cardini in Tijuana, Mexico in 1924. It was the Fourth of July and business had been so brisk that the restaurant was running out of food.
Unwilling to turn away hungry customers, Cardini had a rummage in his kitchen and put together a salad from his few remaining supplies: romaine lettuce, garlic, croutons, Parmesan, hardboiled eggs, olive oil and Worcestershire sauce.
With a natural showman's instinct, he prepared the salad at the table so the guests could watch the humble ingredients transform into something rather special.
Proud of the dish he had created in less than ideal circumstances, Cardini decided to give it his first name, Caesar.
Vaseline
It was recently estimated that a jar of Vaseline is sold every thirty-nine seconds somewhere in the world - pretty good going for a product whose origins lie in a sticky substance found on the drill rods of a Pennsylvania oil rig.
The rise from gloopy petroleum by-product to global bathroom cabinet staple came about thanks to the observational powers of Robert Chesebrough, a young, British-born chemist making a way for himself in nineteenth century America.
Whilst visiting a Pennsylvania oil town on a fact-finding mission, 22-year-old Chesebrough noticed the rig workers' habit of slathering the matter they called rod wax onto burns and other injuries to speed up the healing process.
In 1865 he was able to patent a process for making a clear, pure product which he dubbed petroleum jelly.
Travelling by horse and cart, he demonstrated the product to communities throughout New York State, and in 1872 Chesebrough registered his petroleum jelly as Vaseline, a name arrived at by combining wasser – the German word for water – with élaion, the Greek word for oil.
His hard work paid off and in 1874, 1,400 jars of Vaseline were being sold daily across the USA.
Commander Robert Peary used the product to protect his skin when he made his attempt on the North Pole in 1909.
Robert Chesebrough was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1883; he died in 1933 at the age of 96.
Quality Street
Sweetening Christmas since 1936, Quality Street is the world's number one selling boxed chocolate assortment.
Around 6,000 individual sweets are produced every minute - or 67 million per week.
Yet without the efforts of a hardworking couple from Halifax in the 1890s, Yuletides would be bereft of green noisette triangles, golden toffee pennies, and 'the purple one'.
In 1890, shopkeepers John and Violet Mackintosh hit upon a way to combine traditional English toffee with soft, gloopy American caramel.
After a few years their recipe had become so popular that they closed their shop and opened a toffee factory.
By the 1930s, John Mackintosh & Sons Ltd was a thriving confectionery business with more than 1,000 employees in Halifax, and a second factory in Norwich. Yet the difficult economic conditions of the era meant that ordinary people had less disposable income for luxuries like boxes of chocolates.
Realising this, in 1936 Mackintosh decided to create a range of toffees and sweets which would be coated in chocolate, making them more affordable than confectionery with a higher chocolate content.
When John died his son, Harold inherited the business, named Mackintosh's, and in 1936 he invented Quality Street, a name inspired by the J. M. Barrie play 'Quality Sweet'.
The businessman was revolutionary, wrapping sweets individually in coloured paper and in a decorative tin for the first time. He also introduced new technology in the world's first twist-wrapping machine.
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