What Does the Chiko Roll Have to Do With Richmond and Punt Road?
Updated: Aug 30
The full RTSSG member feature, How the Tigers helped to invent the Chiko Roll, starts with a wonderfully unlikely Richmond connection: Frank McEncroe standing outside the Richmond Football Ground at Punt Road in 1950.
McEncroe was a Bendigo boilermaker. At the football he watched spectators buying Chinese spring rolls and began thinking about a larger, more substantial version that could be eaten while standing in a crowd. The product that followed was launched at the Wagga Wagga Show in 1951 and eventually became one of Australia’s most recognisable takeaway foods.
That much is part of the documented story. But where does Richmond sit inside it?
Can a football ground influence something far beyond football?
Was Punt Road merely the place where McEncroe happened to be standing, or did the way people watched football help shape the idea itself? What did a supporter need from food in a packed suburban ground in 1950 — and why would portability matter enough to change the product?
The detail about the packaging is just as interesting. A snack built for one-handed eating makes sense in a football crowd where the other hand might be holding a drink, a program or the fence. Is that coincidence, or evidence that match-day behaviour helped determine what the product became?
Where does Richmond history actually begin and end?
Club history is usually stored in premierships, players, coaches and famous games. But a football ground also sits inside a city. People meet there, buy things there, invent routines there and carry ideas away from it.
So should the Punt Road connection be treated as a quirky footnote, or as a small example of how deeply football grounds once sat inside everyday Australian life? And how much of Richmond’s cultural history exists in stories that never appear in a match report?
The full member feature follows the connection from Punt Road into the Chiko Roll story. Read How the Tigers helped to invent the Chiko Roll for the complete account.
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