William Davies Company was a pork processing and packing company in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. At one time, it was the largest pork packer in the British Empire, and it operated Canada's first major chain of food stores. One of Toronto's longstanding nicknames, "Hogtown", is attributable to the millions of pigs processed annually by the William Davies Company. Founding of the company William Davies, born in 1831 in Wallingford, England, emigrated to Canada in 1854, and soon thereafter set up a stall in Toronto's St. Lawrence Market, where he sold cured hams and bacon. Realizing that there was an opportunity to export Canadian pork products to England, he wrote to his brother in 1860 stating: "I think you will say that the quality of the meat I send is as good as you ever saw." Davies rented a facility at Front and Frederick Streets, a few blocks east of St. Lawrence Market, and was able to purchase and expand the plant in 1875. Soon, he was shipping millions of pounds annually of salt-cured pork. The William Davies building at 145 Front Street East, later occupied by the J. & J. Taylor Safeworks, still stands today. Business success In 1879, William Davies constructed a new facility further to the east, on the south side of Front Street at the Don River, which soon became the second largest pork processing plant on the continent. In addition to curing pork for export, he began slaughtering and processing hogs, and his business became the first continuous/moving rail hog-slaughtering facility in Canada. In 1891, the new plant was the first in Canada to feature an artificial refrigeration unit. In many ways, Davies was responsible for establishing the modern Canadian pork industry. His efforts led to the establishment of the first Canadian Board of Agriculture, through which producers, processors and government officials could work together to expand the Canadian livestock industry. As Davies had predicted in the 1850s, the firm's products did extremely well in the British market, and commanded higher prices than the offerings of American competitors due to the perception that they were of higher quality. By the 1890s, it was supplying over half of the entire Canadian bacon trade with Britain. The company's agent in Britain, John Wheeler Bennett, was known as the "Bismarck of the bacon trade". In 1891, the business was reorganized as the William Davies Company Limited. By mid-1917, the majority