Vegemite is probably the most jealously guarded brand name in Australia, so it will come as a surprise to many to learn this is not the first time the name has been given the flick by its owners.

The brouhaha over iSnack 2.0, the new cheese variant, is a reminder of a time nearly 90 years ago when the name Vegemite apparently smacked a little too much of veggies for the red-blooded Aussie male - "a salad's not food … it's what food eats".

To get dad to eat the black gooey "vegetable extract" would require a clever marketing stratagem, something that had already reached a remarkable degree of sophistication at the beginning of the 20th century.

An example: during World War I when the prime minister Billy Hughes told local manufacturers to ignore the international patents of the German company Bayer on the drug Aspirin, a marketing guru came up with a brilliant sales line for the new Aussie product: "20 Aspros a day keep a man's pain away".

The Vegemite story really begins in the early 1920s when an enterprising Melbourne merchant named Fred Walker got himself a contract with Carlton United Breweries to provide them with yeast. Just a week after the contract was formalised he appointed a chemist named C.P. Callister to develop a yeast extract as a byproduct.