Baking soda wasn’t discovered in a single moment. Its story stretches from ancient Egyptian mineral deposits to 19th-century chemical factories, with each era bringing humanity closer to the pure white powder sitting in your kitchen cabinet today. The substance we call baking soda, sodium bicarbonate, is a close chemical relative of naturally occurring minerals that people have been collecting and using for thousands of years.
Natron: The Ancient Ancestor
Long before anyone understood chemistry, ancient Egyptians harvested a mineral called natron from dried lake beds. Natron is a natural compound of sodium salts, including sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate, the two chemicals most central to baking soda’s story. Egyptians used natron for an impressive range of purposes: dehydrating mummies, cleaning, cooking, making glass, treating ailments, and even in agriculture. They didn’t isolate sodium bicarbonate on its own, but they were working with a raw mineral that contained it.
For centuries, natron and similar natural soda deposits remained the only source of these sodium compounds. People across the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East traded it widely, but supply depended entirely on geography. If you didn’t live near a natural deposit, you were out of luck.
The Race to Make Soda Ash
By the late 1700s, Europe’s growing industries desperately needed sodium carbonate (soda ash) to produce soap, glass, bleached fabric, and paper. Natural deposits couldn’t keep up with demand, and in 1783 the French Royal Academy of Sciences offered a large prize for the cheapest method of making soda ash from common table salt.
A French chemist named Nicolas Leblanc proposed the only practical solution. His method reacted salt with sulfuric acid, then added limestone and charcoal to produce soda ash. In 1791, he opened the world’s first soda ash factory. But the French Revolution intervened: his plant was seized in 1794, his patent suspended, and he didn’t regain the decrepit factory until 1801. Leblanc never saw fame or fortune from his invention and took his own life in 1806. After 1807, ironically, his process became an industrial cornerstone across Europe.
The Leblanc process produced sodium carbonate, not sodium bicarbonate directly. But it was the critical first step. Once chemists could manufacture soda ash at scale, they could convert it into sodium bicarbonate through further chemical reactions.
Sodium Bicarbonate Gets Its Own Process
The chemical reaction for converting salt, ammonia, and carbon dioxide into sodium bicarbonate had been understood since 1811. The problem was making it work at an industrial scale. For 50 years, no one could figure out how to do it efficiently.
Ernest Solvay, a Belgian entrepreneur, solved that problem without even knowing others had tried. Solvay grew up in his father’s salt-making business and later worked at a gasworks near Brussels, where he began experimenting with the conversion method in his early twenties. His key innovation was the Solvay carbonating tower, a device that allowed an ammonia-salt solution to mix thoroughly with carbon dioxide in a continuous, large-scale process. In 1861, he and his brother Alfred founded a company, built a factory in 1863, and began production in 1865. The Solvay process was cleaner, cheaper, and more efficient than the Leblanc method, and it quickly became the dominant way to produce both sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate worldwide. It still is today.
From Chemical to Kitchen Staple
While European chemists were perfecting industrial production, American entrepreneurs figured out how to get baking soda into home kitchens. In 1846, John Dwight and his brother-in-law Austin Church began selling sodium bicarbonate as a cooking product. At the time, competitors sold dry goods from open, unhygienic kegs. Dwight and Church took a different approach: they personally filled individual red paper bags and sold them under the Cow Brand trademark. They hired traveling sales agents to promote the product to grocery stores and supply vendors, essentially inventing a modern consumer goods distribution model for a chemical that had previously been an industrial commodity.
Their business eventually became the company behind Arm & Hammer, one of the most recognized brands in the United States. Dwight continued marketing his original Cow Brand alongside it for years.
How Baking Soda Became a Leavening Agent
Getting baking soda into kitchens was one thing. Figuring out how to use it to make bread rise was another. When heated to around 200°C (about 390°F), sodium bicarbonate breaks down and releases carbon dioxide gas. That gas creates the bubbles that make baked goods light and fluffy. But heat alone isn’t the most practical way to trigger that reaction in a bowl of batter.
In the 1840s, bakers discovered that mixing baking soda with cream of tartar, an acidic byproduct of wine making, generated carbon dioxide at lower temperatures and without waiting for the oven. This was the birth of chemical leavening as we know it. Before this, bakers relied on yeast, which required hours of rising time, or beaten eggs for lift. Baking soda offered a shortcut that was faster and more predictable.
There was a catch for American bakers, though. Wine production was concentrated in Europe, making cream of tartar an expensive import. That limitation eventually drove the invention of baking powder, which pre-mixed baking soda with a dry acid so bakers didn’t need to source cream of tartar separately. Baking soda itself remained the essential active ingredient in both products.
A $5 Billion Industry From a Lakeside Mineral
What started as a chalky mineral scraped from Egyptian lake beds is now a global industry valued at roughly $5.1 billion as of 2025, projected to reach $8.5 billion by 2035. Sodium bicarbonate is used in baking, cleaning, water treatment, fire extinguishers, animal feed, and dozens of medical and industrial applications.
The path from natron to the orange box in your pantry took thousands of years, a tragic French chemist, a self-taught Belgian industrialist, and two American entrepreneurs with a stack of red paper bags. No single person “discovered” baking soda. Instead, each generation peeled back another layer of understanding about the sodium compounds hiding in salt, minerals, and gas, until the pure white powder we use today became one of the cheapest and most versatile chemicals on the planet.