Sarah Spale as Emmi Creola, the inventor of Betty Bossi in the film “Hallo Betty”.
Keystone
In the mid-1950s, copywriter Emmi Creola invented the fictional character Betty Bossi and became famous throughout Switzerland. The film “Hallo Betty” shows the development of the brand and how hot the advertising soup is cooked for it.
“I’m not a cook at all. I never wanted to be one,” says the old woman at the beginning of the film. She is known to the public as Betty Bossi, but in reality her name is Emmi Creola-Maag and she was a copywriter for an edible oil company. Her invention almost 70 years ago, the fictional character Betty Bossi, was to have a lasting impact on Swiss kitchens.
The feature film “Hallo Betty” tells the story of how the rather reserved Emmi Creola-Maag, played by Sarah Spale, invented the fictional character Betty Bossi in 1956. Despite resistance from her agency, she publishes the magazine “Betty Bossi Post” with cooking recipes and household tips – laying the foundations for today’s empire.
The film by Pierre Monnard (“Platzspitzbaby”) not only sheds light on the invention of the “cook and housewife of the nation”, as Betty Bossi was called then and is still called today, but also on the private life of its creator Emmi. Her life as a sudden Swiss cooking icon – many readers of the magazine were convinced at the time that Betty Bossi really existed – is exciting, but also exhausting. Emmi battles against the envy and resentment of her male colleagues while at the same time trying to continue being a loving mother and wife. That can only go wrong. Or at least cause problems.
A female Don Draper
Emmi Creola was actually just looking for a way to promote margarine and peanut oil for the renowned advertising agency Jäggi & Partner. This is also one of the film’s strengths: it shows in an amusing and sometimes detailed way how things work at an advertising agency and is also a wonderful reflection of society at the time. After all, advertising was a purely male domain at the time, with women writing copy in the background or staying at home at the stove.
“Hello Betty” is therefore also about the distribution of roles, the change in our eating habits, the compatibility of work and family and self-realization. At least these topics are touched on and dealt with as much as is possible in a movie of less than two hours.
You could also say that “Hello Betty” is a kind of “Mad Men” in Swiss. The US series is set in New York in the 1960s in a fictional advertising agency; the plot revolves around the charismatic Don Draper, employees, relatives and products to be advertised.
Logically, products also play a major role in the Swiss film. Emmi Creola, who opens a cooking laboratory where she tests recipes, needs food (and washing-up liquid: the “Pril” bottle is always ready by the sink in her home).
According to C-Films, the most important thing was that the products were already available in 1956. The film production company realized “Hallo Betty” with Betty Bossi, now a brand of the major distributor Coop. In part, it was simply a case of providing historical props. You can see an old tin of Kambly biscuits or the lettering of the Bell meat company. This is another pleasant aspect of the film: there was no temptation to fill the set with promotional items.
Lots of advertising noise in the run-up
The campaign for the film was somewhat more intrusive. Since May, anyone who has signed up for the “Filmnews” newsletter has been inundated with news in the form of recipe tips, short interviews with actresses and funny letters to the editor from the past (“My husband raves about pizza. Do you know the recipe?”). As is often the case with cooking, less would have been more.
And a movie and a newsletter are not enough for a project like “Hello Betty”. Betty Bossi is going on tour – almost like she used to. From January 2026, “Das Zelt” will feature a “Betty Bossi’s cooking and dinner spectacle” in several cities, including a 4-course menu. And Betty Bossi’s core business, namely sharing recipes, will also be cultivated. Recipes for Success”, the cookbook for the movie, has just been published. It includes Riz Casimir, Tiramisu, which according to the publisher “triggered a mascarpone boom in the 1980s” and a “trendy Buddha Bowl”. So a bit of everything, but warmed up, so to speak. The decision to publish a new Betty Bossi cookbook, the 169th by the way, is understandable. However, it would have benefited from a little imagination à la Emmi Creola.
*This text by Nina Kobelt, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation
