Liebig himself never ran a meat business; he was a laboratory chemist who had described the process. The man who turned theory into industry was Georg Christian Giebert, an engineer who recognized that Fray Bentos sat amid an ocean of cheap cattle. The Liebig Extract of Meat Company was incorporated in London on 4 December 1865 with a capital of one hundred and fifty thousand pounds, and the factory rose on the riverbank. By 1875 it was producing five hundred tonnes of extract a year. The product carried an aura of science and health. A German physiologist had even shown that dogs fed nothing but the extract would die, proof it was a supplement rather than a true food, though that did little to dent its reputation as a tonic for the weak and the weary.

In 1873 the company began canning corned beef under the brand Fray Bentos, and the timing was perfect. Tinned meat was recommended to soldiers as far back as the American Civil War for keeping without refrigeration, and it traveled where fresh food could not. The Welsh explorer Henry Morton Stanley carried Liebig's extract into Africa. Working with the English chemist Henry Enfield Roscoe, the company later developed a cheaper extract and registered it under a name that would outlast everything else: Oxo, sold as a liquid and, from 1911, as the familiar bouillon cube. So much food flowed out of this one Uruguayan town that the world began calling Fray Bentos 'the kitchen of the world.'

The works at Fray Bentos grew into one of the largest industrial complexes in South America and effectively brought the industrial revolution to Uruguay. The town swelled alongside it, drawing thousands of European immigrants; at its height the plant employed around five thousand people, and it was said that an animal was processed every five minutes, with every part of the carcass put to use. The workers built their own institutions, including a football club founded in 1905 that still plays. These were people who had crossed an ocean for steady work, and they made a community on the riverbank far from the boardrooms in London. The labor was hard and the hours long, but for the families who settled here, the factory was the center of their world.

Industrial empires can unravel through small failures. In 1964, an outbreak of typhoid fever in Aberdeen, Scotland, sickened hundreds and was traced back to a tin of Fray Bentos corned beef. Investigators found that the water used to cool the cans at the plant had not been reliably chlorinated. The scandal damaged sales just as Britain's move toward the Common Market was reshaping trade. In 1971 the complex was handed to the Uruguayan government, and it never recovered; production ceased entirely in 1979, a heavy blow to the people of Fray Bentos. The brand itself spun off into the machinery of global business, passing through Vestey, Brooke Bond, Unilever, and Campbell, while Oxo went its own way and a laboratory offshoot, Oxoid, became part of a scientific giant.

Liebig understood marketing as well as chemistry. From 1872 the company tucked colorful trading cards into its products, beautifully printed scenes of history, geography, and science that people collected in albums; many remain prized by collectors today. It commissioned cookbooks in several languages to teach households how to use the extract. In London, the company built a factory on the Thames whose surviving riverside frontage, the Oxo Tower, still stands as a landmark. And in Fray Bentos, the original works became the Museum of the Industrial Revolution, its machinery preserved in place, the heart of a district UNESCO recognized in 2015. A chemist's idea about wasted beef had, in the end, left its mark on three continents.