Norwegian Canning Museum — When Sardines Industrialized the City
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
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Transcript
Stavanger’s canning industry emerged when herring declined and entrepreneurs turned to brisling, a small fish marketed internationally as sardines. Stavanger Museum notes that the city’s first canning factory began in 1873 and that by around 1920 Stavanger contained dozens of sardine factories. Mechanized tin production multiplied output dramatically. The industry also transformed labor. Women formed a major part of the workforce, and children worked during busy seasons. This was not quaint craft food production; it was an export industry built on repetitive factory labor, packaging technology and global branding. The museum occupies exactly the right kind of building to tell that story: an industrial space where smell, heat and machinery once organized the working day.