Cash Cow

Descends from the older phrase "milch cow," recorded from the early 1600s, describing a cow kept specifically and continuously for milking rather than meat, a steady, low-effort source of income for a farmer. The modern business sense was formalised much later, in 1968, when Boston Consulting Group founder Bruce Henderson developed the "growth-share matrix," a tool for categorising business products by market share and growth rate. In Henderson's framework, popularised in his 1970 essay "The Product Portfolio," a "cash cow" specifically means a product with high market share in a slow-growing market: dependable, low-maintenance profit.