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The CHIKO Roll is an Australian icon, right up there with Four`N`Twenty pies, kangaroos and Holdens. Since its first appearance at the Wagga Wagga Show in 1951, the CHIKO Roll has become an Aussie favourite, providing a quick and tasty snack for three generations of Australians.
Fifty years ago, CHIKO was invented by Francis Gerald McEncroe, a Boilermaker from Bendigo. From the 1930s to 1950s, Francis and his brothers had been running a large silver service catering venture, travelling around country shows with their team of 30 hometown staff. For many of these shows, Francis and his team would start cooking for up to a week before hand. Francis was renowned for his ingenuity, and was always on the look out for new and distinctive ideas to stay abreast of his competitors.
One day Frank decided that there was a need for a hot snack that could be eaten with one hand at a race meeting, country shows and football matches. Watching a man selling chicken rolls outside football ground set his mind thinking.
The CHIKO Roll was originally inspired by Chinese Spring Rolls, but Frank was concerned that the crispy wrapping wouldn`t stand up to long trips. So he set to work and, before long, he had found a solution. He made his first rolls on a small hand-fed sausage machine that he got from a butcher friend. Using this self-modified device, he concocted a mixture of boned mutton, celery, cabbage, barley, rice, carrot and spices, and wrapped the combination in a thick slab of egg-and-flour dough, he then fried the resulting cylinder, and hand-painted the ends. Frank`s answer to the chicken roll did not contain any chicken but the appeal was enormous. It left one hand free for a beer - a significant consideration for most football spectators. First he called it the Chicken Roll, and then the CHIKO.
It was hugely successful in its own right, but it would most likely have remained a regional Victorian curiosity if not for a fortuitous meeting with some other visionaries, and the money his wife, Annie, saved during the war. McEncroe moved to Moreland Road in Coburg, Victoria, to set up a small factory. He was so dedicated to CHIKO that both he and Annie slept on the factory floor.
By chance, the factory happened to be located near the Floyd Family Iceworks. The Floyds encouraged McEncroe to freeze his products for distribution and together they formed Frozen Food Industries to market CHIKO and other fast foods. Thanks to the extensive groundwork of a man by the name of Mr. McMahon who knocked on doors all over the country, by 1956 every milk bar and fish and chip shop in the land could pull a CHIKO out of the fridge and pop it into a fryer, squirt it with sauce and slide it into its own little bag. The CHIKO roll had become embedded in the hearts of the Australian fast food industry and, from selling 65 million rolls a year in Australia, it wasn`t long until CHIKOs were being exported to Japan.
Today CHIKOs are produced in Bathurst, NSW, and are made on a unique machine that creates the pastry and the filling at exactly the same time. The product starts as a continuous CHIKO Roll which, after cooking, is sliced down to size. The famous pastry ends are added before the CHIKO Rolls are par-fried for a second time. Every CHIKO is still despatched with the famous CHIKO serving bag that has only changed slightly over the years, but has always maintained its original appearance.
Bobby soxers, bikies, surfies and rollerbladers have all loved to `Grab a CHIKO` throughout the decades. Embedded in contemporary Australian culture as an iconic brand, the CHIKO Roll is best known by the infamous `Girl on Motorbike` posters which began as far back as the 1950s (motorbikes were one of Francis McEncroe`s passions) and continue to date. Some of the original posters now fetch up to $1,000 per poster by collectors.
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